Writes Ed Cline of the Ayn Rand Institute:
Sam Waksal’s criminal sentencing to seven years and a multi-million dollar fine, and Martha Stewart’s status in judicial purgatory, indicted for “lying” about her innocence, demonstrates that America has turned 180 degrees away from its founding principles. The laws under which these two have been charged and persecuted are precisely the kinds of laws–general warrants and writs of assistance–that were debated and declared unconstitutional not only in many pre-Revolutionary colonial courts, but by Charles Pratt, Lord Camden, who was chief justice of Britain’s Court of Common Pleas, in 1765!
When our own Constitution was being framed some 20 years later, general warrants, which allowed the government to arrest someone without specifying charges, and writs of assistance, which allowed government agents to search one’s property on mere suspicion of violating a commercial or fiat law, and who were indemnified against any suits for damages, were not incorporated anywhere in the Constitution by the Founders, who abhorred them. These extralegal powers constituted one of the reasons Americans began a revolution!