A man from Portland, Maine, has filed suit in federal court in Massachusetts, claiming a state law that allows police to take drunk people into protective custody is unconstitutional because it violates the right to get drunk in private. As a lawyer and civil libertarian, Bostonist's reaction to this lawsuit is, "Hmm. Very interesting." As a lush, our reaction is "Hell, yeah!"
The man bringing the case, Eric Laverriere, was in the familiar (to Bostonist) position of being at a party that gets broken up by the cops. But when police told people to disperse in what Laverriere though was too hostile a fashion, he did something guaranteed to make the situation worse: he started filming the scene. One way or another, everyone else ended up getting a cab or otherwise leaving the party without incident, but Laverriere spent a night in the Waltham pokey, the WPD having placed him in protective custody. Now he's suing, proclaiming a constitutional right to engage in an activity much cherished by the Founding Fathers: getting wasted on private property.
Photo courtesy of flickr.com / user: Stefano Mortellaro
Funny as it sounds, this is not a far-fetched claim. There is a long line of Supreme Court cases that treat the home as a special place into which government may not insert itself without some very compelling justification. Generally, the compelling justification has had something to do with protecting people from harm, which is what makes Laverriere's case interesting: It's easy to say that the government can't outlaw the use of contraception between consenting adults in a private residence (as the Court did in Griswold v. Connecticut), or consensual sodomy (as in Lawrence v. Texas), because there's no real risk of harm from those activities. Drunkenness, however, is a different matter (and if you don't believe us, we can tell you a story about trying to ride a tricycle over a curb when we were in college and show you a scar on our chin to prove it).
Courts generally shy away from declaring laws unconstitutional, and we suspect that's what will happen here. From what we read, it sounds like the real problem is that the Waltham police used the law as an excuse to detain someone who was irritating them. After all, the law only allows protective custody for people who are incapacitated or a risk to others. If Laverriere wasn't that plastered, the problem isn't with the law, it's with the cops - Massachusetts and federal courts have already decided on numerous occasions that police can't detain people under the law unless they have a reasonable belief that the person is dangerous. Still, with the July Fourth recent enough that we can recall our July Fifth hangover, Bostonist must applaud the sentiment of the lawsuit. We'll hope against hope that whichever wise judge on the Massachusetts District Court gets the case uses it as an opportunity to issue a ringing endorsement of the fundamental right to hit the sauce.
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