Article from Reason by Elizabeth Nolan Brown.

“Twenty-one people en masse arrested for trespassing for going to a party. Does that feel right?” asked Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a case that sees District of Columbia cops on the hook for false arrest.

Neither Sotomayor nor her SCOTUS colleagues seemed impressed with the city’s contention that guests at a 2008 D.C. house party should have known they were trespassing. The guests had been invited there for a bachelor shindig, directly or secondhand, by a woman named Peaches, and they had little reason to suspect she was lying about having recently rented the house.

“You are saying that anytime a policeman goes into a house and there’s a party and people tell you, somebody invited me, and it turns out that that somebody didn’t have a right to be in the house, you can arrest [the invited guests]?” Justice Stephen Breyer asked the city’s attorney during oral arguments last Wednesday.

When invited to a party at someone’s home, “I don’t ask to look at their lease,” said Sotomayor. “I don’t ask to—for them to establish, to my satisfaction or anyone else’s, their right to be there. I assume if they’re there, they can invite me in.”

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: Joe Ravi [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons