The State Supreme Court has ruled that testimony by a mother who listened to a conversation between her daughter and a boyfriend was not admissible against the boyfriend in a criminal trial. The court said the girl and the boyfriend had an expectation of privacy when talking on the phone.
The court was half right. The boyfriend had an expectation of privacy. The girl, who was using her mother’s telephone in her mother’s home, should not.
The ruling brought calls for legislation to protect the rights of parents to decide how to keep track of their children. This should be clear in our law. But the law should not make the parents potential tools of police.
In this case, police suspected the boyfriend in a theft. In telling the mother about the crime, the police may have wanted her to be a tool. If the police had probable cause to suspect the boyfriend of a crime, they should have asked a court for a warrant to tap his phone. Evidence from the mother’s eavesdropping, however, should not be admissible in a criminal case against the boy at the other end of the line.
Parents need to be free to use their judgment in monitoring their children, but that shouldn’t make them police informants.
Any legislation should balance the rights of parents and our protections against unreasonable searches.
Recount adds up
In the contest for governor, every vote means something. Compare Dino Rossi’s 261-vote margin on Nov. 17 and his 42-vote lead after the machine recount with other statewide races. Margins in 12 other statewide contests ranged from 86,234 (by Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland) to 826,803 (by State Auditor Brian Sontag).
In any of those other contests a few hundred votes would mean little, but here a few dozen will make the difference.
We’re also learning about the process. The extra recount has brought out information like this:
• Whatcom County officials found a half-dozen unopened ballot envelopes.
• Kitsap County officials found several dozen ballots that were so lightly marked that the machines couldn’t read them.
• In Skamania County, Rossi lost a vote in the machine recount, then got it back in the manual recount.
• King County officials found 595 ballots that hadn’t been counted.
• Overall, both candidates gained votes, hundreds for each.
The error rate on optical-scan ballots is about 1.8 percent; on punch-card ballots, it’s 8 percent. Yet the difference between Bush and Gore in Florida four years ago was less than 0.002 percent and the difference between Rossi and Gregoire after the machine recount was 0.0014 percent.
We did better when we were pulling levers and marking boxes .
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Evan Smith is the Enterprise Forum editor.
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