The other day I was cooking dinner (believe it!), when the Wife without warning threw open the back door to the apartment, which opens into our kitchen. I say "without warning" because I had not heard the neighbors' knock, and I was in the process of dropping my salad dressing-stained trousers to throw into the wash.
By the grace of God I was
not standing pantless in the kitchen when the door opened on the neighbors, who were themselves dressed for a night on the town. The purpose of their drop-in was to report that there was an unfamiliar man seated in a car in our back parking lot. He had been there for at least two hours; he had his car backed into a parking space and was sitting quietly in the dark, looking down our driveway and into the street. By this time it was about 7 p.m., and the neighbors were not thrilled about the idea of leaving their apartment empty with this guy hanging around.
We huddled and discussed what to do about the situation, ultimately concluding that the neighbors should bravely approach the car and ask the man to explain himself, while the Wife and I watched from the upstairs window in relative safety, with telephones in hand to call for help, if necessary. The neighbors had a brief discussion with the man in the car and came back upstairs. Apparently the guy had produced a badge, said he was a detective with the
Cambridge Police Department staking out a house across the street, but — he assured us — it was "nothing to worry about."
Never mind whether the criminal activity on Putnam Avenue is "anything to worry about" (it certainly was significant enough to warrant a
stakeout) — what I want to know why the cops think they can park in our driveway whenever the hell they want. I'm no lawyer (well, not a good or committed one, anyway), but I am convinced that I have a lawsuit here under the Third Amendment, which forbids the involuntary quartering of soldiers in people's homes. Sure, there are a few additional layers of complexity — the guy was a cop, not a soldier, and if you want to get technical about it, he was not in my house. But what if he had pitched a tent over in the shrubbery, climbed the roof to get a better vantage point, or knocked on the door demanding coffee? I did some preliminary legal research into the Third Amendment today; a
Findlaw commentary says that, except for one federal case, the courts have essentially blown this Amendment off for years. One case I read online confirmed that "[j]udicial interpretation of the Third Amendment is nearly nonexistent."
I think the courts need to get off their butts and start enforcing this Amendment in a meaningful way. On Thursday night I was about to drop my pants in a well-windowed kitchen while a cop sat in my driveway with a pair of binoculars in one hand (
and who knows what in the other?). I am pretty sure that if our great nation's Founding Fathers were on hand to see this, they would have had something to say about it.
