Opinion ID: 2604616
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Heading: Historical Right to Resist Unlawful Arrest

Text: The right to be free from unlawful arrest dates back to the Magna Charta and perhaps before. See Magna Charta, § 39 (No free man shall be seized or imprisoned ... except by the law of the land.). Unlawful arrest has always been considered a serious affront. See The Queen v. Tooley, 2 Ld. Raym. 1296, 92 Eng.Rep. 349, 353 (William Green & Sons 1909) (K.B.1710) (if anyone against the law imprison a man, he is an offender against Magna Charta.). [5] The law has, from the start, deemed an unlawful arrest an assault and battery. State v. Rousseau, 40 Wash.2d 92, 95, 241 P.2d 447 (1952). (`An illegal arrest is an assault and battery,') (citing State v. Robinson, 145 Me. 77, 72 A.2d 260, 262 (1950)). Because this is so, the common law recognized the victim's legal right to forcibly resist. [B]oth American and English courts reached the same conclusions concerning the right to resist an unlawful arrest: an assertion of arbitrary authority was a provocation to resist. Chevigny, The Right to Resist an Unlawful Arrest, 78 Yale Law J. 1128, 1132 (1969). The right was recognized long ago as common citizens came to understand they had rights of personal liberty against lords, Crown, and state. Id. at 1137-38. This right to resist unlawful arrest memorializes one of the principle elements in the heritage of the English revolution: the belief that the will to resist arbitrary authority in a reasonable way is valuable and ought not to be suppressed by the criminal law. Id. see also L.B. Horrigan & Seymour D. Thompson, Select American Cases on the Law of Self-Defence 716 (1874) ([T]he law sets such a high value upon the liberty of the citizen, that an attempt to arrest him unlawfully is esteemed a great provocation....). Authority is clear, as are these cases on their face, the principle upon which the rule was founded that an individual may resist an unlawful arrest with reasonable force is rooted in political philosophy and is no way dependent upon a trivial factual inquiry into the conditions of one's local jail. Compare Majority at 1300-01. Certainly we have repeated the rule in our jurisdiction in recent years when our jails were much the same as today. The majority's discussion under the heading English Prisons (Majority at 1300-01) trivializes and denies by omission the great principle so aptly summarized in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed and that the purpose of government is to protect legal rights, not to violate them through lawless conduct. This principle remains the same whether the local jail is a damp and frigid dungeon or a country club with a fence around it. In either case the inmate has lost his liberty and the government has violated the law when it stole it from him. [6] In America the tradition of resisting unlawful authority has been embraced from the early days of resisting imperial British power during the Revolution through the civil rights movement. See Wright v. State of Georgia, 373 U.S. 284, 83 S.Ct. 1240, 10 L.Ed.2d 349 (1963) (reversing conviction of a group of African-Americans for refusing to obey an order to leave a segregated basketball court). It is fundamental. In the face of obvious injustice, one ought not to be forced to submit and swallow one's sense of justice. More importantly, it is unconscionable to convict a man for resisting an injustice. This is indeed a value judgment, but the values are fundamental. Chevigny, supra at 1137-38. Common law acknowledges a reasonable amount of force can be used to repel the assault and battery of an illegal arrest, including that which threatens one's liberty without physical injury. Indeed, allowing resistance without allowing any force renders the right to resist hollow and illusory. In 1900 the United States Supreme Court held If the officer had no right to arrest, the other party might resist the illegal attempt to arrest him, using no more force than was absolutely necessary to repel the assault constituting the attempt to arrest. John Bad Elk v. United States, 177 U.S. 529, 535, 20 S.Ct. 729, 731, 44 L.Ed. 874 (1900). Traditionally, illegal, arbitrary abuse of state power has been regarded as even more threatening and deserving of resistance than the occasional street crime. Thus the common law has long held [I]f one be imprisoned upon an unlawful authority, it is a sufficient provocation to all people out of compassion; much more where it is done under a colour of justice .... The Queen v. Tooley, 2 Ld.Raym. 1296, 92 Eng. Rep. at 352 (emphasis added). Justice Brandeis said much the same: The maxim of unclean hands comes from courts of equity. But the principle prevails also in courts of law. Its common application is in civil actions between private parties. Where the government is the actor, the reasons for applying it are even more persuasive. Where the remedies invoked are those of the criminal law, the reasons are compelling. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 483-84, 48 S.Ct. 564, 574, 72 L.Ed. 944 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting). Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the meansto declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminalwould bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face. Id. at 485, 48 S.Ct. at 575 (Brandeis, J., dissenting). New York's high court reasoned similarly: For most people, an illegal arrest is an outrageous affront and intrusion the more offensive because under color of law to be resisted as energetically as a violent assault. People v. Cherry, 307 N.Y. 308, 121 N.E.2d 238, 240 (1954) (emphasis added). Thomas Paine considered it common sense that Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamities is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Thomas Paine, Common Sense at 65 (Penguin Books 1976) (1776). Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence reminds us governments are instituted among men to secure the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and [t]hat whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.... The Declaration of Independence of 1776 at 1 (U.S., July 4, 1776). In support of this Declaration the signers pledged our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. Some lost their lives, many their fortunes, but none their honor. When government agents commit assault and battery against the very citizens they are sworn to protect, the government is no longer our friend; it is our dangerous enemy. The Government of the State of Washington, as well, was established to protect and maintain individual rights. Const. art. I, § 1. It was not established to do precisely the opposite. The age-old rule which recognizes the right to resist unlawful assertions of state power is an important deterrent to tyranny. With the rule limited to cases where the police are exceeding and abusing their authority, the police officers involved in the excess should be deterred, knowing that their abuse may spark resistance. This rule has equal application in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to the extent it is rooted in political theory and human nature. In a well-known passage in The Gulag Archipelago, at 13 n. 5 (English ed. 1973), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wonders what would have happened had the countless victims of Stalin's arbitrary state power resisted and whether the officers serving under Stalin might have acted with less zeal had they known they could face legitimate resistance and even harm in effectuating their unlawful arrests. Solzhenitsyn suggests that resistance would have been an effective deterrent; had the victims resisted, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! Id. He then concludes that resistance should have begun right there, at the moment of the arrest itself. Id. at 15. What, then, would Solzhenitsyn make of the majority's claim that this rule has outlived its usefulness because resistance to unlawful arrest when perpetrated by American authority is an act of futility, as the power of our state is so omnipotent that resistance is not only futile but should be condemned? Majority at 1302-03. It may be true, as the majority posits, those who resist an unlawful arrest, like Valentine, will often be the worse for it physically; however, that is not to say that their resistance is unlawful. The police power of the state is not measured by how hard the officer can wield his baton but rather by the rule of law. Yet by fashioning the rule as it has, the majority legally privileges the aggressor while insulting the victim with a criminal conviction for justifiable resistance.