Also this issue:

The Octopus in Philly
-Howard Altman

Show Us Your Zits
Judith Rodin was not as “all-that” as she was cracked up to be.
-Todd Wolfson

Letters to the Editor

July 3- 9, 2003

loose canon

Their Rights, Our Rights.

by Bruce Schimmel

I’ve never been arrested, although a couple months ago I did spend an unpleasant hour in a police station in rural Delaware, my hands handcuffed behind my back.

Officially, this was not an arrest. I was being detained. The police were very polite throughout, and as soon as they confirmed that I am a reporter and therefore wasn't loitering, they let me go. And, yes, with an apology.

But my detention, brief and painless, brings to mind the plight of foreign nationals, here and abroad, whose detentions are neither brief nor painless, and whose incarceration is a continuing national disgrace.

Being detained, I have to tell you, is scary. A detainee is not told why they are brought in. That's because a detention is not an arrest, and without being arrested, no formal charges are filed: There are no Miranda warnings, no phone calls, nothing.

To an American this sounds crazy. At the time it felt to me like I was living in a novel by Kafka.

This kind of detention, fortunately, for the moment, is permitted only in the state of Delaware.

During a routine traffic stop, a Delaware state trooper with a reasonable suspicion you've done something wrong can detain you. A reasonable suspicion isn't much; its threshold is a lot lower than the probable cause needed for an arrest. Reasonable suspicion of drunkenness might be the faint smell of alcohol; probable cause is a Breathalyzer test.

In Delaware, you can be detained up to two hours on reasonable suspicion. But after two hours, even in Delaware, they've either got to arrest you or to let you go. People in America cannot be detained indefinitely, because they have constitutional protections.

Unless they happen to be foreign. If you are a foreign national, and you are suspected of being a terrorist, you can be detained indefinitely. And, sadly, the courts recently upheld the federal government's desire to keep the names of foreign detainees a secret.

Fortunately, the Delaware law is being challenged. Their state slogan -- "It's good to be first" -- let's hope, is wrong.

Meantime, when you visit the Delaware shore or are whizzing south on I-95 , you might want to remember that you've got fewer rights. If you see the lights of a police cruiser fire up, you might feel a special chill.

Still, such a chill would be just a touch of the terror that hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals must feel daily all across America. It is the icy fear of unchecked government power that our nation's guest workers -- the farm hands, the factory workers, the dishwashers, cooks and waiters -- must now live with every day in America.