Post-Thanksgiving ennui can make you do stupid things, like watching The Mentalist, a semi-Psych rip-off that is now thankfully in its final season. I always found the ads for The Mentalist—a smart-assed “genius” who makes the police look like chumps while solving all their toughest cases for them—distinctly off-putting, but, well, I guess it was the stuffing that made me to it, or perhaps a fragment of an underdone potato. At any rate, I watched the show of my own accord, for almost half an hour, which was half an hour too long.
To cut to the chase, the Mentalist suspects this chick of stealing weapons from the army, which he suspects she is hiding in a bowling alley. When the police attempt to arrest her, she grabs another chick and holds her hostage, threatening her with some sort of weapon, probably not a firearm but also probably more lethal than a nail file, but, eventually, the cops take her down. That’s the good news. The bad news is, they have nothing to hold her on! Apparently, resisting arrest and threatening someone with severe bodily harm isn’t a crime—or, if it is, it’s interfering with our plot point, so it has to be ignored.
Confronting the horror of releasing someone from police custody merely because there’s no evidence against her, the Mentalist leads the police to the suspicious bowling alley, where they commandeer the place, kicking out all of the patrons and insisting that the owner allow them to search the premises. “The Fourth Amendment says you have to have a warrant!” bawls some bearded, right-wing vigilante type—we’re in Texas, so it figures. The cops are ready for that one. “We’ll get one,” snarls a cop, addressing the owner, “then we’ll shut you down and tear the place apart.” Since 1) they don’t have any evidence that the stolen weapons are at the bowling alley and 2) they’ve already shut the place down without a warrant, this would seem to fall into the idle—or, rather, irrelevant—threat category, but, naturally, the owner caves, because, again, the plot point thing.
At this point, the (allegedly) guilty chick arrives. “They’re holding me against my will and denying me legal counsel,” she bawls. Hey, honey, you can take that Sixth Amendment and stick it up your ass! The Mentalist is ready to boogie!
“Take my hands,” he tells her. When she recoils, he says “Remember, failure to cooperate is the same as confessing.” Oh, yeah, Fifth Amendment, down the drain!
So, in the space of five minutes, the Mentalist stomps the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments into the ground!1 Conservatives complain—a lot—about the “liberal” media. If only it existed!
Afterwords
I bailed after the crushing of the Fifth, so I don’t know if the guns were there. But I’m betting they were.
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Not to mention the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, found in Article One, Section 9, Clause 2. ↩︎
