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- W.D.N.Y.: Def had no standing in a place he wasn’t allowed to be on parole
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- NYLJ: Analysis: Turnabout: Cell Site Location Information for the Defense
- CA11: QI in suicide by cop case
- CA11: Officer’s experience and opinions about CP collectors and retention of information is entitled to weight in PC determination
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ABA Journal Web 100, Best Law Blogs (2017); ABA Journal Blawg 100 (2015-16) (discontinued 2018)
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by John Wesley Hall
Criminal Defense Lawyer and
Search and seizure law consultant
Little Rock, Arkansas
Contact: forhall @ aol.com / The Book
www.johnwesleyhall.com -
© 2003-24,
online since Feb. 24, 2003 Approx. 425,000 visits (non-robot) since 2012 Approx. 45,000 posts since 2003 (26,730+ on WordPress as of 12/31/23) -
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Fourth Amendment cases,
citations, and links -
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Congressional Research Service:
--Electronic Communications Privacy Act (2012)
--Overview of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (2012)
--Outline of Federal Statutes Governing Wiretapping and Electronic Eavesdropping (2012)
--Federal Statutes Governing Wiretapping and Electronic Eavesdropping (2012)
--Federal Laws Relating to Cybersecurity: Discussion of Proposed Revisions (2012)
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Section 1983 Blog -
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't."
—Me -
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well."
–Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others) -
“I am still learning.”
—Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)). -
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud -
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848) -
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced."
—Williams v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold, J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984). -
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence."
—Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961). -
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987). -
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today."
— Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting). -
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property."
—Entick v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765) -
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth Amendment."
—United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting) -
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth."
—Chapman v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring). -
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable."
—Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987) -
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."
—Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967) -
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
—United States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting) -
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.”
—United States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989) -
"You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need."
—Mick Jagger & Keith Richards -
"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration camp] -
“You know, most men would get discouraged by now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!”
---Pepé Le Pew "The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime."
—Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)
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Category Archives: Third Party Doctrine
N.D.Ind.: Def’s claim the warrant for his Facebook account is akin to Carpenter and CSLI fails as completely speculative and an admitted “guess”
United States v. Cox, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 97326 (N.D. Ind. June 3, 2020):
MN: McNeely retroactive under Birchfield
“The rule announced in Missouri v. McNeely, 569 U.S. 141, 133 S. Ct. 1552 (2013), that the dissipation of alcohol in the bloodstream is not a per se exigency justifying the warrantless search of a suspected impaired driver-applies retroactively when … Continue reading
LA: No PC for warrantless entry and security cameras are not exigency
“Here, the trial court made credibility determinations based on the testimony of multiple officers involved in defendant’s arrest and found that officers lacked probable cause to search defendant’s residence. Furthermore, observation that defendant’s home had security cameras failed to amount … Continue reading
W.D.N.Y.: SW for telephone records not required instead of a subpoena
Defendant was entitled to a search warrant rather than a search warrant to obtain his telephone records. United States v. McClain, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 55427 (W.D. N.Y. Mar. 30, 2020). The search warrant application for child pornography wasn’t at … Continue reading
D.Nev.: No REP in prescription drug database from police inspection
Defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the Nevada prescription drug database because he willingly provided the information to the doctor and the pharmacist, and the police need cause to get access. United States v. Motley, 2020 U.S. Dist. … Continue reading
Vox: Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T could be facing big fines for selling your location data
Vox: Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T could be facing big fines for selling your location data by Sara Morrison (“Your mobile phone company might be on the hook for fines from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for selling your real-time … Continue reading
Security Boulevard: Personal Data Collection: Outsourcing Surveillance
Security Boulevard: Personal Data Collection: Outsourcing Surveillance by Mark Rasch (“The buying and selling of personal data means more entities are able to conduct surveillance without needing a warrant”)
PA: Robber had no REP in proof of his wifi connection on property of another when committing the robbery
Defendant was accused of a 2 am robbery and assault in a dorm on the Moravian College campus in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Campus police checked the wifi connections and found three at 2 am that were not residents of the dorm. … Continue reading
OR: Car owner had no REP from GPS installed by his company before he got the car from them
Plaintiff worked for Toyota Motor Credit and Toyota Financial Services. When he severed his employment with them, he was allowed to keep the vehicle he used for them. Unbeknownst to him, Toyota Financial Services had a GPS device on the … Continue reading
OH6: Checking DMV records involves no 4A intrustion
“[T]he law is clear that a police officer’s check of a person’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles records does not implicate Fourth Amendment rights, as it does not constitute an invasion as it involves no intrusion.” State v. Price, 2020-Ohio-220, 2020 … Continue reading
EFF: Courts Grapple with a Sea Change in Fourth Amendment Law After Carpenter v. U.S.: Year in Review 2019
EFF: Courts Grapple with a Sea Change in Fourth Amendment Law After Carpenter v US: Year in Review 2019 by Jennifer Lynch (“In the year and a half since the Supreme Court’s ruling, Carpenter has been cited in more than … Continue reading
CA6: Def doesn’t show officer delayed stop for drug dog; whole encounter was 5-10 minutes
Defendant argued that the officer delayed the process of issuing a traffic citation by extraneous questioning just to get a dog sniff in within the period before the traffic citation could be completed. Still, the entire process reasonably took ten … Continue reading
Brietbart: Pollak: House Democrats Violated the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments in Impeachment Inquiry [No they didn’t.]
Brietbart: Pollak: House Democrats Violated the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments in Impeachment Inquiry by Joel Pollack:
SCOTUSBlog: Justices to take up battle over Trump financial documents [or, what does this mean to the third-party doctrine?]
SCOTUSBlog: Justices to take up battle over Trump financial documents by Amy Howe:
D.Mont.: Using Western Union for money transfer creates no REP in WU’s records
Western Union’s production of money transfer records was a classic third-party record situation where there was no reasonable expectation of privacy. United States v. Escobedo, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 208067 (D. Mont. Dec. 2, 2019). Defendant’s inconsistent story about whether … Continue reading
PA: Refusing to submit to BAC blood draw under SW supports obstruction of justice conviction
Refusal to submit to a blood draw search warrant for BAC supports a conviction for obstruction of justice. Commonwealth v. Palchanes, 2019 Pa. Super. LEXIS 1186 (Nov. 27, 2019). The CI’s basis of knowledge and reliability was adequately shown, and … Continue reading
W.D.Wash.: No reasonable expectation of privacy in Bitcoin records
There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in Bitcoin records. Zietzke v. United States, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 204274 (W.D. Wash. Nov. 25, 2019):
M.D.Pa.: Bank records can’t be equated with CSLI in detail, and a subpoena is constitutionally sufficient
Defendant’s bank records cannot be equated with CSLI such that a search warrant is required rather than a subpoena. As Carpenter says: “Our decision today is a narrow one. … We do not disturb the application of Smith or Miller … Continue reading
OH: On LPN check, car not matching color on registration is enough for a stop to see if it’s stolen
“When an officer encounters a vehicle the whole of which is painted a different color from the color listed in the vehicle-registration records and the officer believes, based on his experience, that the vehicle or its displayed license plates may … Continue reading
OH6: Search claim can’t be raised on post-conviction, but def would lose on merits anyway
Defendant in post-conviction raises seizure of a Western Union document from Kroger. First, that’s defaulted. Second, it’s admissible through the third-party doctrine. State v. Young, 2019-Ohio-3819, 2019 Ohio App. LEXIS 3873 (6th Dist. Sept. 20, 2019).* Defendant’s guilty plea waives … Continue reading