Vehicle stop for cracked windshield also involved officer’s knowledge that the back seat occupant was making furtive movements. When the car was stopped, the driver gave an apparently forged DL, and that led to his arrest and search incident which produced evidence of more forgery. The search incident was valid. Officers, as a matter of course, may order a passenger or passengers either to get out of the car or to remain in the car during a lawful traffic stop if the officers deem it necessary for officer safety. Whether the passenger is ordered to stay in the car or get out of the vehicle is a distinction without a difference. An officer making a traffic stop may immediately take the reasonable steps he or she deems necessary to secure the officer’s safety, including ordering a passenger to remain in or to get out of the vehicle, without violating the Fourth Amendment. People v. Vibanco, 151 Cal. App. 4th 1, 60 Cal. Rptr. 3d 1 (6th Dist. 2007).*
Heavy traffic from a house and a traffic stop of a person who came from inside that produced drugs was not sufficient grounds to get a search warrant issued. State v. Gentile, 373 S.C. 506, 646 S.E.2d 171 (2007):
The narcotics officers’ decision to investigate Gentile was precipitated primarily by the receipt of citizen complaints regarding a high volume of traffic at Gentile’s residence. Even though the officers verified the pattern of traffic at Gentile’s residence, this, without additional investigation into the residence, was not sufficient to establish that narcotics activity was taking place. …
Next, we consider the single citizen claim that she smelled marijuana in the vicinity of Gentile’s residence. Initially, we question whether the magistrate was privy to this information. Based on our review of the record, we are unable to find where Bradley, the officer who obtained the warrant, testified regarding this information. Instead, the only reference to this tip was through the testimony of Corporal Jenkins. Furthermore, there is no mention in the affidavit regarding this tip. Therefore, it is questionable whether it was communicated to the magistrate.
Even if we conclude that Bradley communicated to the magistrate the citizen’s tip, we find it was insufficient to establish probable cause. First, the tip is vague in that there is no indication of how many times the citizen may have smelled marijuana or that she could readily identify that the odor was emanating from Gentile’s residence. Secondly, there was no indication that the citizen was knowledgeable about the smell of marijuana. Significantly, there was no independent verification by the narcotics officers regarding this tip.
The trial court incorrectly held that an officer had to have reasonable suspicion before he could ask for consent to search. State v. Nash, 957 So. 2d 1266 (Fla. App. 4th Dist. 2007).*
Defendant’s weaving within a line of traffic was not reasonable suspicion for a stop in itself, but the fact the vehicle was traveling in tandem with another, all inside a city, and other facts accumulating was enough to give reasonable suspicion that something was up on the totality of circumstances. The court of appeals decision was reversed. State v. Post, 2007 WI 60, 301 Wis. 2d 1, 733 N.W.2d 634 (2007).*
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"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, Let it Bleed (album, 1969)
"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]
“Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a man is realising that it’s all rotten. Realising how to celebrate that rottenness, that’s freedom.” – John le Carré, The Night Manager (1993), line by Richard Roper
"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)
The book was dedicated in the first (1982) and sixth (2025) editions to Justin William Hall (1975-2025). He was three when this project started in 1978.
