Defendant lacked an expectation of privacy in a package that was shipped between the continental U.S. and Puerto Rico and subjected to an inspection where he put another person’s name on it as both shipper and recipient. United States v. Colon-Solis, 508 F. Supp. 2d 186 (D. P.R. 2007). Comment: The district court, in an extremely long footnote (n. 2), noted that packages shipped between the U.S. and P.R. are not subject to border inspection because P.R. is a part of the U.S. The government, however, conducts limited inspections for a non-customs purpose. The issue remains open, but the court expressed doubt as to the legality of those inspections:
The legality of the search itself turns on whether U.S. Customs agents were statutorily authorized to conduct random, warrantless searches on items imported to Puerto Rico from the continental United States. The government maintains their ability to search such packages is rooted in the regulations mandating the filing of a Shippers Export Declaration (“SED”). They claim U.S. Customs and Boarder Protection (“CBP”) agents are authorized to conduct random searches for SED verification and enforcement purposes. The SED is a dual purpose document used by the Census Bureau for statistical reporting purposes only, and by the Bureau of Industry and Security and other government agencies for export control purposes. 15 C.F.R. § 30.4. It is this dual use that creates a novel legal issue not previously addressed in the First Circuit or elsewhere. Though the SED is required under two separate agencies and for completely separate purposes, the same form is used for both. A problem arises in that one agency, the Census Bureau, requires the SED to be filed for shipments from the United States to Puerto Rico while the other agency, the Bureau of Industry and Security, excludes Puerto Rico-bound shipments from the SED requirement. Moreover, the provisions governing the use of SEDs are unique to each agency and at times contradictory. (See i.e. 15 C.F.R. § 30.4(a) (designating that the SED provisions of that part apply only to the statistical reporting requirements and not to the export control requirements)). It is drafting such as this that breeds confusion.
Consent to “look around” authorized a search for guns and drugs. United States v. Cole, 246 Fed. Appx. 112 (3d Cir. 2007)* (unpublished).
Assuming, without deciding, that defendant’s stop was illegal, his flight was an intervening act that purged the taint. United States v. Jackson, 246 Fed. Appx. 478 (9th Cir. 2007)* (unpublished). The First Circuit had a similar case a few days later, and defendant was never seized until after flight. United States v. Holloway, 2007 WL 2460035 (1st Cir.(Mass.) Aug 31, 2007).
Officers had reasonable suspicion for a probationer search from information from an informant that provided “rich detail” that was corroborated on important points. Most importantly, “the suppression analysis could have begun and ended with this fact: before the search began, Loranger admitted that the probation officers would find marijuana at his place. Statements against penal interest are presumed reliable. … Loranger essentially volunteered probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime would be found on the premises.” United States v. Jeffery, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 64374 (W.D. Wis. August 30, 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.
