Defendants came out of a house under surveillance for suspected drug activity overnight, but the officers had no PC as to the house. The mere fact of coming out of the house in the early morning hours is not reasonable suspicion of anything. They lacked any facts of a suspected crime. United States v. Traviesa, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 41595 (N.D. Fla. May 6, 2009):
Because the officers suspected criminal activity was being conducted inside of the 6550 residence, they decided to conduct surveillance on the location. However, the mere fact that the occupants of the car emerged from a house which was suspected of being involved in narcotics activity is insufficient to provide reasonable suspicion that criminal activity involving these particular Defendants was afoot. …
There is a dearth of evidence to support reasonable suspicion that criminal activity involving these Defendants or this truck was underway. There was no search warrant issued for the 6550 residence or property. There was no evidence that contraband had been moved from the house to the truck. In fact, officers testified that as they drove by the truck, there was nothing inside the truck bed. This was not a high crime area. The time that the Defendants were spotted leaving the house was not in the middle of the night or in the very early morning hours when people engaged in criminal activity may try to conceal their actions. There is no evidence that the windows of the truck were tinted or that the drivers tried in any way to avoid detection. There is no evidence that the Defendants saw the officers from the inside of the house and left in order to evade capture. No informant contacted police and told them that criminal activity was taking place in the 6550 residence. No informants had identified these Defendants as people involved in criminal activity. The connection between the occupants of the 6550 and the occupants of the other marijuana grow operations was tenuous, at best. Officers’ testimony indicated that but for the decision by the Marion County officers to take down another house in the investigation, the officers would not have stopped the Defendants in the truck.
On similar facts to the above, officers tailed the car and made a traffic stop and then lawfully fished around for consent. State v. Corley, 383 S.C. 232, 679 S.E.2d 187 (2009).*
Officers listened to defendants in a hotel room by putting their ear to the common door between them, but that was not unreasonable, and defendant lacked standing to contest the entry since he was there for drug dealing as a temporary guest. The co-defendant argued that the warrantless entry into his hotel room was unreasonable, but the court finds that it does not have to decide that question because there was a search warrant with an independent source. United States v. Hearn, 563 F.3d 95 (5th Cir. 2009).*
Plaintiff, a female truck driver, was arrested for disorderly conduct for giving the finger to a truck stop security guard after he accused her of being a prostitute. She was pulled out of her truck and left standing in the parking lot wearing only panties for 20 minutes, and she was driven to jail without any other clothes. While there was at least PC for the arrest, she stated a claim for the actions of making her stand in the parking lot and taking her to jail undressed. Green v. City of Texarkana, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 41979 (W.D. Ark. May 14, 2009).*
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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.
