The officers’ attempt at procuring a search warrant failed several statutory requirements because of his lack of training and experience. They sought help from other officers and failed to get it. The town JP also failed to so some things, but none of it rises to the level of bad faith to justify suppressing the search. The officers acted with good faith throughout, and that was sufficient to invoke the GFE to the exclusionary rule. (Half the opinion is quoting from Leon and Herring because of their relevance to the outcome.) United States v. Monroe, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 80479 (W.D. N.Y. March 17, 2009):
This lack of knowledge and experience is not “sufficiently deliberate” so as to “trigger the exclusionary rule;” nor is it “sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system.” Herring, supra, 172 L.Ed.2d at 507. The actions of Sergeant Lott and Detective Walters do not constitute “deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct” and therefore, it is RECOMMENDED that defendant’s motion to suppress the evidence seized pursuant to the search warrant at issue herein be in all respects DENIED.
Although Rule 12 does not state what a defendant has to show to get a suppression hearing, under Third Circuit precedent the defendant needs to show a colorable factual dispute to get a suppression hearing. United States v. Boyd, 652 F. Supp. 2d 546 (D. Del. 2009).
Consent to search a car for drugs includes anywhere drugs can be hidden. Defendant’s approach of the officers was not a withdrawal of the consent. He was waived off for officer safety. United States v. Jimenez, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 80410 (E.D. Tenn. September 2, 2009).*
The search warrant in this case authorized both the seizure and search of defendant’s computer for child porn. The actual search occurred after the ten days for seizure, but this was not a constitutional violation (citing many cases). United States v. Cameron, 652 F. Supp. 2d 74 (D. Maine 2009).*
The stop of defendant was justified because the vehicle matched the description of a vehicle and occupants involved in a break-in within three minutes of the anonymous call and within a block in a high crime area. It was the only vehicle like it. United States v. Barrera-Omana, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 80413 (D. Minn. August 14, 2009).*
The officer had cause to stop the defendant’s vehicle based on the driver’s admissions on the tape during the stop. His implausible travel plans gave reasonable suspicion. United States v. Jimenez, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 80590 (E.D. Tenn. February 23, 2009),* adopted United States v. Sanders, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 80569 (E.D. Tenn. June 11, 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.
