The officers here had no specific information there was anybody else in defendant’s house when they did a protective sweep. Nevertheless, the sweep is reasonable. Officers are also entitled to draw on their experience in determining whether a protective sweep is necessary, and, in their experience, others could have been present. Defendant’s involvement in drugs and gangs was enough. United States v. Sanders, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 115345 (N.D. Ind. July 11, 2018) (I’m not convinced; getting “no response” when knocking on door happens when the house is empty, after all. So, the officer was coming in no matter what then?):
Contrary to Sanders’s first argument, the Agents did not need to observe anyone else in the house or be told that anyone else was in the house to justify a protective sweep. See United States v. Thompson, 842 F.3d 1002, 1009 (7th Cir. 2016) (“As the door was opening, Agent Reynolds asked Thompson whether anyone was inside and received no response.”). Law enforcement are permitted to draw on their experience, using common sense to make reasonable inferences based on what they know. United States v. Ruiz, 785 F.3d 1134, 1141 (7th Cir. 2015) (finding that law enforcement may develop reasonable suspicion based on “‘specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts,’ suggest criminal activity” (quoting Terry, 392 U.S. at 21-22)); United States v. Reed, 443 F.3d 600, 603 (7th Cir. 2006) (“In determining whether suspicious circumstances rise to the level of probable cause, officers are entitled to draw reasonable inferences based on their training and experience.”).
Here, the Agents were briefed on Sanders’s criminal history prior to executing the warrant for his arrest including, Sanders’s phone calls from prison indicating that he was dealing narcotics; Sanders’s conviction for dealing cocaine; that Sanders resisted law enforcement resulting in an injury to a police officer on March 21, 2017; that Sanders was likely armed; and that Sanders was affiliated with a gang in the area. Further, Deputy Simpson, Deputy Anderson, and TFO Anderson testified that, based on their experience, drug dealers usually have armed associates with them in a house and that special caution was warranted in this situation. These factors, considered in totality, provided the Agents with the reasonable belief that other persons could be in Freeman’s house as to justify the protective sweeps. Henderson, 748 F.3d at 791; Starnes, 741 F.3d at 808.
Similarly, Sanders’s argument that the sweeps were not necessary because he was arrested at the front door without resisting is unpersuasive. As observed, supra, Sanders and Freeman lack credibility regarding the circumstances of the Agents entering Freeman’s house and apprehending Sanders. Moreover, Sanders’s location in the house and his level of cooperation are not determinative on whether the protective sweeps were reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. See Buie, 494 U.S. at 328 (finding a sweep of the basement reasonable after the suspect had exited the basement and was apprehended); Henderson, 748 F.3d at 792-93 (finding a protective sweep reasonable where the defendant exited the house 10 minutes prior to the sweep).
"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.
