Inevitable discovery supported seizure from a car that the court found no PC for an automobile search. However, an inventory search which was authorized would have discovered the evidence, despite the fact the court does not believe the officer. United States v. Martinez-Pena, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 87578 (N.D. Iowa September 23, 2009)*:
The first prong of the test is more problematic. The only evidence at the suppression hearing regarding the location of the drugs was from Bob Jones, who testified he saw the methamphetamine as soon as he opened the driver’s side door. The court has found this evidence not to be credible, both from the photographs and from the fact that both of the other officers who had a reasonable opportunity to do so failed to notice anything in the driver’s side floorboard. Nevertheless, it also seems reasonable that during a thorough inventory search of the vehicle, Todd Jones and Miller would have checked underneath the seats for items that should be placed on the inventory list. The court therefore finds that inevitable discovery of the illegally-seized evidence during the inventory search was “more likely than not.” See Bourjaily v. United States, 483 U.S. 171, 176, 107 S. Ct. 2775, 2779, 97 L. Ed. 2d 144 (1987); see also Thomas, 524 F.3d at 861-62 (Colloton, C.J., concurring). As a result, the drugs need not be suppressed.
Defendant was not seized when the officer parked behind the defendant’s legally parked car, walked to the front and started asking questions. The fact the car was blocked, however, and defendant could not leave, was a seizure. United States v. Hicks, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 87884 (E.D. Pa. September 23, 2009):
Viewing the totality of the circumstances, however, this Court concludes that the occupants of the vehicle were seized when Officer Haser, whose vehicle was blocking the Intrepid from leaving, instructed the driver, Hicks, to shut off the car engine and Hicks complied. At that point in time, Defendants were faced with a uniformed officer with a holstered weapon who had asked the driver to roll down the window and also instructed the driver to shut off the engine. Furthermore, the Intrepid was blocked in such a way that to terminate the encounter, the driver would have had to back up from his parked spot and maneuver his car around Officer Haser’s patrol car. To accomplish this, the driver would have either had to defy Officer Haser and start the engine again or Defendants would have had to exit the vehicle and abandon the car with the officer only a few feet away. Instead, Hicks complied with Officer Haser’s show of authority and shut off the engine. A reasonable person in the situation in which the occupants of the Intrepid found themselves would not feel free to ignore the police officer and go about his or her business. See United States v. Jones, 562 F.3d 768, 772 (6th Cir. 2009) (“Here, by blocking in the Nissan, the officers had communicated to a reasonable person occupying the Nissan that he or she was not free to drive away.”).
A party to a business dispute was temporarily ousted by Sheriff’s deputies enforcing a court order. The business dispute led to an order of possession, a stay, and a bankruptcy and a stay of the stay until it was dissolved. The Sheriff’s deputies had qualified immunity. Dever v. Kelly, 348 Fed. Appx. 107, 2009 FED App. 0656N (6th Cir. 2009) (unpublished).*
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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.
