The USMJ’s finding that the stop was racially motivated is rejected. Reviewing the dashcam video, the stop was clearly justified for a traffic offense, and that’s all that was legally required. United States v. Crawford, 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 120634 (N.D. Ind. July 8, 2022):
The court has reviewed Magistrate Judge Rodovich’s findings de novo, and disagrees with the legal standard applied in the Report and Recommendation with respect to the propriety of the stop itself. According to the Report and Recommendation, a racially-motivated traffic stop warrants application of the exclusionary rule to any incriminating evidence uncovered as a result of the stop. (See DE # 59 at 11-13.) This legal recommendation is rooted in the guarantees of the Equal Protection clause. (See id. at 11, citing Conley v. United States, 5 F.4th 781, 788 (7th Cir. 2021)). However, neither the Supreme Court nor the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has authorized remedying an Equal Protection violation by application of the exclusionary rule. See United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 n.2 (1996) (noting that the Court has “never determined whether dismissal of the indictment, or some other sanction, is the proper remedy if a court determines that a defendant has been the victim of prosecution on the basis of his race”); United States v. Nichols, 512 F.3d 789, 794 (6th Cir. 2008) (“[W]e are aware of no court that has ever applied the exclusionary rule for a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause”); Brooks Holland, Racial Profiling and A Punitive Exclusionary Rule, 20 Temp. Pol. & Civ. Rts. L. Rev. 29, 30 (2010) (advocating for the application of the exclusionary rule in the equal protection context, but noting that “[t]he Supreme Court, however, has not determined whether an equal protection violation implicates the traditional criminal procedure remedy: the exclusionary rule.”).
Rather, the exclusionary rule was created to disallow the introduction of evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment. United States v. Matthews, 12 F.4th 647, 652 (7th Cir. 2021), cert. denied, 142 S. Ct. 1212 (2022) (“The exclusion of evidence for a violation of the Fourth Amendment is a judicial remedy intended to deter police misconduct and thereby protect Fourth Amendment rights.”). Under well-established Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, an officer’s actions are reviewed under an objective standard, with no weight given to the officer’s subjective intentions — even motivations related to race. Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 813 (1996); United States v. Cole, 21 F.4th 421, 428 n.2 (7th Cir. 2021), cert. denied, 142 S. Ct. 1420 (2022) (reaffirming objective test for Fourth Amendment violations, and noting that changing that standard “is an issue for the Supreme Court, not us”). Thus, Officer Reillo’s actual motivations for initiating the traffic stop are irrelevant in the context of the Fourth Amendment.
by John Wesley Hall Criminal Defense Lawyer and Search and seizure law consultant Little Rock, Arkansas Contact: forhall @ aol.com / The Book www.johnwesleyhall.com
"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
"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]
“You know, most men would get discouraged by
now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!”
---Pepé Le Pew
"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)