A search warrant for trace evidence of a homicide in a car was sufficient under the particularity requirement. How much more precise could it be? United States v. Burgos-Montes, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 47046 (D. P.R. February 28, 2011):
It is known that insofar as trace evidence of a homicide, no matter how much someone tries to clean up a crime scene, something is generally left behind, even if not always easily detected. Geared to find this evidence, forensics examines a particular crime scene for the so called trace evidence of a crime. Such evidence can be a number of things, from hair follicles, DNA samples, glass, dirt, plant, foreign objects to the particular site under examination or absence of certain objects that are expected to be found at the site, with consideration of any possible cross transfers that could have occurred from a person to person contact or a site to person contact. Although must forensic of a homicide would center on fingerprints, fibers, hair specimens or DNA samples of any bodily secretions, it could easily assist to find other items, as well, depending on the time frame and the nature of the offense.6
6 Trace evidence of a crime may be related to glass, paint, dirt or dust, pollen, leaves or roots, seeds, as well as a general category of trace evidence which in relation to other evidence may assist in identifying the commission of an offense, including tool marks and ballistics, surface indentations and particles subject to gas chromatography.
The particularity requested by defendant in regards to the trace evidence requested in the search warrant of the black Chrysler Sedan vehicle at issue may encompass residues of different kinds, marks, fabric, prints, grime or minute traces of elements which may subsequently be subject of forensic analysis. Still, it is not a generalized search, but one limited to a particular item, the Chrysler black sedan with license plates GIG-001, which examination may have required sampling of minute traces of evidence requiring further scientific analysis.
The warrant at issue cannot be invalidated as a general warrant for it does not vest the executing officers with unbridled discretion to conduct an exploratory rummaging through defendant’s property in search of criminal evidence. Rather, the warrant’s clauses describe in both specific and inclusive generic terms what is to be seized: “evidence or traces of evidence relevant to the homicide of Madeline Semidey Morales” in relation to a particular crime. By directing the searching officers to seize all of these items, the Magistrate Judge, rather than the officers, determined what was to be seized. Christine, 687 F.2d at 753.
As argued by the government relying on Atwell, it is “perfectly logical for the officers to search for items such as … blood, hair, fibers, fingerprints, items of identification, personal possessions, receipts or the like, since those items might well link [defendant] to [Morales-Semidey], at or near the time of [her] disappearance. Atwell, 289 F.Supp 2d at 636. The circumstances of this case and the nature of the crime being investigated limited the parameters of the relevant evidence.
Furthermore, Christine “made clear that search warrants and their supporting affidavits are to be judged ‘in a commonsense and realistic fashion.’” Atwell, 289 F.Supp.2d 629, 635. “The use of generic classifications in a warrant is therefore sufficient to delineate the categories of items to be seized when, due to the circumstances of the investigation, a more precise description is not feasible.” Christine, 687 F.2d at 753.
Related case: United States v. Montes, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 47141 (D. P.R. May 2, 2011).
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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.
