Appellant’s property was way off the road and his yard was not visible from the road or any neighboring properties. Based on a CI of unknown reliability, officers decided to do a knock and talk, admitting that they did not get a warrant because of the unknown CI. Officers approached and defendant saw them from the window, but he did not come out. When defendant disappeared from the window, one officer went around to the back for “officer safety,” but there was no indication that defendant was armed or dangerous–he was in his mid-sixties. The defendant had a reasonable expectation in his back yard from the police entering on the property. Denial of motion to suppress reversed. Cooksey v. State, 2011 Tex. App. LEXIS 3487 (Tex. App.—San Antonio May 11, 2011):
Here, although appellant’s backyard is not enclosed by a fence, and we accept as true the sheriff’s officers’ testimony that there was not a “no trespassing” sign posted anywhere on the property, several factors support appellant’s reasonable expectation of privacy in his backyard and back steps. First, as in Pool, appellant’s home is located in a secluded, wooded area, and there are no neighbors within several hundred yards. Also, the mobile home is not visible from the main road, and appellant’s backyard and back steps are not visible from the private driveway, from the front of the home, or from any neighboring properties. Because appellant’s backyard and back steps would not be visible to anyone on the main road, on the driveway, or on the usual pedestrian pathway to the mobile home’s front door, we believe appellant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in both. In addition, the back steps on which Deputy Isley observed the potted marijuana plants are physically attached to the mobile home. Therefore, we conclude appellant’s backyard and back steps are curtilage of his home and constitutionally protected against unreasonable search.
. . .
As stated previously, the State argues the entry into appellant’s backyard was justified to ensure “officer safety,” but it is unclear whether the State argues “officer safety” rose to the level of exigent circumstances or warranted a protective sweep. Turning to the State’s first possible argument, the existence of exigent circumstances, we must first determine whether probable cause existed for entry into appellant’s backyard. See McNairy, 835 S.W.2d at 106 (absent probable cause, exigent circumstances alone cannot justify a warrantless entry). At the time Deputy Isley entered appellant’s backyard, the sheriff’s officers had no information that appellant was engaged in any illegal activity, other than a confidential informant’s tip, which was related through an officer from another jurisdiction. Lieutenant Hill testified he did not feel comfortable seeking a search warrant for appellant’s home based exclusively on the word of the informant, whom he did not know and never spoke to. Also, it was not until appellant was about to reenter his home through the back door that Deputy Isley entered the backyard, and it was only after Deputy Isley entered appellant’s backyard without appellant’s consent that he observed the potted marijuana plants on the mobile home’s back steps. According to Deputy Isley: “I noticed [the plants] after [appellant] actually pointed [them] out to me[;] again, I was more focused on [appellant] than I was the contraband.” Based on these facts, we conclude the sheriff’s officers did not have probable cause to believe the instrumentality of a crime or evidence of a crime would be discovered in appellant’s home or its curtilage. Therefore, the officers did not have probable cause to enter appellant’s backyard.
Even assuming probable cause existed, there also were not exigent circumstances such that obtaining a warrant was impracticable. …
Hat tip to a reader who sent this in.
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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.
