Defendant was stopped for having a headlight out and was given a warning. Immediately after he was told he was free to leave, the officer went into asking whether he had any drugs, firearms or knives on him. In the meantime, a second officer showed up to observe. The consent to search his person was a mere submission to authority at that point. State v. Dieckhoner, 2012 Ohio 805, 2012 Ohio App. LEXIS 699 (8th Dist. March 1, 2012):
[*P22] We find no legal distinction between Robinette and the case before this court. Just as the Ohio Supreme Court was in Robinette, we are also troubled by the timing of Comerford’s immediate transition from giving Dieckhoner the warning for the improperly working headlight to questioning him about contraband and then requesting to search his person.
[*P23] Comerford gave Dieckhoner a verbal warning for the improperly working headlight and told Dieckhoner that “he was all set and to have a good night.” As Dieckhoner turned to walk toward his car, Comerford then asked, “[b]y the way, do you have anything illegal; guns, knives, bombs, anything[?]” Unlike the facts in Robinette, there was no departmental or “drug interdiction policy” that required Comerford to question Dieckhoner about weapons or drugs. With the second officer standing five feet away, Dieckhoner denied having any contraband. Comerford immediately asked for consent to search him and Dieckhoner agreed.
[*P24] Comerford testified that he asks everyone he stops if they have any weapons, drugs, or guns on their person, and that he had no particular reason for asking Dieckhoner to search his person. In fact, Comerford testified that Dieckhoner was not acting suspicious in any way and that Dieckhoner was free to leave.
[*P25] Although Detective Leanza testified that Dieckhoner stated he consented to the search because he did not think Comerford would find the drugs in his pocket, the test for whether consent was voluntary depends on the totality of the circumstances at the time consent was given. Dieckhoner’s reasoning for consenting to the search given after being arrested and to another law enforcement officer while in police custody does not withstand the State’s burden of clearly demonstrating that Dieckhoner’s consent was voluntary.
[*P26] After considering the totality of circumstances in the instant case, including Comerford’s testimony that Dieckhoner appeared calm, the seamless transition between the detention and the request for consent, the fact that Comerford had no reasonable suspicion that Dieckhoner was involved or engaging in criminal activity, and the presence of another uniformed police officer, this court finds there was a sufficient show of authority such that Dieckhoner would not believe at the time that he was free to get in his car and drive away. Under these circumstances, any reasonable person would have felt compelled to submit to the officer’s search, rather than consenting as a voluntary act of free will. See Robinette at 244-245.
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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.
