The officer did not produce the inventory policy and testified vaguely to it. Since the defense did not ask for it, the court can’t say the inventory was unconstitutional. The inventory itself will not be micro-managed by the courts. “The inventory here, while not a model, was sufficient to meet the constitutional minimum.” Also, policy was to impound a vehicle if the driver had no valid DL and the owner was not present. Since neither the driver nor passenger mentioned a word about the owner, the officer wasn’t constitutionally obligated to inquire. People v. Walker, 2012 NY Slip Op 7851, 20 N.Y.3d 122, 957 N.Y.S.2d 272, 980 N.E.2d 937 (2012):
Neither defendant nor his girlfriend asked the trooper if the girlfriend could drive the car, or told him that she had a driver’s license and the owner’s permission to drive it. The trooper was not required, as a matter of constitutional law, to raise the question, or to initiate a phone call to the owner. To impose such a requirement on police in such situations would not only create an administrative burden, but would involve them in making (and the courts in reviewing) difficult decisions in borderline cases. If a person present claims to have the owner’s permission to drive, must the police take her word for it? If the owner is called and does not answer immediately, must police wait for a call back? It is reasonable for the police to institute clear and easy-to-follow procedures that avoid such questions.
. . .
Defendant’s argument focuses on several alleged deficiencies in the proof relating to the inventory search: the written policy that governed the search was never produced; the state trooper’s description of the policy was very vague; and the descriptions of the returned property on the inventory form — “misc. items” and “paperwork” — would be of limited usefulness in the event the car’s owner claimed that some of her property was missing. These criticisms are not without force. Certainly, it would be better for a prosecutor seeking to prove the existence of a written policy to put a copy of the policy into evidence. On the other hand, defense counsel could have demanded that the policy be produced to help her cross-examine the trooper. She did not do so.
When a car has been lawfully impounded, the reasonable expectation of the person who was driving it that its contents will remain private is significantly diminished. In such a case, the driver presumably expects the police to find whatever is in the car. Galak, Johnson and Gomez establish that this does not give the police carte blanche to conduct any search they want and call it an “inventory search.” The police must follow a reasonable procedure, and must prepare a “meaningful inventory list” (Johnson, 1 NY3d at 256). But it would serve little purpose for courts to micro-manage the procedures used to search properly impounded cars. The United States Supreme Court implicitly recognized as much in Bertine, by upholding as constitutionally valid a search producing what a trial court had found to be a “somewhat slipshod” inventory (479 U.S. at 369; see id. at 383 [Brennan, J., dissenting] [describing the inventory’s deficiencies]). The inventory here, while not a model, was sufficient to meet the constitutional minimum.
"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.
