Plaintiff was held down to forcibly remove cocaine from his mouth, and it was objectively reasonable for the officers to believe he was at medical risk for holding it there. He was also finally forcibly sedated, but that issue wasn’t raised in the district court, so it’s waived. Spotsville v. Hall, 547 Fed. Appx. 498 (5th Cir. 2013).
Plaintiff’s arrest was with probable cause, so his 1983 claim fails. Jones v. Las Vegas Metro. Police Dep’t, 2013 U.S. App. LEXIS 22994 (9th Cir. November 14, 2013).*
Officers did not violate clearly established law in entering plaintiff’s property and entering alleged curtilage. Roloff v. Washington County, 2013 U.S. App. LEXIS 23014 (9th Cir. November 14, 2013).*
Plaintiff’s stop in this 1983 case was valid, and it was not unreasonably extended. It was 40 minutes, but that was because of the plaintiff’s own conduct. “Picray recorded his forty-minute interaction with the officers. A certified transcript of this recording clearly demonstrates that the officers detained Picray only for the amount of time necessary to effectuate their investigation and that Picray’s combative conduct and failure to cooperate caused the investigation to last forty minutes.” Picray v. Heeb, 2013 U.S. App. LEXIS 22837 (9th Cir. November 12, 2013).*
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The state’s 14 factors of nervousness and reasonable suspicion still did not add up to reasonable suspicion. Suppression should have been granted. State v. Moore, 404 S.C. 634, 746 S.E.2d 352 (2013):
Opening the door of an occupied car is a search. Here it was reasonable because it was based on officer safety. McHam v. State, 404 S.C. 465, 746 S.E.2d 41 (2013):
Defendant was known to the police to be a methamphetamine user and dealer, and they talked to him outside his hotel, ID’g themselves and police. He said he knew they were police. They asked him if they could “look around” his room for drugs. He consented and took them to the room, he used his key card to unlock it, and they searched. The consent was voluntary, despite his claim he was high on methamphetamine at the time, and the officers did not exceed the scope of the consent, which was to look for drugs. United States v. Barragan, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 123340 (N.D. Iowa August 27, 2013), adopted 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 130424 (N.D. Iowa September 12, 2013).
The Fourth Amendment wasn’t violated by a police officer stopping without using his lights or siren and getting out and inquiring of defendant in a parked car whether he had permission to be on a housing complex parking lot. Defendant consented to a patdown. When asked, he got out of the car. People v. Woods, 2013 IL App (4th) 120372, 2013 Ill. App. LEXIS 578 (August 28, 2013).*
HGN test for suspicion of DWI was probable cause for arrest. The fact it’s not admissible at trial doesn’t mean the officer could not arrest on it. Commonwealth v. Weaver, 2013 PA Super 245, 76 A.3d 562 (2013).*
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There is no clearly established constitutional right to have an officer talk to all witnesses before making an arrest on probable cause. Beattie v. Smith, 2013 U.S. App. LEXIS 22884 (10th Cir. November 13, 2013):
A few days ago, I posted United States v. Thomas, one of about 64 P2P search cases nationwide. This one case, for some reason, caught the attention of writers about Internet privacy. Knowing this issue isn’t new, I did a Lexis search and I estimate 64 reported criminal cases (since 2006) have already held there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a computer left on running P2P. The commonality of this issue is now being recognized:
A gun in the house is not an exigent circumstance, but reasonable suspicion of its use is. State v. Mattocks, 2013-Ohio-4965, 2013 Ohio App. LEXIS 5168 (11th Dist. November 12, 2013):
The testifying officer heard the drug deal go down on a wire and watched the defendant go in his house and get the drugs and return for the sale. That’s PC. Any falsity in the information or testimony was mere oversight and not deliberate. State v. Hudson, 2013-Ohio-4967, 2013 Ohio App. LEXIS 5167 (11th Dist. November 12, 2013).*
No basis to file a motion to suppress, so no IAC. Moore v. State, 2013 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 969 (November 6, 2013).*
Defendant’s girlfriend consented to an entry into the property, and then defendant consented to a patdown inside. State v. Stephens, 2013-Ohio-5008, 2013 Ohio App. LEXIS 5206 (5th Dist. November 7, 2013).*
Officers had a search warrant for defendant’s vehicle with plenty of probable cause. Defendant fled from the vehicle, however, effectively abandoning it, and that’s all the court needs to say. United States v. Smith, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 161722 (D. Minn. October 31, 2013).*
Officer’s testimony he saw the gun in plain view was credited by the district court and the evidence clearly supports that conclusion. United States v. Cunningham, 546 Fed. Appx. 203 (4th Cir. 2013).*
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Common authority is based on what the officers see at the time of the search. While defendant seeks to show that common authority was actually limited and the consenter only had permission to drive the car, the consenter described her control as complete, and that was enough for the officers to believe she had common authority. United States v. Scott, 732 F.3d 910 (8th Cir. 2013):
A subpoena for defendant’s medical records did not violate HIPAA or the Fourth Amendment. An overbroad subpoena can be quashed, but this one wasn’t. State v. Williams, 146 Conn. App. 114, 75 A.3d 668 (2013):
In this death penalty case, defendant’s car was suspected of running down and over his victim. When the car was seized, the undercarriage of the car had tissue from the victim. The car was seized for a search warrant, but immediate seizure of the tissue sample was clearly reasonable under the automobile exception even before the warrant. Galloway v. State, 122 So. 3d 614 (Miss. 2013).
Jamaican wiretaps were done by local law enforcement, and Jamaican authorities were not acting as surrogates for U.S. law enforcement. The product of the wiretap could thus be used in a U.S. court. Also, the government could not be made to turn over the wiretap applications because they were not in its possession. United States v. Lee, 723 F.3d 134 (2d Cir. 2013).
Defendant was in a group of men “socializing” when an officer cut him from the pack and escorted him to a car while holding his waistband. He was asked for consent and did. The stop was without reasonable suspicion, and suppression should have been granted. People v. Noah, 2013 NY Slip Op 04144, 2013 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 4052 (4th Dept. June 7, 2013).*
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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.
