Defendant was stopped for littering and not using a turn signal. When he was stopped, he was nervous and his hands were shaking. One officer asked who was in the car with him, and he asked “Does it matter?” The other officer described defendant as “verbally belligerent” when ordered out of the car, but didn’t hear what was said. He refused consent. A patdown for weapons was unjustified, and the marijuana in defendant’s pocket was suppressed. Frazier v. Commonwealth, 406 S.W.3d 448 (Ky. 2013).
Defendant had no standing in the place searched. While his DL showed that address, he conceded he lived elsewhere. Mackey v. Commonwealth, 407 S.W.3d 554 (Ky. 2013).*
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Officer was arresting an armed and dangerous person in a vehicle, when out came others. He was justified in ordering them all to the ground at gunpoint for officer safety without it turning into a full arrest of the others. United States v. Howard, 729 F.3d 655 (7th Cir. 2013):
The Post-Dispatch has identified 100 people arrested in error over the past seven years. Collectively, they spent more than 2,000 days in jail – an average of about three weeks each. One man alone was incarcerated 211 days. About a quarter were held repeatedly – one of them, five times – and 15 were locked up while the right suspect was already behind bars.
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In many states, the use of that data has led to a movement to protect cellphone location information. One cellphone search, in particular, could serve as a test case for civil liberties groups challenging law enforcement’s access to such information.
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Grits for Breakfast: Strip searching in jail overkill for minor traffic violations:
Last year the US Supreme Court okayed jails strip searching defendants upon entry, even for minor offenses. CBS-11 out of Dallas reported last week on a case in Richland Hills where a driver was arrested by the city marshal for an unpaid ticket from August (rolling through a stop sign), during which she was forced to disrobe at the jail.
Imbedding GFB’s link never works. It’s http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2013/10/strip-searching-in-jail-overkill-for.html?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=79553&utm_campaign=0
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Defendant has Rochin due process standing to challenge removal of drugs from his wife’s vagina, but he didn’t have Fourth Amendment standing. Using a Rochin due process analysis, the court concludes that Mrs. Anderson was handcuffed to a bench for hours after her nighttime arrest, and she couldn’t sleep because she was constantly uncomfortable. Then the officers decided to talk to her, and she admitted she had drugs hidden in her. She was ultimately told that a judge refused to issue a body cavity search warrant. Under the due process clause, because the court finds that this qualified under Rochin, Mr. Anderson gets standing. United States v. Anderson, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 153638 (D. Vt. October 24, 2013):
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Officers arguably violated Miranda when they asked defendant where his gun was during his stop. Inevitable discovery applies, however, because the officers had reasonable suspicion under Long that he was armed. He was recently involved in a domestic dispute with a firearm. They’d searched for it and didn’t find it, so they asked. Second search not suppressed. State v. Jones-Bateman, 2013-Ohio-4739, 2013 Ohio App. LEXIS 4952 (6th Dist. October 25, 2013):
There was specific evidence for probable cause. Observations the police made driving onto defendant’s property were visible to anyone coming in, and they were not protected. Defendant’s detention outside the house for nearly six hours while the search warrant was prepared were reasonable under Summers. State v. Roberson, 2013 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 927 (October 24, 2013).
There was probable cause to talk to defendant, so her consent was required, and her argument about revocation of consent is rejected. “[*P20] We agree that merely changing one’s mind about talking to an officer, walking away, or acting in an ‘unusual’ fashion would not justify a Terry stop or patdown. However, under the circumstances presented, we agree with the trial court’s conclusion that the officer was justified in detaining Johnson for further investigation, that Johnson’s detention did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights, and that the evidence need not have been suppressed.” State v. Johnson, 2013-Ohio-4729, 2013 Ohio App. LEXIS 4940 (2d Dist. October 25, 2013).*
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The Justice Department for the first time has notified a criminal defendant that evidence being used against him came from a warrantless wiretap, a move that is expected to set up a Supreme Court test of whether such eavesdropping is constitutional.
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The 48 hour rule of (McLaughlin v. Riverside) and the presentment rule (Rule 5), aren’t violated by detention for a violation of supervised release issued on a summons requested by PO. Dismissal’s not the remedy for delay; suppression of evidence that is the fruit of that is. Here there wasn’t anything to be used against the accused. United States v. Serrano, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 153590 (N.D. Ga. September 11, 2013).*
The records checks took time, and the stop was reasonable in length compared to that. Also doing an EPIC records check doesn’t require reasonable suspicion. United States v. Maddox, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 153612 (E.D. Tenn. September 11, 2013).* [This was 2011, not 1971. Why does it take 10 minutes for any computer system to do anything, except calculate when the next asteroid comes close to Earth? It should take seconds. I still want an explanation for why anything takes so long and the street cops have no idea. I’ll bet some obfuscating supervisor could explain it, but it strains credulity that anything with a computer takes so long. I personally think that they delay it on purpose so they can have all that free time to talk with the motorist and develop reasonable suspicion.]
The officer did not time defendant’s arrest so he could inventory the car. The officer was unarmed and in an unmarked car, there was probable cause for the arrest, and he waited for backup. Defendant also consented to a search of the contents of the car after being Mirandized a second time. He was trying to help himself when he consented. Child pornography was found. Defendant was in the Coast Guard at Key West, and he was arrested because he was a Peeping Tom and caught with a camera with voyeuristic pictures. United States v. Witten, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 153208 (S.D. Fla. September 13, 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.
