Defendant’s stop was prolonged because it was based on a “hunch” and not reasonable suspicion. The consent granted after that was not voluntary. The state had the burden and it failed. State v. White, 2013 Ohio 3027, 2013 Ohio App. LEXIS 3083 (2d Dist. July 12, 2013).*
Defendant has no standing to challenge the alleged pretextual stop of a car he wasn’t even in and had no possessory interest. State v. Silvas, 2013-NMCA-093, 2013 N.M. App. LEXIS 61 (July 10, 2013), Certiorari Granted, September 20, 2013, No. 34,271.
Probable cause existed on the totality of circumstances. Defendant viewed all the factors only in isolation in his argument. State v. Wilson, 404 S.W.3d 917 (Mo. App. 2013).*
Defendant was stopped for almost hitting a police car, and reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing was evident to the officers [but not to me], and a patdown resulted in a plain feel of a bag of drugs. Nix v. State, 2013 Ala. Crim. App. LEXIS 57 (July 12, 2013).*
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Medically paralyzing a suspect, without a warrant or consent, to remove crack cocaine hidden in his rectum shocked the conscience of the court and was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. United States v. Booker, 728 F.3d 535 (6th Cir. 2013):
While hearsay at a suppression hearing is not the preferred method of the government presenting its case, the confrontation clause doesn’t apply. On a motion for new trial even, the missing witness from the suppression hearing testified at trial the same as represented at the suppression hearing, and he was cross-examined. United States v. Spencer, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 121945 (D. Minn. August 26, 2013).*
The trash pull at defendant’s apartment complex was not in a constitutionally protected area, citing Jardines, so there was no Fourth Amendment problem with it. United States v. Jackson, 728 F.3d 367 (4th Cir. 2013).*
The information derived from the unconstitutional placement of a GPS on defendant’s car was excised from the affidavit. There still was probable cause for the search under the independent source doctrine. United States v. Bush, 727 F.3d 1308 (11th Cir. 2013).
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In an amicus brief filed ahead of Oct. 29 oral arguments on the stay, lawyers for Public Advocate Bill de Blasio said any impact of the remedies ordered by Judge Scheindlin, including her appointment of a monitor to oversee reforms of NYPD practices, is not imminent.
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An anonymous tip on defendant’s being involved in drugs brought the police, and they’d already heard about him and knew about the area. When the officer approached defendant, he fled into a house and the officer validly pursued him. Tossing drugs inside supported the arrest. Cooper v. State, 2013 Miss. App. LEXIS 686 (October 15, 2013):
Defendant was subjected to a traffic stop, but the officers knew that defendant was a known user of drugs and guns and was wanted for that. The patdown was clearly justified. United States v. Mizzell, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 148401 (E.D. Va. October 15, 2013).*
“[C]ounsel’s strategic decision to forego a dubious fact-bound motion to suppress does not fall below the objective standard of reasonableness for competent counsel.” Almost certainly the search was legal. Even if it wasn’t, there would be no prejudice because of the quality of the prosecution’s case. Georges v. United States, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 148957 (D. Me. June 11, 2013).*
The record does not support defendant’s contention that he was told he couldn’t leave unless he consented. The court finds that the officer made no promises before the consent. United States v. Stewart, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 148744 (D. Vt. October 16, 2013).*
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Encountered by the police and ordered out of the car at night, this unquestionably became a seizure of the person. It was clearly communicated that he was not free to leave. United States v. Mundy, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 148952 (E.D. Ky. October 3, 2013):
Officers heard this 1983 plaintiff on a wire saying that he could provide drugs to an undercover buyer. Officers confronted him and searched him, finding nothing. He was taken to the police station and strip searched and a bag of crack was found hanging from his buttocks. The officers get qualified immunity. There was arguable probable cause for the arrest for attempt, possession, or distribution. Whether the strip search was valid is not settled, so they get qualified immunity for that too. Gonzalez v. City of Schenectady, 728 F.3d 149 (2d Cir. 2013):
Defendant was stopped for a dirty license plate, and she was asked for consent while the warrant check was being run. This was unreasonable because she was not free to go. (And, for what it’s worth, the state is responsible for the “thin record.”) State v. Stoebe, 406 S.W.2d 509 (Mo. App. 2013):
The stop was justified, and furtive movements inside the car during the delayed stop justified the officer opening the car door to look for weapons. State v. Lockett, 120 So. 3d 886 (La. App. 4 Cir. 2013).*
The extra two minute detention of defendant after he was stopped on probable cause of a traffic offense and reasonable suspicion developed was reasonable. United States v. Taylor, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 105249 (N.D. Ga. July 26, 2013).*
Illegally possessed animals were seized from defendant’s property and he was convicted of a city misdemeanor. Any alleged illegal seizure of the animals would not have changed the outcome because clearly the animals were there. City of Bedford v. Deal, 2013 Ohio 3240, 2013 Ohio App. LEXIS 3306 (8th Dist. July 25, 2013).*
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Detention of men at a storage unit was without reasonable suspicion, and the search of the bag of one of them was unreasonable. Telling them to sit down was a stop that required reasonable suspicion. Clark v. State, 994 N.E.2d 252 (Ind. 2013)
Defendant’s blood draw was reasonable based on the officer’s belief that somebody had been injured in the accident. Douds v. State, 2013 Tex. App. LEXIS 12725 (Tex. App. – Houston (14th Dist. October 15, 2013),* rev’d on rehearing en banc Douds v. State, 2014 Tex. App. LEXIS 6152 (Tex. App.-Houston June 5, 2014) (posted June 10, 2014).
The officer did not prolong the stop to get the drug dog there because it arrived two minutes after the request while waiting for the computer check. Defendant was “nervous and paranoid” and the dog alerted. A gun was validly found in the glove compartment. State v. Greene, 2013 Ohio 4516, 2013 Ohio App. LEXIS 4756 (2d Dist. October 11, 2013).*
There was probable cause for defendant’s traffic stop, and reasonable suspicion developed he was under the influence when he was out of the car. That justified extending the stop. Vogt v. State ex rel. DOT, 2013 WY 123, 2013 Wyo. LEXIS 129 (October 9, 2013).*
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Defendant was stopped with reasonable suspicion or more that he was engaged in drug dealing, and he was handcuffed on the street a few blocks from his house. His handcuffing and the speculative argument that a man who fled from the stop might have gone to his house to destroy drugs did not justify a warrantless entry on exigent circumstances of his house. State v. Howard, 120 So. 3d 831 (La. App. 4 Cir. 2013).*
Being ordered to produce travel documents at a juvenile arraignment was waived as a search and seizure issue, but it’s not even plain error. People in Interest of J.G., 2013 V.I. Supreme LEXIS 33 (July 11, 2013).*
Crossing the fog line twice was reasonable suspicion for a stop. State v. Hett, 2013 SD 47, 834 N.W.2d 317 (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.
