Where the automobile exception applies to a car, the state does not need a search warrant to search a locked safe found in it. State v. Crane, 2014 Ark. 443, 2014 Ark. LEXIS 586 (October 30, 2014).
The government did not waive an argument about which statute it was relying on for a stop where it first said at the hearing it wasn’t relying on it, but then it reasserted the statute in a post-hearing brief. United States v. Demilia, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 20684 (8th Cir. October 29, 2014).
The past reliable CI’s information here was that the defendant would be a passenger in a car arriving at a certain time with drugs. When the car and defendant arrived, there was at least reasonable suspicion for the stop. United States v. Rogers, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 189001 (M.D. N.C. August 16, 2013).*
Officers entered the curtilage without a warrant or exigent circumstances and shot plaintiff’s dog in front of his 12 year old daughter. The verdict for the defendant officers is reversed and remanded for trial because they didn’t show reasons for entering the curtilage. Harris v. O’Hare, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 20813 (2d Cir. October 30, 2014), amended 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 22220 (2d Cir. November 24, 2014): Continue reading →
The stop of defendant was justified as a welfare check because he was parked on a gravel road on the way to an historical site at 11 pm. He admitted having marijuana. State v. Schneider, 2014 ND 198, 2014 N.D. LEXIS 198 (October 28, 2014).*
“Regardless, the officers’ telling Defendant to exit the vehicle was reasonable. At least six facts, taken together, point to possible criminal activity on the part of Defendant: (1) the initial violation (traveling well over the speed limit); (2) the subsequent violation (ignoring the order to pull over); (3) Defendant’s apparent control of the Malibu (as evidenced by his talking over Johnson and the rental agreement); (4) Defendant’s movements while officers were away (suspicious); (5) Defendant’s visage when officers returned (heavy breathing and sweating); and (6) the time of day (just past midnight). These facts are sufficient.” United States v. Awer, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 20700 (1st Cir. October 29, 2014).*
There was probable cause for defendant’s arrest for passing bad checks. United States v. Alfred, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 153048 (D. V.I. October 29, 2014).*
There was no exigency justifying dispensing with a warrant for a blood draw in this case. The officer never considered a warrant [probably because it was pre-McNeely]. People v. Armer, 2014 IL App (5th) 130342, 2014 Ill. App. LEXIS 748 (October 27, 2014).*
Defendant was seen using a public computer terminal in a library and child pornography was on the screen seen by people walking behind him. The police were called and a naked child was on the screen. There was probable cause for his arrest. Decker v. State, 2014 Ind. App. LEXIS 515 (October 28, 2014).*
Defendant’s stop was justified by the record, it was valid and defense counsel was not ineffective for not challenging it. State v. Sanders, 289 Neb. 335, 2014 Neb. LEXIS 165 (October 24, 2014)
FORT KENT, Maine (AP) — A Maine judge on Friday rejected a bid by state health officials to restrict the movement of nurse Kaci Hickox, who defied a state quarantine for medical workers who have treated Ebola patients.
Judge Charles C. LaVerdiere ruled that Hickox should continue daily monitoring and coordinate travel with state officials so monitoring can continue. But, because she’s not showing symptoms, the judge says she’s not infectious.
Posted inSeizure|Comments Off on AP: Judge rejects Ebola quarantine for nurse
The police can get your fingerprint, but not your password, to unlock your smartphone, a Virginia judge ruled this week.
A password is constitutionally protected individual knowledge, Virginia Beach Circuit Court Judge Steven Frucci ruled. But a fingerprint is similar to giving a DNA or handwriting sample, which the law allows, he said.
Posted inCell phones, Search|Comments Off on The Hill: Court: Police can use your fingerprint to search your phone
A scary-sounding report about government surveillance practices is probably based on a misunderstanding. Ironically, the spike in the number of delayed-notice warrants may reflect greater privacy protection rather than less.
Posted inSearch|Comments Off on WaPo: Why the EFF – and then others – probably misunderstood the numbers on ‘sneak and peek’ warrants
According to the USPS Office of Inspector General, 20 percent of law enforcement requests were not properly approved, and 13 percent were unjustified or not properly documented. Those statistics are compounded by the fact that the requests are not subject to judicial review….Paul Krenn, a spokesman for the Inspection Service, defended his agency. ‘You can’t just get a mail cover to go on a fishing expedition,’ he told the New York Times. ‘There has to be a legitimate law enforcement reason, and the mail cover can’t be the sole tool.’ But Theodore Simon, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, is not so sure. ‘It appears that there has been widespread disregard of the few protections that were supposed to be in place,’ he said.
Can police can demand records of where, when, and with whom people slept without a warrant?
Imagine that you own a small hotel or motel. One weekend, a group booking arrives and checks in. While taking their IDs and license-plate information, you discover that they’re visiting town to attend a political conference the following day. If you’re a conservative, imagine that they’re Tea Partiers or NRA members. If you’re a liberal, think of them as Occupy Wall Street protesters or anti-war activists. Now imagine that an hour, or a day, or two weeks later, a police officer shows up demanding to see all the information you collected from those customers. He has neither a warrant nor any evidence that the guests committed a crime. As a hotel or motel owner, should you be compelled to turn over their information?
Some legal cases do more than raise eyebrows – they push the legal envelope to change the law. Such is a federal case in Las Vegas now working its way through the courts. The question is whether federal agents can disrupt service to a house and then, masquerading as helpful technicians, gain entry to covertly search the premises in hopes of finding evidence that might later justify a search warrant.
Posted inPolice misconduct|Comments Off on NPR: Can Authorities Cut Off Utilities And Pose As Repairmen To Search A Home?
One of the more controversial provisions of the Patriot Act was to broaden the “sneak-and-peek” power for federal law enforcement officials. The provision allows investigators to conduct searches without informing the target of the search. We were assured at the time that this was an essential law enforcement tool that would be used only to protect the country from terrorism. Supporters argued that it was critical that investigators be allowed to look into the lives and finances of suspected terrorists without tipping off those terrorists to the fact that they were under investigation.
. . .
More than a decade later, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has published an analysis on use of the sneak-and-peek power. Just as critics predicted, it’s now a ubiquitous part of federal law enforcement….And as critics predicted, it is overwhelmingly used in cases that have nothing to do with terrorism.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on WaPo: Surprise! Controversial Patriot Act power now overwhelmingly used in drug investigations
After the Department of Homeland Security canceled a plan for broad law enforcement access to a national license-plate tracking system in February, officials established a policy that required similar plans be vetted by department privacy officers to ensure they do not violate Americans’ civil liberties. Two months later, however, officials with DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency bypassed the privacy office in purchasing a one-year subscription for a commercially run national database for its Newark field office, according to public contract data and department officials.
The FBI is pressing the little-known Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules to give it expanded authority to remotely hack and spy on computers in the U.S. and abroad.
Civil liberties and privacy advocates are calling the proposal a “new, expansive power” that could allow the government to collect private data, raising “significant” First and Fourth Amendment concerns. The FBI is arguing the change is a necessary update to outdated rules on territorial limits of warrants for electronic storage searches.
Posted inFISA|Comments Off on The Hill: FBI wants expanded hacking authority
The court of appeals thinks that the officer having the driver close the windows and turn on the heater for a dog sniff is a search, but the state supreme court disagrees, and the court is bound by it. Also, the wait for the sniff was only 5-7 minutes and that didn’t unreasonably prolong the stop. People v. Thomas, 2014 IL App (3d) 120676, 2014 Ill. App. LEXIS 750 (October 27, 2014),* modified on denial of rehearing 2015 IL App (3d) 120676, 2014 Ill. App. LEXIS 958 (January 8, 2015).*
Defendant was stopped for jaywalking. Because he was in a high crime area with a recent shooting, defendant was asked about whether he was armed and he admitted it. A frisk was thus reasonable. State v. Moorer, 2014-Ohio-4776, 2014 Ohio App. LEXIS 4641 (10th Dist. October 28, 2014).*
Police received information of a drug deal going down on a McDonald’s parking lot between two identified cars. The officer was able to walk right up to them and observe defendant doing heroin. The order to put his hands on the dashboard was a stop, but it was all with reasonable suspicion. State v. Rudnitskyy, 2014 Ore. App. LEXIS 1490 (October 29, 2014).*
Remembering that there is a difference between plain view and open view, the officers saw defendant selling cocaine in the vestibule between a glass door and the front door of his house. When the police approached, they could see the cocaine and defendant stomped on vials of it, missing one. The entry was based on exigent circumstances. It isn’t necessary to decide the curtilage question here. Brewer v. State, 2014 Md. App. LEXIS 129 (October 29, 2014).
Defendant has no standing to complain that his statement was obtained by the alleged violation of another person’s Fourth Amendment rights. Therefore, defense counsel can’t be ineffective for not raising it. People v. Wood, 2014 Mich. App. LEXIS 2078 (October 28, 2014).*
Questions of fact remained in this state § 1983 claim on questions of voluntariness of consent and apparent authority to consent. The claim of qualified immunity is also denied. Lavigne v. Forshee, 2014 Mich. App. LEXIS 2081 (October 28, 2014).*
Defendant come home while a search warrant was being executed on his house, and he walked up to officers to ask what was going on, and one officer said “Hold him.” UnMirandized, he was asked about a storage unit, and he admitted he had one and he consented to a search of the unit. When confronted with the existence of another, he consented to a search of that. Defendant was an alleged habitual offender, so it was reasonable to conclude that he understood all that was going on. Defendant wasn’t Mirandized until after the consent, and it wasn’t written. Collins v. State, 2014 Ark. App. 574, 2014 Ark. App. LEXIS 847 (October 29, 2014): Continue reading →
Posted inConsent|Comments Off on AR: Defendant consented to search of storage unit without Miranda warnings
The search of defendant’s prosthetic leg was reasonable as a search incident. Heroin was found. The officers did not have to take the leg first to the courthouse to x-ray it. United States v. Thomas, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 152531 (E.D. Mich. October 28, 2014).
Asking defendant about the marijuana the officer could smell was not a seizure requiring reasonable suspicion. To the extent it might be a seizure, it was with reasonable suspicion. United States v. Garcia, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 152029 (D. Mont. October 27, 2014).
Plaintiff’s civil rights action fails. PC was not needed for the search of his house because it was a parole search. Kelly v. Hocking, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 20608 (7th Cir. October 28, 2014).*
Posted inSearch incident, Seizure|Comments Off on E.D.Mich.: Prosthetic leg could be searched incident to arrest
Agency requests rule change but civil liberties groups say ‘extremely invasive’ technique amounts to unconstitutional power grab
The FBI is attempting to persuade an obscure regulatory body in Washington to change its rules of engagement that would grant it significant new powers to hack into and carry out surveillance of computers throughout the US and around the world.
Civil liberties groups warn that the proposed rule change amounts to a power grab by the agency that would ride roughshod over strict limits to searches and seizures laid out under the fourth amendment of the US constitution, as well as violating first amendment privacy rights. They have protested that the FBI is seeking to transform its cyber capabilities with minimal public debate and with no congressional oversight.
Posted inFISA|Comments Off on The Guardian: FBI demands new powers to hack into computers and carry out surveillance
A 30-year-old loophole increasingly gives police officers a pass when they violate the Fourth Amendment.
It used to be that when police violated a suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights through an unconstitutional search, evidence derived from the search would be thrown out.
"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.
