Archives for: June 2011, 29

06/29/11

Permalink 07:28:55 pm, by fourth, 210 words, 1911 views   English (US)
Categories: General

"Did Pa. Police Officer's Text Messages Violate Wiretap Act?"

Did Pa. Police Officer's Text Messages Violate Wiretap Act? by Gina Passarella in The Legal Intelligencer, June 29, 2011:

The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania has granted allocatur in two cases related to whether a police officer violates the Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act by pretending to be an accomplice and communicating directly with a suspect via text message.

The court granted the appeals in Commonwealth v. Cruttenden and Commonwealth v. Lanier June 16. A panel of the Superior Court ruled in June 2009 that it was "constrained" to uphold a trial court's grant of Jeffrey S. Cruttenden and Stephen Lanier's motion to suppress evidence in the criminal cases against them.

The court's decision in Cruttenden has already resulted in the upholding of other suppression rulings, including in the case of Commonwealth v. Rosa. In that case, the Superior Court held this year that a narcotics detective violated Pennsylvania's Wiretap Act by using two cell phones to receive calls intended for the phones' owners and to set up defendants' subsequent arrests on drug charges. A phone seized by the police rang frequently, and the detective answered it. Impersonating the owner of the cell phone, the detective made arrangements to meet the caller for a drug transaction. The detective met the caller and arrested him.

Permalink 11:09:25 am, by fourth, 210 words, 1677 views   English (US)
Categories: General

MO: Lack of time reference for CI's seeing drugs was lack of PC, but still GFE applied

Affidavit’s lack of a time reference for when CI saw drugs in defendant’s possession was a lack of probable cause. Nevertheless, the good faith exception applies because the officer’s belief in probable cause was not unreasonable under Leon. State v. Wilbers, 347 S.W.3d 552 (Mo. App. 2011):

That there could be some future-deterrent value in suppressing the evidence here is not debatable. “[W]e do not suggest that the exclusion of this evidence could have no deterrent effect. But our cases require any deterrence to ‘be weighed against the “substantial social costs exacted by the exclusionary rule,”’ and here exclusion is not worth the cost.” Herring, 555 U.S. 135 at __, 129 S.Ct. at 702, n.4 (internal citations omitted and emphasis added). As the error found in this case rests not on the officer, but rather on the issuing court, the good-faith exception applies.

Therefore, for all the reasons stated above, the evidence obtained as a result of the invalid search warrant is admissible by application of the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule.

A city ordinance that permitted random stops for inspection of taxicabs was moot by the way plaintiff pursued it. G & C Transp., Inc. v McGrane, 2011 NY Slip Op 21221, 32 Misc. 3d 872, 928 N.Y.S.2d 208 (Orange Co. 2011).*

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"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't."
—Me

"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

"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."
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Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)

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