Archives for: September 2012, 03

09/03/12

Permalink 08:55:22 am, by fourth, 150 words, 268 views   English (US)
Categories: General

C.D.Ill.: CI's affidavit he lied to officer didn't support Franks issue, but it wasn't even believable

Defendant’s Franks hearing fails to produce evidence of any material misstatement by the police officer. The CI provided an affidavit that he lied about buying drugs from defendant saying instead that it came from an encounter outside. That part of the affidavit was belied by video surveillance of the scene that showed no encounter outside. United States v. Wallace, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 122346 (C.D. Ill. June 18, 2012).*

Overruling a 2011 case, the Motor Vehicle Division has to affirmatively determine that an operator’s stop was constitutional before a DL could be suspended. Here, it was based on an officer seeing the motorist’s motorcycle go down and going to assist and finding the driver smelled of alcohol. Schuster v. State Dep't of Taxation & Revenue, 2012 NMSC 25, 283 P.3d 288 (2012).*

Crossing both sides of lines of the highway was reasonable suspicion for a stop. State v. Womble, 2012 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 668 (August 24, 2012).*

Permalink 06:59:19 am, by fourth, 203 words, 215 views   English (US)
Categories: General

OR: Getting defendant out of car a second time to ask about omitted arrests was "a mere conversation" and not a detention

Defendant was stopped for a traffic offense, and the officer found that she had a suspended DL. He asked about prior arrests, and she related some but left out prior drug arrests. The officer got back her prior arrests for drugs after she’d been allowed back in the car in the passenger seat. He got her out of the car again and asked why she’d lied about the prior drug arrests, and she started to cry. He asked for consent and got it. It was all a valid consent, even though she was retrieved from the car a second time. This was characterized as “mere conversation” and not a part of the detention [even though it should have been apparent that the reason was to confront her and ask for consent]. State v. Mazzucchi, 252 Ore. App. 122, 284 P.3d 1263 (2012).*

Officers had reasonable suspicion for stopping defendant for an apparent drug deal in a high crime area. He’d been followed, and a collection of innocent facts added up to reasonable suspicion, particularly looking to see if people were looking, an apparent drug deal in the car from somebody getting in and right out, and more. State v. Holt, 206 Md. App. 539, 51 A.3d 1 (2012).*

Permalink 06:44:55 am, by fourth, 531 words, 245 views   English (US)
Categories: General

Utah applies attenuation to find a SI to a warrant found on an illegal stop was not unreasonable.

Defendant was stopped as a potential drug buyer leaving a house occasionally surveilled for apparent drug dealing. He was asked for his ID, and that led to finding a warrant for his arrest and he was searched incident to that arrest, not the original stop. The court finds that the stop was a Fourth Amendment violation, but attenuation analysis favored the state, and the search incident was not suppressed. State v. Strieff, 2012 UT App 245, 716 Utah Adv. Rep. 26, 286 P.3d 317 (2012). The court gives a lengthy expose of Utah and Supreme Court case law on attenuation. Valuable reading for litigators, and maybe LEOs too. Just a paragraph:

[*P27] The court's conclusion that Officer Fackrell's conduct was neither purposeful nor flagrant is further supported by the circumstances of the encounter as a whole. The officer's misconduct amounted to a misjudgment, one of constitutional proportion certainly, but a single misstep over the constitutional boundary rather than a deliberate transgression. See generally Rawlings v. Kentucky, 448 U.S. 98, 110 (1990) (stating that conduct premised on an error about the officer's authority "does not rise to the level of conscious or flagrant misconduct requiring prophylactic exclusion" of evidence); People v. Brendlin, 195 P.3d 1074, 1080 (Cal. 2008) ("[A] mere 'mistake' with respect to the... law[] does not establish that the... stop was pretextual or in bad faith."). Moreover, from Strieff's perspective, the degree of intrusion upon his rights, though real, was relatively minor. Even without reasonable, articulable suspicion, Officer Fackrell could legally have stopped Strieff and asked to see his identification, noted his name and date of birth, and then run a warrants check while Strieff remained free to leave. See, e.g., State v. Hansen, 2002 UT 125, ¶ 34, 63 P.3d 650 (stating that there is no Fourth Amendment seizure when an encounter is consensual, as evidenced by a person voluntarily responding to noncoercive police questioning); State v. Deitman, 739 P.2d 616, 618 (Utah 1984) (per curiam) (concluding that no detention occurs when an officer merely asks a defendant for identification and for an explanation of his or her activities). Had a warrant then turned up, the officer would have had a constitutional basis for detaining Strieff as well as a professional obligation to arrest him. The situation that actually developed in this case is not so different as to suggest that the detention was either a deliberate or glaring violation of Strieff's constitutional rights or the result of official indifference to them. And, although we accept the State's concession that Strieff was not free to leave because Officer Fackrell retained his identification, we note that the furthest Officer Fackrell may have taken Strieff's identification was to the officer's nearby vehicle. Recognizing that such a minimal encroachment does not justify a Fourth Amendment violation, we nevertheless view the relatively slight intrusion as support for the district court's conclusion that Officer Fackrell was not acting purposefully or flagrantly in detaining Strieff. See generally State v. Martin, 179 P.3d 457, 463-64 (Kan. 2008) (taking into account all the circumstances surrounding the officers' encounter with the defendant, including the relatively minimal intrusion upon the defendant's privacy by engaging him in a brief conversation about his activities, to conclude that the officer's conduct was not purposeful). The purpose and flagrancy factor therefore weighs against suppression.

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by John Wesley Hall
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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."
Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration camp]

“You know, most men would get discouraged by now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!”
Pepé Le Pew

"There is never enough time, unless you are serving it."
Malcolm Forbes

"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)

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