Officer responding to a shots fired call with the shooter wearing orange pants and a white shirt saw the likely shooter at the apartment complex [how many people wear orange pants?] and approached him. The defendant turned and walked away. The officer shouted to stop, and he kept going into an apartment. The officer was in hot pursuit and had exigent circumstances that defendant was going for the gun. United States v. Walker, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 106116 (S.D. Fla. October 22, 2009)*:
Applying these legal principles here, the undersigned finds that Officer Wilson and the other police officers did not violate defendant's Fourth Amendment rights because of several exigent circumstances which existed at the time the officers entered his apartment. First, as a preliminary matter, the undersigned finds that the police officers had probable cause to believe that defendant had committed a felony offense, namely, aggravated assault with a firearm or another state crime, as reported by the victim. Officer Wilson, only minutes earlier, had heard his radio dispatcher advising police officers of an assault in the area of the subject apartment reported by a victim who described his assailant as a black male wearing a white shirt and orange pants who allegedly attacked him and fired at him with a firearm. Officer Wilson immediately responded to the area and found the suspect wearing a white shirt and orange pants standing outside of an apartment complex. Officer Wilson approached the suspect, later identified as defendant, who immediately turned and walked quickly away from the officer despite a verbal order to stop. Officer Wilson followed defendant, repeating his order to stop, which only resulted in defendant quickening his pace and entering the subject apartment. Officer Wilson followed defendant from only a few yards behind but could not see defendant's hands to determine whether he still had a firearm. Believing defendant to be the suspect described by the victim, and not knowing whether defendant was still armed, Officer Wilson rightly concluded that he had probable cause to pursue defendant in both "hot pursuit" of a fleeing suspect and for the safety of himself and others possibly inside the apartment.
Having probable cause to believe that defendant had committed an offense, the police officers also correctly concluded that exigent circumstances existed permitting a warrantless entry into the apartment. As stated above, exigent circumstances exist "when the inevitable delay incident to obtaining a warrant must give way to an urgent need for immediate action." Ramos, 933 F.2d at 972 (quoting Satterfield, 743 F.2d at 844). ...
Store security guards were reliable in the information they passed on to law enforcement officers, and that was reasonable suspicion for defendant’s stop. United States v. Cobb, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 106313 (E.D. Pa. November 12, 2009).*
Knock-and-announce was properly dispensed with because of a fear for officer safety. [There was no mention of Hudson.] United States v. Landan, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 106305 (D. Mass. November 12, 2009).*
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"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).
"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."
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case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth
Amendment."
—United
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"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated
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"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the
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"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
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“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted
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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
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“You know, most men would get discouraged by
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—Pepé LePew
"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)