Officers had reasonable suspicion from furtive movements and nonsensical answers to questions about travel to detain the defendants and ask for consent. While the officers applied a crass stereotype to the defendants’ Middle Eastern ethnicity and claimed on radio that they had suicide bombers wandering around Florida and were concerned that they were driving with a Qur’an in their laps, the officers got consent to search and found cut PVC pipe usable for pipe bombs which had “a potassium nitrate explosive mixture. The government also contends a forensic analysis of the laptop computer revealed Mohamed in a video explaining how to construct a remote-controlled explosive device.” The search was valid, even discounting the racial stereotyping. United States v. Megahed, 546 F. Supp. 2d 1324 (M.D. Fla. 2008)*:<\/p>\n
FN5. Obviously, holding a Qur’an (or any religious item for that matter) while in an automobile should not arouse suspicion. But Blakely’s other observations within this quote present unbiased reasons for furthering the investigation. Accordingly, for the sake of completeness, I have included Blakely’s inappropriate comments as well as his rational observations.<\/p>\n
FN6. At the suppression hearing, Blakely and Taylor characterized these comments as crude “jokes” and in retrospect recognized their comments were offensive and “unprofessional.” Despite their after-the-fact mea culpas, the two admitted they were concerned for their safety (although their reasons were mainly based on their stereotypical ethnic-based misconceptions). Blakely’s apprehension, although unwarranted, is evident from his comments: “Dude, shut up. All right. I don’t like stopping these (expletive) anyway (T. 5:38:46) \u2026 I’m going to get him (Mohamed) out of the car; I’m gonna search his car, and you got to help me, Bill (Fields) (T. 5:39:01).”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
State trial court’s finding that a frisk of plaintiff was unreasonable was not preclusive to whether there was probable cause to arrest plaintiff in the first place. Here, there was probable cause and that permitted a search incident, so plaintiff’s claim fails. Randolph v. City of East Palo Alto, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15607 (N.D. Cal. March 1, 2008).*<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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