{"id":4700,"date":"2010-10-17T09:17:42","date_gmt":"2010-09-26T15:58:35","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-09-26T15:58:35","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=4700","title":{"rendered":"Plain Dealer: Sneak-and-peaks escalate from 87 in ’06 to 1,145 in ’09; most in drug searches and some disguised as burglaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

An important news story on sneak-and-peak warrants: Federal investigators used delayed-notice search warrant to help crack Greater Cleveland heroin ring<\/a> by James Ewinger in The Cleveland Plain Dealer: <\/p>\n

A little-known federal law that allows investigators to carry out a search warrant without the suspect’s knowledge contributed to the smashing of a major heroin ring in the area last week. <\/p>\n

The tool was put in place as part of anti-terrorism laws passed by Congress after the 9\/11 attacks on American soil. The implement was rarely employed in its first years, but records show investigators nationally are increasingly pulling it from their belts. <\/p>\n

Some in the legal profession are jittery that the law can be abused and question whether federal judges should allow these warrants for offenses other than suspected terrorism. <\/p>\n

The delayed-notice search warrant is designed to keep suspects from knowing they are under surveillance. In this case, investigators used the warrant to go through a suspected drug dealer’s apartment in Cleveland last April. They took more than a pound of heroin and two guns, then trashed the place to make it look like a burglary. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Give the government an inch, it takes a mile. The delayed notice provision of \u00a7 213 the USA Patriot Act, 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 3103a<\/a>, was written into Rule 41(f)(3)<\/a>:<\/p>\n

(3) Delayed Notice.<\/em> Upon the government\u2019s request, a magistrate judge\u2014or if authorized by Rule 41(b), a judge of a state court of record\u2014may delay any notice required by this rule if the delay is authorized by statute.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The FBI wrote about them here<\/a>, EFF here<\/a>, and a Georgia law professor wrote about them here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is an important story that hopefully AP will pick up and reproduce nationwide so the public knows about the abuse of sneak-and-peak. Regrettably, SCOTUS never made immediate notice of a search a Fourth Amendment requirement. See Dalia v. United States<\/a>, 441 U.S. 238, 247-48 (1979):<\/p>\n

Moreover, we find no basis for a constitutional rule proscribing all covert entries. It is well established that law officers constitutionally may break and enter to execute a search warrant where such entry is the only means by which the warrant effectively may be executed. See, e.g., Payne v. United States, 508 F.2d 1391, 1394 (CA5 1975); cf. Ker v. California, 374 U.S. 23, 28, 38 (1963); 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 3109. Petitioner nonetheless argues that covert entries are unconstitutional for their lack of notice. This argument is frivolous, as was indicated in Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 355 n. 16 (1967), where the Court stated that “officers need not 248*248 announce their purpose before conducting an otherwise [duly] authorized search if such an announcement would provoke the escape of the suspect or the destruction of critical evidence.” In United States v. Donovan, 429 U.S. 413, 429 n. 19 (1977), we held that Title III provided a constitutionally adequate substitute for advance notice by requiring that once the surveillance operation is completed the authorizing judge must cause notice to be served on those subjected to surveillance. See 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 2518(8)(d). There is no reason why the same notice is not equally sufficient with respect to electronic surveillances requiring covert entry. We make explicit, therefore, what has long been implicit in our decisions dealing with this subject: The Fourth Amendment does not prohibit per se a covert entry performed for the purpose of installing otherwise legal electronic bugging equipment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}