Plaintiff didn’t sufficiently plead a Fourth Amendment violation and overcoming qualified immunity from the officer’s seizing his notebook and perusing it and handing it to another officer. It’s his burden to deal with qualified immunity, and he didn’t adequately respond. Trover v. Oglesby, 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 5017 (7th Cir. Feb. 18, 2026).
The police dog bite and hold for 30 seconds to extract plaintiff from climbing into an attic was covered by qualified immunity. Plaintiff had assaulted someone, and he was fleeing. Hays v. Adams, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 34385 (E.D. Wash. Feb. 19, 2026).*
2254 petitioner’s CSLI claim was made and trial occurred all before Carpenter, and the holding was correct on existing law. Stone bars relitigating it. It was correct at the time, and petitioner used the state procedures to challenge it. Ruiz v. Walker, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 34191 (E.D.N.Y. Feb. 19, 2026).*
An arrest warrant isn’t constitutionally required for a felony arrest. Hernandez v. Commonwealth, 2026 Ky. LEXIS 7 (Feb. 19, 2026).
There was no rationale entitlement to discovery of the name of the informant in this case, so defense counsel wasn’t ineffective for not asking for it. McKinney v. United States, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 34995 (M.D. Ala. Feb. 20, 2026).*
Parking behind defendant’s already parked car in a parking lot was not a seizure. State v. Powell, 2026-Ohio-592 (5th Dist. Feb. 19, 2026).*
Defendant argues the automobile exception doesn’t apply, but the real issue here is abandonment of the car. United States v. Marion, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 35063 (E.D. Mo. Feb. 20, 2026).*
Plaintiff sued while his criminal trespass case was pending in state municipal court. The action is stayed because plaintiff can raise his constitutional claims there. Younger also counsels that. Spiehs v. Allen, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 35038 (D. Kan. Feb. 20, 2026).
The police dog bite and hold for 30 seconds to extract plaintiff from climbing into an attic was covered by qualified immunity. Plaintiff had assaulted someone, and he was fleeing. Hays v. Adams, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 34385 (E.D. Wash. Feb. 19, 2026).*
Parking behind defendant’s already parked car in a parking lot was not a seizure. State v. Powell, 2026-Ohio-592 (5th Dist. Feb. 19, 2026).*
“The district court correctly held that the officers did not violate Torres’s Fourth Amendment rights by asking him whether he was armed. The officer’s question to Torres, which took no more than three seconds to ask and answer, did not unconstitutionally prolong the stop. See Rodriguez v. United States, 575 U.S. 348, 354 (2015) (The ‘Fourth Amendment tolerate[s] certain unrelated investigations that [do] not lengthen the roadside detention.’). Indeed, the entire interaction unfolded in less than twenty seconds. We need not decide whether the officers had reasonable suspicion to frisk Torres, because Torres ran away from the officers immediately after he was asked whether he was armed, and Torres does not dispute that the officers were permitted to pursue and restrain him based on this conduct.” United States v. Torres, 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 5118 (9th Cir. Feb. 20, 2026).
The officer was trained in the odor of burnt fentanyl [albeit nowhere near as much as burnt marijuana], and that was probable cause. State v. Grounds, 2026 Ida. App. LEXIS 9 (Feb. 20, 2026).*
Plaintiff finances cars. When Suffolk County seized the cars from the buyers, they were allegedly really slow in returning them to Santander. Plaintiff admits the initial seizure was lawful, so the retention doesn’t ipso facto violate the Fourth Amendment. Santander Consumer USA, Inc. v. Cty. of Suffolk, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 34236 (E.D.N.Y. Feb. 19, 2026):
Off-site copying of defendant’s cell phone after the warrant’s expiration date was permitted by Rule 41(e)(2)(B). United States v. Hernandez, 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 4990 (11th Cir. Feb. 19, 2026).
Defense counsel wasn’t ineffective for not filing a motion to suppress that couldn’t win over (1) a judge in one county issuing a warrant for another county expressly permitted by state law or (2) recording a controlled buy. Horton v. United States, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 34062 (W.D. Ark. Jan. 27, 2026).*
The police knew 716½ had a side stair and entrance, and the warrant was specific to that with 716 never being searched. United States v. Platek, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 34091 (W.D. Mo. Jan. 28, 2026),* adopted, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 32684 (W.D. Mo. Feb. 18, 2026).*
The state’s claim of exigency from potential destruction of evidence was speculative, and the motion to suppress should have been granted. As to his burglary conviction, it’s harmless, but not as to two other counts. State v. Gilliland, 347 Or. App. 256 (Feb. 19, 2026).
A computer intrusion case, defendant beat around the bush: “Vance does not assert, but rather questions, whether the search warrant was unconstitutionally vague and he avers in general fashion that some of the items seized were outside the scope of the search warrant.” “Although Vance does not raise the issue of probable cause, there was clearly probably cause to conduct searches of his property.” The search was constitutionally adequate. United States v. Vance, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33459 (M.D. Pa. Feb. 19, 2026).*
The exclusionary rule generally does not apply in federal supervised release revocation proceedings. United States v. Kitt, 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 4953 (4th Cir. Feb. 19, 2026).*
The Fourth Amendment does not require a warrant be provided at the time of arrest, and an arrest can occur with probable cause and without a warrant in felony cases. Mister v. Marino, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33508 (E.D. Pa. Feb. 19, 2026).
Plaintiff may not “back door” his conviction by a § 1983 action that’s barred by Heck v. Humphrey and also by the statute of limitations. Sheffey v. Nev. Dep’t of Corr., 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33528 (D. Nev. Feb. 19, 2026).*
Defendant’s guilty plea waived his search claim, and he’d lose on the merits anyway. People v. Brown, 2026 NY Slip Op 00984 (1st Dept. Feb. 19, 2026).*
The officers had arguable probable cause to arrest plaintiff, and that defeats his false arrest claim. Cook v. Brooks, 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 4962 (11th Cir. Feb. 19, 2026).*
“Applying those principles here, we conclude that, under the totality of the circumstances, defendant was seized, at the latest, at 8:53 a.m., when Smith’s questions changed from general questions about defendant’s or P’s identity, to more probing questions about what defendant and P’s plans were. Put differently, at that point, a reasonable person in defendant’s situation would have felt that their movement was restricted by Smith. Several factors lead us to that conclusion. …” State v. Acosta Parra, 347 Or. App. 216 (Feb. 19, 2026).
The encounter started with consent. Officers developed reasonable suspicion for a longer detention, despite later concluding that defendant wasn’t involved in the alleged criminal activity that brought them out. United States v. Dougherty, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33961 (D.S.D. Feb. 17, 2026).*
Plaintiff wife has no Art. III standing to sue over husband’s arrest. Garcia v. City of McAllen, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33902 (S.D. Tex. Jan. 16, 2026).*
In an immigration detention case, the government’s failure to respond to the petitioner’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment arguments was waiver. Eduardo R.P. v. Bondi, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33634 (D. Minn. Feb. 17, 2026).*
Coercing a suspect out of his home for a warrantless arrest violates Payton. [But here, the error is harmless on the murder and assault charges.] People v. Shaw, 2026 NY Slip Op 00961, 2026 N.Y. LEXIS 130 (Feb. 19, 2026):
The financial reporting requirements for real estate transactions under the Bank Secrecy Act satisfy the statutory requirements which are more onerous than the Fourth Amendment requires under Shultz. Therefore, there’s no Fourth Amendment violation. An inquiry can be made, as with administrative warrants, with just official curiosity. Fid. Nat’l Fin., Inc. v. Bessent, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33478 (M.D. Fla. Feb. 19, 2026):
Begging the question: What consequences are there for a Franks violation, besides a Franks hearing and maybe just suppression of evidence? Or here, return of the evidence? Rebuke? Prosecution for false statement or worse? See 18 U.S.C. §§ 1001 (false statement to federal officer) & 1621 (perjury).
Affidavit for search warrant was improperly admitted into evidence of guilt at trial. It was full of hearsay and the burden for probable cause is too low for reasonable doubt. Also, admitting a video violated the confrontation clause. State v. Smith, 2026-Ohio-552, 2026 Ohio App. LEXIS 601 (8th Dist. Feb. 13, 2026):
Pole camera observation didn’t violate the Oregon Constitution. State v. Lane, 347 Or. App. 229 (Feb. 19, 2026).
Probable cause developed after the stop but before the search under the automobile exception. There was also consent. United States v. Camorlinga, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 32720 (D. Or. Feb. 18, 2026).*
Defendant’s stop for speeding led to smelling marijuana and a search. Five days later, officers observed him doing an apparent hand-to-hand transaction. There was probable cause for both searches. United States v. Tucker, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 32781 (D.S.C. Feb. 18, 2026).*
Defendant’s motion to suppress that alleges no facts as to his arrest allegedly without probable cause states essentially nothing. People v. Honyghan, 2026 NY Slip Op 50154 (N.Y. Co. Feb. 5, 2026).*
A search warrant return outside the state law time limit by law is not a Franks issue. United States v. Davis, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33100 (M.D. Fla. Feb. 18, 2026).
Plaintiff “fails to specifically address, and thus waives any challenge to, the district court’s determination that a favorable finding on his Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment interrogation, Sixth Amendment, and general due process claims would necessarily imply the invalidity of his state conviction or sentence.” Goodson v. City of Dallas, 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 4837 (5th Cir. Feb. 18, 2026).*
Plaintiff is a convicted sex offender on probation. He was left on GPS monitoring for years too long. His claim is a state claim, not a Fourth Amendment claim. Wroblewski v. Schroeder, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33090 (W.D. Wis. Feb. 17, 2026).*
Officers had a court order under Cal. Welf. & Inst. Code § 8100 for taking plaintiff’s guns because of a mental health hold. They came to his house but he was gone. They talked to him through his Ring doorbell. His therapist made the call that started it. They got the guns from him. Case over the guns dismissed. Hill v. L.A. Cty. Sheriff’s Dep’t, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 31135 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 11, 2026).*
“The warrant limits the digital search to electronic devices and files ‘constituting evidence of sexual exploitation of children,’ not a full forensic search of every device and file as Mr. Quinlan asserts. Although the warrant lacks a temporal limitation, the constituting evidence of language distinguishes this warrant from the Galpin warrant found to lack particularity for failure to ‘provid[e] the forensic examiner with any guidance or limitations as to what kinds of files might be relevant.’ … Although the language of the warrant issued here could have been drafted more artfully, the court finds the limiting language sufficiently connects the items to be seized to the crime of sexual exploitation of children.” United States v. Quinlan, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 30725 (D. Vt. Feb. 13, 2026).*
Reason: Was It a Coincidental Traffic Stop or AI-Powered Surveillance? by Mattha Busby (“Seth Ferranti was driving his Ford pickup on a southeastern Nebraska stretch of the interstate in November 2024 when law enforcement pulled him over, claiming that he had wobbled onto the hard shoulder. As the Seward County sheriff’s deputies questioned Ferranti, a filmmaker who had spent 21 years in prison for distributing LSD, they allegedly smelled cannabis. Declaring this probable cause for a search, they searched the vehicle and discovered more than 400 pounds of marijuana. But were those the actual reasons for the stop and search? When Ferranti went on trial, his attorneys presented a license plate reader report produced by the security communications company Motorola Solutions. It revealed Ferranti had been consistently monitored prior to his arrest, including by the local sheriff on the day he was apprehended.”)
Posted inAI|Comments Off on Reason: Was It a Coincidental Traffic Stop or AI-Powered Surveillance?
NPR: Some cities are ditching license plate readers over immigration surveillance concerns by Jude Joffe-Block (“The use of automatic license plate readers has exploded across the country in recent years. The cameras on roads and freeways that take images of the back of passing cars are popular with police for solving crimes. But as President Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown has escalated in recent months, residents of various American cities are urging local leaders to stop using these cameras, citing fears of mass surveillance and concerns that local data could be aiding a federal deportation dragnet. Many of the grassroots campaigns have targeted cameras made by Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that has contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. Some cities have grappled with the issue and decided to keep their cameras due to public safety, but in a number of places, the pressure has worked. The liberal college towns of Flagstaff, Ariz., Cambridge, Mass., Eugene, Ore. and Santa Cruz, Calif., are among a list of at least 30 localities that have either deactivated their Flock cameras or canceled their contracts since the beginning of 2025 – with much of the activity happening in just the last three months.”)
Posted inAutomatic license plate readers|Comments Off on NPR: Some cities are ditching license plate readers over immigration surveillance concerns
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"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, Let it Bleed (album, 1969)
"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
"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)
The book was dedicated in the first (1982) and sixth (2025) editions to Justin William Hall (1975-2025). He was three when this project started in 1978.
