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- VA: Body cam video of valid arrest would not be suppressed
- NM: Trial court’s finding of consent is reversed because the court engaged in its own internet investigation beyond what the parties provided
- Reason: No Warrant, No Suspicion, No Problem: Flock and Border Cellphone Searches Excluded From 4th Amendment Rules
- Reason: Flock’s Gunfire Alerts Raise a New Fourth Amendment Question
- N.D.Ohio: Car in driveway was on curtilage and plain view prohibited
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Feedspot’s Best Legal Blogs and Websites 2023-2026,
also, firm website Top 90 Criminal Law Blogs 2026 -
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ABA Journal Web 100, Best Law Blogs (2015-17) (then discontinued)
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by John Wesley Hall
Criminal Defense Lawyer and
Search and seizure law consultant
Little Rock, Arkansas
Contact: forhall @ aol.com
Search and Seizure (6th ed. 2025)
www.johnwesleyhall.com -
© 2003-26,
online since Feb. 24, 2003 Approx. 600,000 visits (non-robot) since 2012 Approx. 50,000 posts since 2003 (29,000 on WordPress as of 12/31/25) -
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Fourth Amendment cases, citations, and links -
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To search Search and Seizure on Lexis.com $ -
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Congressional Research Service:
--Electronic Communications Privacy Act (2012)
--Overview of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (2012)
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"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)
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“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] -
“Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a man is realising that it’s all rotten. Realising how to celebrate that rottenness, that’s freedom.”
– John le Carré, The Night Manager (1993), line by Richard Roper -
"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.
Website design by Wally Waller, Colorado Springs. 
Category Archives: Stop and frisk
IN: Second patdown had its own RS def was still armed
Defendant was hostile and aggressive toward officers, and a second patdown was conducted after he was handcuffed finding a gun. His actions continued and heightened concern that he had a weapon on him. J.R. v. State, 2017 Ind. App. LEXIS … Continue reading
CA11: Stop of man matching description of a robber in vicinity was reasonable
Officers received a report of a Friday night armed robbery of an Hispanic male by two black men wearing black. “The officer was aware that would-be robbers targeted this area because it contained a number of bars frequented on weekend … Continue reading
W.D.Mo.: Stopping def on the street because he vaguely matched the description of an assailant from three days earlier lacked RS
Defendant was approached on the street as he was walking past the police station because he was the same race as a man who was a suspect in an assault three days later. He gave his first name but kept … Continue reading
IL: Stop of a witness to a homicide led to RS for frisk
Defendant was seized as a witness to a homicide, not as a suspect. Once stopped, however, reasonable suspicion developed that he was in possession of a firearm, and a frisk was permitted. In re Tyreke H., 2017 IL App (1st) … Continue reading
D.Kan.: Def’s pulling arms from sweatshirt sleeves was RS for frisk since hands weren’t visible
The officer had reasonable suspicion for a frisk of defendant with a 4:30 am stop and having to turn his back on defendant to investigate what was going on. Importantly, defendant kept pulling his arms out of his sleeves of … Continue reading
D.N.M.: Flight from a pat down justifies arrest and search incident
“The initial encounter, including the officers’ questions to the Defendant, was justified under the community caretaker exception to the Fourth Amendment. However, that initial encounter quickly gave way to a pat-down search that was justified for officer safety under … … Continue reading
ID: Frisk doesn’t allow opening containers that can’t reasonably contain weapons; search incident doctrine doesn’t apply to frisk because no arrest
The search incident doctrine doesn’t apply to a stop and frisk. Thus, when a container is removed from a person in a frisk and the officer has no reasonable basis for concluding that the container has a weapon in it, … Continue reading
Two on RS: CA1 criminal case and a WI cop firing case
The stop and frisk all happened here within seconds, and the court finds that, while the question is close and not free from doubt, the evidence supports the district court’s conclusion that there was reasonable suspicion for the stop and … Continue reading
CA7: RS man was casing a store for robbery made it reasonable to believe he was armed for a frisk
The cases that apply to plaintiff’s Terry stop don’t necessarily apply to plaintiff’s frisk. Here, the precedents were too dissimilar, and defendants are entitled to qualified immunity for the frisk. Plaintiff was a “suspicious person” believed to be casing a … Continue reading
CA7: Plainclothes officers have to ID themselves when making a stop
“The jury instructions on Terry stops, however, were inadequate. Over Doornbos’s objection, the court instructed the jury only on investigatory stops but not frisks. Yet Officer Williamson’s own testimony indicates that he was starting a frisk when he first approached … Continue reading
OH3: The 3 days that an Ohio SW has to be executed in is business days
Ohio’s rule that a search warrant be executed in three days doesn’t include weekends. State v. Seaburn, 2017-Ohio-7115, 2017 Ohio App. LEXIS 3241 (3d Dist. Aug. 7, 2017). Defendant’s jaywalking stop didn’t justify a patdown where defendant wasn’t even asked … Continue reading
ME: SW not needed to photograph def’s facial injuries
Police didn’t need a search warrant to photograph injuries on defendant’s face. State v. McNaughton, 2017 ME 173, 2017 Me. LEXIS 193 (Aug. 1, 2017). There was neither reasonable suspicion for defendant’s stop nor his patdown. No facts were put … Continue reading
CA10: Def didn’t submit to police authority until after his furtive movements under the car seat
Police officers pulled into a bar’s parking lot from different directions looking for criminal activity. When they pulled up behind him, defendant did not submit to police authority until after his furtive movements under the seat, where a gun was … Continue reading
CA10: Where one in car flashed gun in a bar, it was reasonable to order occupants to ground when stopped
Defendant was seen flashing a gun in a bar in Colorado, and police got a specific description including hair braids and dress from the wait staff. When the car was seen, officers ordered the occupants out and to the ground … Continue reading
W.D.Tex.: Two citizen informants corroborated each other
Two identified citizen informants fully corroborated each other for reasonable suspicion. United States v. O’Brien, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 104936 (W.D. Tex. July 7, 2017).* “The officers’ interference with Lawrence’s liberty was not arbitrary. The officers approached West, Lawrence, and … Continue reading
ND: Firefighter reasonably removed rifle during early part of fire entry
Firefighters in the house removed a rifle for safekeeping and safety of the fireman early into the fire scene entry, and that was reasonable under Clifford. State v. Friesz, 2017 ND 177, 2017 N.D. LEXIS 164 (July 12, 2017). “Here, … Continue reading
OH10: Flight from a Terry stop was PC for search incident
“Because appellant committed an arrestable offense when he fled from the lawful Terry stop, the search of appellant’s person following his apprehension was constitutionally reasonable as a search incident to arrest.” State v. Johnson, 2017-Ohio-5527, 2017 Ohio App. LEXIS 2583 … Continue reading
W.D.Mo.: Illegal Terry frisk led to subsequent searches after arrest warrant found; no suppression under Strieff
Defendant’s Terry frisk was invalid, but the existence of a warrant for his arrest requires that the subsequent searches not be suppressed under Strieff. United States v. Sisco, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 94761 (W.D. Mo. Jan. 11, 2017), adopted, 2017 … Continue reading
D.Ariz.: Checking gun SN during frisk was unreasonable
While an officer can take a gun during a frisk, the officer can’t run the serial numbers [compare New York v. Class on VINs] as a part of a frisk. United States v. Shipley, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 83985 (D. … Continue reading
Stop and frisk created by SCOTUS 49 years ago today
Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), was decided 49 years ago today, June 2d. The stop and frisk occurred on October 31, 1963. The Ohio Court of Appeals Eighth District opinion is interesting for its historical value: State v. … Continue reading