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- D.Mont.: Delay of USPS Express Mail for dog sniff didn’t violate 4A
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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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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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Congressional Research Service:
--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: Abandonment
S.D.Fla.: Throwing a bag aside when seeing the police is an abandonment
Throwing a bag aside when seeing the police is an abandonment. It was speculation he would retrieve it if the police didn’t get it. United States v. Morrow, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 14604 (S.D. Fla. Jan. 20, 2017),* adopted, 2017 … Continue reading
W.D.Va.: Leaving cell phone outside fed courthouse under ashtray, where CSOs commonly recommended hiding phones, was a waiver of REP in phone, albeit not abandonment
Defendant came to the federal courthouse because his mother was being arrested, and DHS officers invited him there. He did not know that he had an arrest warrant, too. When he got to the courthouse, he was told he couldn’t … Continue reading
D.Utah: Tossing bag of drugs onto somebody else’s porch is an abandonment; where the police were standing doesn’t matter
Defendant’s tossing a black bag with drugs onto the porch of another apparently attempting to distance himself from them was an abandonment, and he had no standing as to what was thrown onto the porch. It matters not where the … Continue reading
S.D.N.Y.: Tossing gun in flight is abandonment even if the initial stop would have been unreasonable
Defendant’s tossing a gun in flight from the police is abandonment no matter how unreasonable the initial stop might have been. United States v. Jones, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 173592 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 14, 2016):
DE: CI reported arrest warrant for def so he was arrested; no warrant, however, so search incident was invalid
A CI told the police that defendant had a warrant for his arrest. Without checking, the police arrested. There was no warrant, and the search incident to arrest is void. State v. Rodriguez, 2016 Del. Super. LEXIS 642 (Dec. 21, … Continue reading
FL4: Password protected cell phone left in a stolen car still had a REP in its contents; that’s what the password means
Defendant juvenile left a cell phone in a stolen car, and it was password protected. The password protection “clearly indicat[ed] an intention to protect the privacy of all of the digital material on the cell phone or able to be … Continue reading
OR: Horse owner didn’t lose privacy interest in horses being cared for by another on other’s property
Third-party property owners who were boarding defendant’s horses had the actual authority to consent to the sheriff’s entry onto their properties. Defendant didn’t have any authority to exclude the owners from particular parts of the properties where her horses stayed. … Continue reading
OR: Def didn’t abandon backpack by not affirmatively claiming ownership of it during vehicle search by consent
The officer had reasonable suspicion something was up and the driver of a van already stopped consented to a search of the van, but that did not include a backpack that didn’t belong to him. Defendant did not abandon the … Continue reading
WA: While cell phones are certainly “private affairs,” there’s no special abandonment rule for cell phones
Cell phones are the “private affairs” of Washingtonians under their state constitution, merely stating the obvious, but they can be abandoned like anything else, and the court declines to adopt a cell phone exception to abandonment. State v. Samalia, 2016 … Continue reading
ID: Def was entitled to retrieve duffle bag in rental car before inventory
Defendant had standing to challenge the search of his duffle bag in a rental car. The State conceded that the officers’ conduct in refusing to allow him to take the luggage from a rental car and notifying him that the … Continue reading
W.D.N.Y.: No REP in bloody tissue left in police dept bathroom
Defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a bloody tissue left in a men’s bathroom at the Buffalo police station. United States v. Green, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 87388 (W.D.N.Y. July 6, 2016). Defendants’ vehicle was stopped as it … Continue reading
N.D.Ga.: Running away from the getaway car is an abandonment
Officers had probable cause to search defendant’s car for DNA and other evidence connecting it to a bank robbery that the car was connected to. Aside from that, everybody in the car fled when it was stopped, and that’s an … Continue reading
CA8: Fleeing from a car during a traffic stop and leaving a backpack behind is objectively an abandonment
Fleeing from a car during a traffic stop and leaving a backpack behind is objectively an abandonment. The fact it’s a semi-private place isn’t determinative here. United States v. Nowak, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 10956 (8th Cir. June 17, 2016):
TX1: Cell phone was abandoned on roof of abandoned getaway car
The getaway car for a robbery was left outside the scene when the occupants got out of the car to shoot but scattered after gunfire. Defendant’s cell phone was left on the roof of the car. This was an abandonment … Continue reading
N.D.Iowa: The fact two officers recollect the facts somewhat differently at suppression hearing doesn’t mean one or both are lying
That two officers recollect defendant’s traffic offense and stop somewhat differently doesn’t mean that one of them was lying. On the totality, there was reasonable suspicion. United States v. Maldonado, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 67881 (N.D.Iowa May 24, 2016),* R&R … Continue reading
D.Minn.: Fleeing police, crashing car, and running away from it is abandonment
Defendant abandoned the car he was in: “after being pursued by officers at high speeds for several city blocks, Crenshaw drove the green Cadillac across a vacant lot, crashed it against the side of a private residence, exited the vehicle, … Continue reading
CA11: Ditching a backpack and then fleeing the police was abandonment
Defendant was a member of the Coast Guard stationed at Key West. He was a suspected peeping tom and the police had a description of a man with a backpack. When defendant was found he didn’t have the backpack. He … Continue reading
ID: Denial of ownership of a lockbox tossed onto ground by girlfriend was abandonment
Defendant’s denying ownership of a lockbox tossed onto the ground by his girlfriend saying it wasn’t his was a waiver of any reasonable expectation of privacy in it. State v. Melling, 2016 Ida. App. LEXIS 46 (April 6, 2016). The … Continue reading
CA11: Putting a backpack in trunk and distancing self from it and then giving false name was abandonment
The search of defendant’s backpack was supported by two rationales: Lack of a reasonable expectation of privacy and automobile exception. As to the former, “Even if Rivera did have a reasonable expectation of privacy, the district court found that Rivera … Continue reading
OH2: Police following you may be intimidating, but it’s not a seizure
Police following defendant may have been intimidating, but it wasn’t a seizure. He abandoned the drugs on him. State v. Ramey, 2016-Ohio-607, 2016 Ohio App. LEXIS 689 (2d Dist. Feb. 19, 2016).* A convenience store clerk who called the police … Continue reading