May 2026 S M T W T F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Archives
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Recent Posts
- OR: Even if original served warrant wasn’t the one returned, it doesn’t warrant suppression
- Two on suicide calls as exigency
- W.D.N.Y.: Civil discovery dispute denies access to other employees’ cell phones as 4A issue
- Reason: All New Cars Could Have Mandatory Surveillance Tech Unless Congress Stops This Mandate
- CA3: In seeking arrest warrants, officers need not present all exculpatory evidence to issuing magistrate unless it’s “conclusive”
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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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Stringrays (ACLU No. Cal.) (pdf)
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Congressional Research Service:
--Electronic Communications Privacy Act (2012)
--Overview of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (2012)
--Outline of Federal Statutes Governing Wiretapping and Electronic Eavesdropping (2012)
--Federal Statutes Governing Wiretapping and Electronic Eavesdropping (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: Inevitable discovery
D.Minn.: If warrant lacked PC or was defective, def’s admissions in questioning would have led to another search warrant based on more, so inevitable discovery applies
Police doing a child porn investigation with an allegedly defective search warrant come to defendant to talk about it, and his admissions are enough that the police would have obtained a search warrant if they already didn’t have one. Therefore, … Continue reading
TN: CI’s reliability mooted by trash pull
Whether the CI was reliable was essentially moot based on a trash pull that showed all kinds of marijuana cuttings. State v. Altman, 2015 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 556 (July 13, 2015).* [Usually, the courts say that the CI was … Continue reading
CA10: Where no emergency suggested, welfare check entry violated Fourth Amendment
The officer here came to serve a summons at plaintiff’s house, and he looked through the window and saw the place was in disarray. He went to the door, and it was unlocked. He never knocked. He decided to perform … Continue reading
FL2: State “protective custody” doesn’t permit search incident; entry into jail here, however, made it valid
When defendant was taken into “protective custody” under state law as drug impaired, his backpack couldn’t be searched incident to arrest because it’s not an arrest. However, he ended up at the jail, and an inventory at the jail was … Continue reading
MN: Exigency for entry unproved; inevitable discovery doesn’t apply to statements after an unlawful search
The state didn’t make its burden in proving that the emergency aid exception applied to the entry into defendant’s home because there was no positive link to it and an assault where the victim was in the hospital being treated … Continue reading
D.Kan.: PC alone doesn’t get the police to inevitable discovery: “To accept probable cause alone is to probably cause the (inevitable discovery) exception to swallow the (warrant requirement) rule.”
“Whatever view one has of the Fourth Amendment, its exceptional graces surely must be preserved from too casual invocation.” Here, the officers had probable cause, but no arrest or search warrant, when they entered a motel room looking for defendant … Continue reading
GA: Mistaken belief def was on probation made search invalid; no GFE in GA, either; suppressed
The officer mistakenly believed that defendant was still on probation, but he wasn’t. The probation search was unlawful, and the good faith exception doesn’t apply in Georgia. State v. New, 2015 Ga. App. LEXIS 115 (March 12, 2015). The officer … Continue reading
TN: Dead body here subject to inevitable discovery
Just because the rent on an apartment hadn’t been paid and there had been no eviction process, his property was there and he was hiding after a murder, he did not abandon the home. The affidavit for search warrant was … Continue reading
CA11: Illegal vehicle search cured by inevitable inventory; owner of car was dead
Defendant was driving on a suspended license the truck of a man known to be dead. The search of the truck was clearly illegal, but inevitable discovery applied because it would have been impounded and inventoried. United States v. Johnson, … Continue reading
MS: Throwing down car keys and running away from a car is abandonment
Throwing down car keys and running away from a car is abandonment. Green v. State, 2015 Miss. App. LEXIS 29 (January 20, 2015). In executing a search warrant for stolen goods on the premises of a convicted felon, the finding … Continue reading
UT: Attenuation doctrine must ultimately bottom on inevitable discovery
Under the attenuation doctrine, incorporating a proximate cause analysis, inevitable discovery must ultimately control where there is both lawful and unlawful police action. State v. Strieff, 2015 UT 2, 2015 Utah LEXIS 4 (January 16, 2015):
NC: Excessive force as an unreasonable search has to be raised in trial court first
During a traffic stop, reasonable suspicion was clearly developing, and defendant had something in his hand while denying it. Multiple requests to open his hand were refused, and, fearing a weapon, the officer ultimately had to take defendant down to … Continue reading
CA2: Court lacks “high level of confidence” for inevitable discovery to apply
Here, the search discovering defendant’s illegal firearms violated the Fourth Amendment, but the government argued for inevitable discovery, but the court lacks a “high level of confidence” that the officers would have inevitably discovered it. The government’s argument was essentially … Continue reading