The S.D. Ala. had to deal with an interesting question: When does arrest end and pre-arraignment detention begin? It matters in an excessive force case because during arrest the Fourth Amendment applies and in pre-arraignment situations the Fourteenth Amendment applies. Here, the defendant was in the police station and in the booking process when he was Tasered, so the court determined that the Fourth Amendment applied because arrest was not complete. (The court cites dozens of cases, just a few are here.) Stephens v. City of Butler, 509 F. Supp. 2d 1098 (S.D. Ala. 2007):
The Fourth Circuit has rejected the “continuing seizure” theory. See Riley v. Dorton, 115 F.3d 1159, 1164 (4th Cir. 1997). The Seventh Circuit has rejected the extension of Fourth Amendment protection into the “gap” between the initial arrest and charge–at least once the person has been arrested and “placed securely in custody.” Wilkins v. May, 872 F.2d 190, 192-93 (7th Cir. 1989) (Fourteenth Amendment applied to claim for threats during interrogation).
The authority in this Circuit establishes no clear cut-off point beyond which the Fourth Amendment ceases to apply. In Redd v. Conway, 160 Fed.Appx. 858, 861 (11th Cir. 2006), a panel of the Court of Appeals analyzed a claim that officers used excessive force during booking under the Fourteenth Amendment standard, without discussion of the potential for use of the Fourth Amendment standard. In Cotrell v. Caldwell, 85 F.3d 1480 (11th Cir. 1996) a different panel reversed the trial court’s application of the Fourteenth Amendment to an excessive force claim in which the arrestee died during transportation to the jail. And in Vinyard v. Wilson, 311 F.3d 1340, 1347 (11th Cir. 2002), another panel analyzed the plaintiff’s excessive force claim under the Fourth Amendment where the allegedly excessive force was applied during the ride to the jail but declined to decide whether the Fourth Amendment applied to a pretrial detainee.
(Comment: If the law could just be the same for these issues, this court would not have to engage in its metaphysical discussion of when an arrest, which can extend well into the time in the police station, transforms into post-arrest detention. It is interesting, but it is something only a Fourth Amendment geek would really like, and it only matters in an excessive force civil case. I’m apparently not.)
The investigation started with an anonymous tip, but, over five days, the officer was able to corroborate enough of the informant’s story to give reasonable suspicion for a stop. United States v. Pearsall, 492 F. Supp. 2d 432 (D. Del. 2007).*
Search issue raised in the trial court and abandoned for appeal was fairly litigated and barred under Stone v. Powell. Westfall v. Parker, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 45787 (E.D. Okla. June 22, 2007).*
Plaintiff who claimed that she was arrested at school for drug use for her father’s drugs and the case was “contrived” by the police stated a claim for relief. Allen v. Fresno City, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 45827 (E.D. Cal. June 13, 2007).*
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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)
“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.
