FedEx packages bound for the Phillipines were checked by Customs at the FedEx Oakland facility before shipment overseas looking for shipments of cash. After discovering a package with a letter referring to sex with minor by a U.S. citizen in the Phillipines, Customs started looking at all packages from this individual. It was determined that he traveled to the Phillipines 43 times in the previous eleven years. Other package inspections revealed more incriminating evidence of sex with minors. Customs found he had booked a flight to Manila from LAX, so they encountered him at the airport and searched his luggage finding child porn, including pictures of him with children. Following United States v. Abbouchi, 05-50962 (9th Cir. July 13, 2007) (UPS’s Louisville hub was functional equivalent of the border), FedEx’s Oakland hub is the functional equivalant of the border. United States v. Seljan, 497 F.3d 1035 (9th Cir. 2007).
Terminating high speed chase by causing a crash warrants summary judgment. No constitutional violation occurred, following Scott v. Harris, 127 S. Ct. 1769, 167 L. Ed. 2d 686 (April 30, 2007). Beshers v. Harrison, 495 F.3d 1260 (11th Cir. 2007):
The Supreme Court recognized in Scott v. Harris, …, that this typically means adopting the plaintiff’s version of facts in a qualified immunity case. Nonetheless, in this case, as in Harris, we have the benefit of viewing two videotapes from the patrol cars involved in the pursuit. Thus, to the extent Appellant’s version of the facts is clearly contradicted by the videotapes, such that no reasonable jury could believe it, we do not adopt his factual allegations. Id.
This appeal did not decide a search issue, because the defendant accepted for appeal the trial court’s conclusion that he lacked an expectation of privacy in the contraband. Defendant was involved in receiving a shipment of twenty acetylene tanks which were shipped from El Paso to New Jersey. Undercover DEA officers received the tanks, inspected them, and then flew them to New Jersey rather than drive them, then set up sophisticated surveillance on the receiving end when the drugs were delivered. The issue on appeal was a trial error, which was rejected. The case is at least interesting for the lengths the DEA went to accomplish this bust. United States v. Cugno, 255 Fed. Appx. 5 (5th Cir. 2007)* (unpublished). The introductory paragraph:
On January 28, 2004, Drug Enforcement Agency (“DEA”) Special Agent Daktor Holguin (“Holguin”), posing undercover as a tractor trailer driver, had several telephone conversations with Alejandro Garcia-Lozada (“GarciaLozado”), in which Holguin agreed to pick up twenty acetylene tanks filled with marijuana and transport them to New York. The next day, at Garcia-Lozada’s direction, Holguin met Cesar Trevizo (“Trevizo”) at a convenience store and accompanied him to a warehouse. At the warehouse, Holguin met Omar and Cesar Calvillo (the “Calvillo brothers”), who helped Holguin load the twenty tanks into his tractor trailer. The tanks were between four and five feet tall and black, and they resembled large oxygen tanks. Holguin transported the tanks to the DEA’s El Paso field division office.
Court finds consent was voluntary based on a credibility determination that the officers were more believable on the validity of consent than the defendant and his wife who consented to the search. United States v. Foster, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 58963 (E.D. Ark. August 10, 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.
