Anticipatory warrant that authorized a search of only the place where the package was “accepted” for delivery, even though it was otherwise inspecific, was still valid. There was a specified triggering event, and the officers could not be sure where the package would end up. Anticipatory search warrants strike a proper balance between the need to search but not relying on exigent circumstances for a warrantless search. People v. Duoc Bui, 2008 Ill. App. LEXIS 216 (1st Dist. March 21, 2008), released for publication May 7, 2008 (not posted on court’s website as of this posting):
We believe that our holding strikes the appropriate balance between the purpose of the warrant requirement and the need for the judiciary to encourage the use of warrants and to recognize that anticipatory warrants meet important law enforcement needs. The purpose of the warrant requirement is to act as a check on police officers “engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime” by interposing a “neutral and detached magistrate” into the process. Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 14, 92 L. Ed. 436, 440, 68 S. Ct. 367, 369 (1948). Our holding in this case is consistent with this purpose because it encourages police to obtain an anticipatory warrant when they intercept a package containing narcotics and have reason to believe that the package will be brought and opened at a location other than listed on the delivery address. Our holding thereby ensures that a magistrate, and not a police officer, will ultimately determine if there is in fact probable cause to believe that the package will be brought to another location. To require the police to obtain a new warrant after defendant brought the package to his home and then opened it would create the possibility that police would lose track of the criminal and the contraband and would fail to take into account the speed and flexibility with which law enforcement is required to act when dealing with those who traffic in narcotics through the mail system. We recognize the concerns raised by defendant regarding the need to limit police discretion and the potential for police abuse created by general warrants. However, given the particular facts of this case, including the use of the electronic monitoring device inside the package and the information sworn to by Officer Bator regarding narcotics traffickers moving the package to another location, we simply do not believe that those concerns are implicated in this case such that we would be required to find the warrant unconstitutional.
. . .
The triggering condition of the warrant was acceptance of the package at the nail salon or “any other location” in the State of Illinois. Therefore, pursuant to Grubbs, there must have been probable cause to believe that the package would be accepted at a location other than the nail salon. We do not read Grubbs to require police to know every possible location where the package could be brought and accepted, including, as defendant suggests, the house on Campbell Street. To adopt such an interpretation would significantly hinder the effectiveness of an anticipatory warrant where narcotics traffickers could simply ship a package containing narcotics to one location and then bring it to another place where it could be safely opened. We decline to do so and instead conclude that, to satisfy the fourth amendment, there must have been probable cause to believe that the package would be accepted at a location other than the delivery address.
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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.
