Postings late today due to trial preparation. They will be late tomorrow because of the trial.
The defendant exited an interstate highway at a drug checkpoint ruse, and an officer followed him. His explanations for looking for a gas station and nervousness justified detention for a dog sniff. The defendant rejected consent to search, but that was mentioned only in passing. The District Court’s grant of suppression was reversed. United States v. Carpenter, 462 F.3d 981 (8th Cir. September 18, 2006). Comment: This is really thin on the finding of reasonable suspicion. It falls under the “government virtually always wins in the Eighth Circuit” local unwritten rule.
The Tenth Circuit finds reasonable suspicion and a dispatching error made an hour long detention for a drug dog reasonable. United States v. Douglas, 195 Fed. Appx. 780 (10th Cir. September 15, 2006)* (unpublished).
The fact defendant was under the influence of marijuana during a knock and talk encounter over a possible stolen car at a motel did not make his consent involuntary. United States v. Smith, 199 Fed. Appx. 759 (11th Cir. September 15, 2006)* (unpublished).
Detailed affidavit in homicide case showed PC on the totality to believe that DNA, a rape kit, and defendant’s boots would link him to a homicide. Franks issue also failed for lack of any proof that the officer made a false or reckless statement. State v. Cooke, 2006 Del. Super. LEXIS 356 (September 8, 2006).*
Reasonable suspicion was shown, in part, by defendant and passenger lying about their criminal history, nervousness, and defendant reaching up and putting a Bible on the dash as the officer walked up, aside from otherwise challenging behavior. Manyou v. State, 2006 Tex. App. LEXIS 8188 (Tex. App. – Dallas September 18, 2006):
Brewer asked each occupant of the vehicle if he had ever been arrested, and each replied he had not. Brewer then returned to his patrol vehicle to run a routine computer check on both occupants. The computer check revealed that appellant did, in fact, have a criminal history, including a conviction for marijuana trafficking. The computer check on the passenger, Reid, was negative for arrests.
In light of appellant’s false statement about his criminal history and the demeanor of the two men, Brewer called for a back up unit. Brewer formed a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity based on the nervousness of both occupants, as evidenced by the shaking of their hands and the throbbing of their carotid arteries, failing to make eye contact, agitation when asked to get out of the vehicle, the story about being Christian rock promoters, and appellant’s picking up the Bible and placing it on the dash. Therefore, Brewer further detained the occupants. Appellant was “parked approximately six inches from the fog line.” For safety reasons, Brewer asked both men to get out of the car and away from the traffic. When Brewer asked appellant to get out of the vehicle, appellant became angry and belligerent and accused Brewer of picking on him and trying to put somebody in jail. Brewer believed he was dealing with a dangerous and agitated suspect; however, appellant did cooperate. Brewer detained appellant until DPS cover officers Peterson and Armstrong arrived. Brewer’s reasonable suspicion was formed from the totality of the complete circumstances of the stop.
"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.
