911 caller who did not identify herself, but operator had address from 911 system, who described burglary in progress and who stayed on the telephone with 911 until the police arrived could be considered reliable. United States v. Long, 464 F.3d 569 (6th Cir. October 2, 2006):
We agree with the magistrate’s determination that the call was relatively reliable and relevant to the existence of reasonable suspicion to support the stop here. Although in some cases, police knowledge of an address from where an otherwise anonymous call is made might not be enough to render the call reliable, the reliability of this call is strongly supported by the fact that in addition to the dispatcher knowing the caller’s address, the police pulled up in front of the caller’s house while the 911 call was still ongoing. If the caller turned out to have been lying, the police could have confronted him immediately. Whether or not the authorities were aware of the caller’s name in this situation added little to the reliability determination under Gates.
Officer who came to house to talk to one individual there encountered the defendant and decided to patdown the defendant for weapons for safety reasons. Defendant said “no” and headed for the door, and he was stopped. The patdown was unlawful because the defendant was removing the alleged threat by attempting to leave. United States v. Ellis, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 70769 (D. Neb. September 26, 2006):
It is uncontroverted that Officer Watson did not ask Ellis to consent to a patdown search. Instead, Officer Watson simply announced his intention that he was going to search Ellis. Rather than acquiescing to Officer Watson’s demand, Ellis instead effectively just said “no,” stood up, and began to walk to the door to leave, an action which, if allowed to occur, would have removed any threat to the officers’ safety that a reasonable person would have felt Ellis represented.
Under the totality of the circumstances, the patdown search was not justified by any threats to the safety of the officers or of others nearby. Miller, not Ellis, was the only target of the officers’ investigation. Ellis was under no compulsion to answer the questions of the officers and was fully within his rights to go on his way. See Royer, 460 U.S. at 498. Therefore, the contraband that was discovered and the admission that was obtained from Ellis at the scene must be suppressed.
Having suppressed the contraband and the on-site admission, any further admissions at the police station are also suppressed as fruits of the Fourth Amendment violation. See United States v. Wong Sun, 371 U.S. 471, 487 (1963).
Identified citizen informant was entitled to more credit in PC determination in support of a search warrant. PC was shown on the totality of circumstances. United States v. Olivent, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 70689 (E.D. Tenn. July 7, 2006).*
Controlled buys corroborated informants. State v. Metzger, 2006 Ohio 5161, 2006 Ohio App. LEXIS 5100 (3d Dist. October 2, 2006).*
"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.
