Even if information illegally obtained from an illegal search was removed from the affidavit for the search warrant, there still would be probable cause for the warrant. United States v. Lawrence, 205 Fed. Appx. 786 (11th Cir. 2006)* (unpublished). The same result occured in Ohio on November 9th. State v. Newell, 2006 Ohio 5980, 2006 Ohio App. LEXIS 5903 (2d Dist. November 9, 2006) (emergency entry in response to a shooting in progress; police re-entered after situation was resolved, and that was purged from the affidavit still leaving PC).
On November 4th there is a post about Microsoft creating software that permits tracing back webcasts of child porn that was used in Ontario to rescue a child from a live production. Related to that, and just before that article was published, there was an opinion from the District of Idaho involving a live transmission of child porn from Edmonton to Idaho which the police became aware of, and they obtained a search warrant in Idaho. United States v. Banks, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 82368 (D. Idaho October 27, 2006). The issue here was particularity: When the affidavit for the search warrant states the crime under investigation, the fact parts of the material sought do not specify a crime within them does not matter because it relates back to the overall possible crime mentioned in the affidavit:
By contrast, in this case, it is quite clear from the face of the warrant that the search related to criminal possession, production and/or transportation of child pornography and the visual depiction of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct. As defendant himself observes, the ten sections to which he does not object contain explicit and repeated mention of this specific criminal conduct. (Reply at 5.) Defendant’s hyper-technical reading of the cases above runs afoul of Supreme Court authroity, which has stated clearly that courts are to read a “warrant in a common sense fashion.” Cardwell, 680 F.2d at 77 (citing United States v. Ventresca, 380 U.S. 102 (1965)); Andresen v. Maryland, 427 U.S. 463, 479-482 (1976) (rejecting a particularity challenge because the relationship between the items to be seized and the alleged criminal conduct was “clear from the context”). In this instance, there is a clear, commonsense, logical nexus between the items described in those six categories and the crimes listed elsewhere throughout in the warrant. Indeed, many of the disputed categories authorize seizure of items which are directly necessary for adequately processing and searching items listed in the undisputed categories. Therefore, the May 21, 2005, warrant has given a more than adequate “indication of the alleged crime to which the seized [items] pertained.” Kow, 58 F.3d at 427.
Voluntariness of Miranda warning and consent to search was supported by the record. People v Knudsen, 2006 NY Slip Op 8149, 2006 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 13361 (2d Dept. November 8, 2006).*
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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.
