Not TOO illegal detention led to defendant having wants and warrants run which led to an arrest warrant being found and a search incident led to drugs; the seizure was not so illegal that the detention should be suppressed
An officer was talking to two people in a breezeway, and defendant happened by. The officer asked him for his identification without justification and ran wants and warrants on him, finding a warrant. A search incident followed and drugs were found. The stop was illegal but not flagrantly illegal. Thus, the existence of the arrest warrant was an independent intervening circumstance that dissipates the taint of the initial illegal stop vis-a-vis the evidence discovered as a consequence of a search incident to the execution of the arrest warrant. Birch v. Commonwealth, 203 S.W.3d 156 (Ky. App. March 17, 2006). Comment: So, police can just stop people to check their IDs to see if there are warrants on them as long as they don’t keep them too long? What is wrong with this picture?
Search of house for key to lock door after defendant was arrested for a DV complaint exceeded defendant’s consent to search. He had a key on his person and he told the officers where to look for a key inside, but they searched drawers contrary to the consent and found guns, which he was charged with. They never bothered to take the key from his person to lock the door. The search was illegal. Commonwealth v. Thomas, 67 Mass. App. Ct. 738, 856 N.E.2d 892 (November 15, 2006).
Excessively tight handcuffing that injured plaintiff stated a claim against the officer that did it and the officers plaintiff complained to who did nothing. Pheneger v. City of Lima, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 82902 (N.D. Ohio November 14, 2006):
Plaintiff alleges the officers used excessive force when putting on the handcuffs. Plaintiff further alleges the officers failed to do anything after plaintiff told them that the handcuffs were causing severe pain and swelling to her wrists. Plaintiff states that on removal of the handcuffs her hands were swollen to twice their normal size and red marks and bruising were evident where the handcuffs had been. Plaintiff alleges that she later required surgery and other medical care as a result of the injuries inflicted on her by the excessively tight handcuffs.
Plaintiff asserts a Fourth Amendment excessive force claim against the officer who applied the handcuffs and the other officers present. With regard to her claims against those other officers, the Sixth Circuit has held that a police officer who fails to act to prevent the use of excessive force may be held liable when “(1) the officer observed or had reason to know that excessive force would be or was being used, and (2) the officer had both the opportunity and the means to prevent the harm from occurring.” Smoak v. Hall, 460 F.3d 768, 784 (6th Cir. 2006) (citing Turner v. Scott, 119 F.3d 425, 429 (6th Cir. 1977)); see also Barton v. Norrod, 106 F.3d 1289, 1299 (6th Cir. 1997) (holding that an officer present where other officers are violating a person’s civil rights may have a duty to intervene).
Georgia v. Randolph applies to objecting resident and not one who consents. Defendant consented. United States v. Wilson, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 82737 (D. Neb. November 8, 2006).*
General motion to suppress that did not address the sworn affidavit already in the case file was insufficient to even warrant granting a hearing in N.Y. under CPL 710.60(1). People v Long, 2006 NY Slip Op 8198, 2006 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 13447 (2d Dept. November 14, 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.
