An anonymous 911 call said that a meth lab was in a farm building. The caller hung up, and the police could not get the caller to answer the call back, and that was enough to justify the entry. United States v. Elder, 466 F.3d 1090 (7th Cir. November 1, 2006):
A 911 call led to the dispatch of two officers to a farm in Humbolt, Illinois. A caller had told the dispatcher “I think we got meth out here” and added that “suspicious” people were “flying like quails.” The caller hung up, and when the dispatcher called the originating number no one answered. One obvious possibility was that the caller had been injured. Officers saw lights and heard a TV within the farm house, but no one answered knocks on the front or rear doors. The door of a nearby outbuilding was open. (Whether it was open was disputed in the district court; the judge found that it was open and did not commit clear error in doing so.)
Looking through the doorway, the officers saw what appeared to be a laboratory. They entered in search of the caller and did not find him. But what they saw from outside (and both saw and smelled from inside) provided evidence against Elder, the property’s owner. The caller turned out to have been Elder’s father, who had not been abducted or injured — though the officers could not have known that without checking, because even if (as Elder maintains) they knew or should have known that the proprietors of the meth lab were fleeing during the 911 call, the officers could not have known whether they took a hostage (or a life) in the process, or whether some third party was refusing to acknowledge his or her presence, and what danger that person posed (or was in).
The entry into the outbuilding was reasonable, and a warrant was not essential to make it so. The officers acted sensibly in attempting to assure the caller’s safety. The fact that drug dealers often use guns and knives to protect their operations created a possibility that violence had been done, or that someone was still there and lying in wait. So considerations of safety — the caller’s and the officers’ — made a look-see prudent. See Brigham City v. Stuart, 126 S. Ct. 1943 (2006); Maryland v. Buie, 494 U.S. 325 (1990). Everything else followed from there, and the evidence was admissible against Elder. His argument that police cannot take steps to protect a caller’s safety unless they know the caller’s identity and “reliability” would require them to act unreasonably. Many 911 calls are brief, and anonymous, precisely because the speaker is at risk and must conceal the call. These persons are more rather than less in need of assistance.
Comment: My problem with this case is how it works so diabolically: An anonymous 911 caller cannot be reached, so, in a drug case, the police are justified in entering without a warrant because of the mere possibility that the caller was injured by the person he or she was calling about. So, can the police just not call the caller back but say they did and then use that as an excuse to enter? The point really is: if they did not call back but say they did, can the defense ever prove it? Unlikely.
Defendant was stopped for suspicion of transporting illegal aliens, and ICE officer got him out of the car and had him put his hands over his head. To the extent this was a Terry stop, the ICE officer had authority to do so under 8 C.F.R. § 287.8(b). The defendant failed to prove that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated, so he loses. United States v. Ambris-Sebastian, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 79343 (N.D. Fla. October 31, 2006). Comment: This is incredible: A warrantless arrest and the court holds that the defendant has the burden of proof? Wrong!
Consent was voluntary where the defendant came to the police station saying that he wanted to cooperate and his “life was an open book.” There was no indication that anything was coercive about the situation. United States v. P.A. Landers, Inc., 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 79256 (D. Mass. October 31, 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.
