The case against the City of Los Angeles for rousting “skid row” denizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment is extended. It expired after three years. The District Court finds that, applying the summary judgment standard, to the factual allegations of continued violations of the original stipulated injunction, the plaintiffs have pled enough to go to trial. Fitzgerald v. City of Los Angeles, 485 F. Supp. 2d 1137 (C.D. Cal. 2007):
The settlement agreement constituted a stipulation to a permanent injunction as follows:
1. Officers will not conduct detentions or “Terry” stops without reasonable suspicion that a person is involved in criminal activity or has committed a crime or violated parole or probation. However, officers may continue to engage in consensual encounters with persons, parolees, probationers, or others residing in or otherwise present in the “Skid Row” area of Los Angeles.
2. Officers will not search the persons and/or possessions of those individuals stopped on the public streets and sidewalks of the “Skid Row” area of Los Angeles without probable cause and/or reasonable suspicion that the person has committed a crime or violated parole or probation. However, nothing shall prohibit officers from performing “pat-down” searches in accordance with the law.
3. Officers will not search residences of persons residing or otherwise present in the “Skid Row” area of Los Angeles except with a valid warrant, other legal justification, or with reasonable suspicion that they are on parole or probation and have violated the terms of their parole or probation.
“It matters not whether the defendant is arrested eventually for a crime other than that for which probable cause existed initially. All that matters is — as here — probable cause to arrest existed at the time the search was initiated.” United States v. Langel, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 30562 (D. Colo. April 25, 2007).
To show a private actor acted with a public actor under § 1983, it is required to allege that they had a common purpose to violate plaintiff’s constitutional rights. Here, plaintiff’s property was entered by a private process server to levy on a judgment assisted by a law enforcement officer. The process server was related to the plaintiff. The allegations of the complaint were insufficient. Rowell v. King, 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 9576 (10th Cir. April 25, 2007)* (unpublished).
Nolle pros of state case overcomes Heck bar. Contorno v. McCann, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 30776 (N.D. Ill. April 25, 2007):
As noted, the unlawful possession of alcohol and obstruction charges were dismissed pursuant to a nolle prosequi, which is not a final disposition; rather it “is a procedure which restores the matter to the same state which existed before the Government initiated the prosecution.” Id. at 557 (citation omitted). As such, the court denies the McCann Defendants’ motion to dismiss these claims based on Heck.
Defendant’s late filing of a motion to withdraw his guilty plea was denied, and he waived his motion to suppress which was not filed, even though he claimed the police lied in his police reports. United States v. Keating, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 30516 (E.D. Mo. April 25, 2007).*
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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.”
"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.
