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- CA7: False confession claim is a 4A not 14A claim
- CA5: RS required of weapons or contraband for search of vagina
- CA4: Affidavit for SW provided neither nexus nor timing and even failed GFE
- CA9: Ptfs didn’t meet burden of showing administrative subpoena was 4A violation or in bad faith
- CA2: No 4A requirement for SWs being issued with notice to target
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ABA Journal Web 100, Best Law Blogs (2015-17) (then discontinued)
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by John Wesley Hall
Criminal Defense Lawyer and
Search and seizure law consultant
Little Rock, Arkansas
Contact: forhall @ aol.com
Search and Seizure (6th ed. 2025)
www.johnwesleyhall.com -
© 2003-26,
online since Feb. 24, 2003 Approx. 600,000 visits (non-robot) since 2012 Approx. 50,000 posts since 2003 (29,000 on WordPress as of 12/31/25) -
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Fourth Amendment cases, citations, and links -
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Congressional Research Service:
--Electronic Communications Privacy Act (2012)
--Overview of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (2012)
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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)
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“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.
Website design by Wally Waller, Colorado Springs. 
Search Results for: dog
GA: REP against dog sniff at apartment door in gated complex where management let police in
A dog sniff at defendant’s apartment door seams was unreasonable, despite it being in a common area of a gated apartment building [where the general public wasn’t allowed, but management let the police in]. State v. West, 2026 Ga. App. … Continue reading
KY: Def needs to make a record on how long the drug dog extended the stop under Rodriguez
The drug dog arrived while the traffic tickets were still being written. All the record shows is that. The record doesn’t “reveal how much time elapsed between the canine’s arrival and it alerting to the odor of unlawful drugs emanating … Continue reading
E.D.Ky.: Fact drug dog wasn’t trained on fentanyl wasn’t defect when he alerted on it and cocaine
The drug dog wasn’t trained on fentanyl but alerted on it. It was trained on cocaine and did alert on it. That doesn’t make the dog unreliable. After probable cause developed, using the key fob to open the car wasn’t … Continue reading
SCOTUSBlog: The dog sniff at the center of a Supreme Court petition
SCOTUSBlog: The dog sniff at the center of a Supreme Court petition by Kelsey Dallas:
LA1: Accelerant detection dog’s alert supported PC despite negative lab test
The fact the accelerant detection dog alerted supports probable cause despite later negative lab tests. State v. Hale, 2025 La. App. LEXIS 1749 (La. App. 1 Cir Sep. 19, 2025). Officers did not violate curtilage by observing shell casings in … Continue reading
ID: Drug dog’s nose touching a car door handle was not a search
Drug dog’s nose touching a car door handle was not a search. State v. Pendleton, 2025 Ida. App. LEXIS 38 (Aug. 29, 2025). The defendant officer violated no reasonable expectation of privacy by accessing plaintiff’s public Facebook posts. Dicks v. … Continue reading
IN: Drug dog’s instinctive entry into car is reasonable, but this was facilitated by the officer and wasn’t
Indiana adopts the drug dog rule that “a K9’s instinctive entry into a vehicle does not implicate the Fourth Amendment so long as it is not directed, encouraged, or facilitated by officers.” This one was, and without probable cause, and … Continue reading
CA6: Harris drug dog reliability case only applies to warrantless searches
The Harris drug dog reliability case applies only to warrantless searches. Here, Postal Inspectors used a drug dog on a suspicious package at the Cleveland sorting center, and then got warrant when the dog alerted. Harris is not an exception … Continue reading
VA: Dog repeatedly jumping onto the vehicle during the dog sniff was a search
The drug-sniffing dog’s repeatedly jumping onto and placing paws on a vehicle during a drug sniff constitutes a physical trespass for the purpose of obtaining information, and therefore qualifies as a search under the Fourth Amendment. Commonwealth v. Wiggins, 2025 … Continue reading
CA4: Dog sniff at apt. door here violated no REP
A dog sniff at defendant’s apartment door in a multi-unit complex didn’t violate any reasonable expectation of privacy. (Two unpublished cases in this circuit said that; this one’s published.) United States v. Johnson, 2025 U.S. App. LEXIS 19648 (4th Cir. … Continue reading
S.D.N.Y.: Abandoning three large dogs to flee is more than just “mere refusal to cooperate”
“At the very least, leaving three large dogs effectively unrestrained in a public place to flee from law enforcement certainly amounts to more than the ‘mere refusal to cooperate’ that is protected by the Fourth Amendment. Cf. [Wardlow, 528 U.S. … Continue reading
IA: Video shows officers didn’t slow walk traffic stop for dog sniff
On de novo review, the officers didn’t slow walk the traffic citation to get more time to do the dog sniff. State v. Cox, 2025 Iowa App. LEXIS 567 (July 2, 2025)*:
GA: Dog sniff during the first part of the stop while computer checks going on didn’t prolong it
“[T]he trial court was entitled to find that the questioning and free-air dog sniff were done concurrently with other tasks related to the mission of the traffic stop and therefore did not impermissibly prolong the stop.” Avant v. State, 2025 … Continue reading
N.D.Fla.: Police going to backyard with a drug dog violated curtilage
Officers went into defendant’s backyard with a drug dog and that unreasonably invaded the curtilage. United States v. Holland, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 102751 (N.D. Fla. May 30, 2025):
OH1: Drug dog’s instinctive jump into car window wasn’t unreasonable
The drug dog’s instinctive jump into the window of defendant’s car wasn’t initiated by the handler, so it wasn’t unreasonable. State v. Barton, 2025-Ohio-1904 (1st Dist. May 28, 2025) (2-1). “As already discussed, Parr had reason to believe Defendant was … Continue reading
techdirt: Enter The Fourth Amendment, Yet One More Reason DOGE Is Such A Constitutional Nightmare
techdirt: Enter The Fourth Amendment, Yet One More Reason DOGE Is Such A Constitutional Nightmare by Cathy Gellis:
CA8: Dog’s instinctive head in the car window wasn’t a trespass
The dog touching the car was instinctive and not handler directed. Therefore, it’s not a trespass. There’s some doubt in the existing rule in this circuit, but not here. United States v. Munoz, 2025 U.S. App. LEXIS 8808 (8th Cir. … Continue reading
GA: Dog sniff of car while citation being filled out did not extend stop; suppression reversed
While the stopping officer was filling out the citation, a second officer arrived. The dog sniff occurred while the citation was still being filled out, so it didn’t extend the stop. Grant of motion to suppress reversed. State v. Dean, … Continue reading
CA10: Siccing police dog on sleeping man wasn’t subject to QI
Siccing a police dog on a sleeping man not subject to qualified immunity. Luethje v. Kyle, 2025 U.S. App. LEXIS 6385 (10th Cir. Mar. 19, 2025). The CI’s information on a video showed his basis of knowledge and provided probable … Continue reading
IN: Greyhound bus subject to automobile exception because dog alerted on luggage compartment
If you’re riding a bus and drugs are found on one, are all subject to search. The answer can’t be yes, but it is here: Defendant was a passenger on a Greyhound bus on I-80. The bus crossed the centerline … Continue reading