Defendant might not have standing but there was probable cause, so standing doesn’t have to be decided. Probable cause for the search warrant for defendant’s cell phone was predicated on his social media postings of him holding firearms, and they were found on the phone. United States v. Brown, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 111884 (N.D. Ind. July 19, 2017).
“It is undisputed that Powell threw the firearm out of the moving vehicle before he abandoned the car and ran into the woods. The law is clear that abandoned property is not subject to a Fourth Amendment challenge.” United States v. Webb, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 112289 (M.D. Ala. June 28, 2017).*
Months of historical CSLI, rather than just three day’s worth, was properly acquired by the government to show defendant’s connections to the property at issue. The third party doctrine provides defendant no relief [yet]. United States v. Serrano, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 112399 (S.D. N.Y. July 18, 2017).
Defendant was a mere passenger, and he has no standing to challenge the search of the car, despite his claiming a possessory interest in the firearm found inside. United States v. Taylor, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 111895 (E.D. Wis. July 19, 2017).*
Defendant’s 2255 Franks IAC claim fails for not showing what the false statements were and how probable cause was undermined. United States v. Johnson, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 112806 (D. Md. July 20, 2017).
Defendant’s moving his hands around in a vehicle prior to getting out supported a frisk. United States v. Davis, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 112912 (S.D. W.Va. July 20, 2017).*
There were stationary bugs that recorded conversations, and the government has declined to use them at trial after much litigation. Still, there is “a heap of incriminating evidence” derived from all kinds of sources, and the court won’t suppress all that was legally obtained under its supervisory power. Defendants sought to suppress everything from that date on, but they can’t show a cause in fact that anything else derived from them. United States v. Giraudo, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 111757 (N.D. Cal. July 18, 2017): Continue reading →
The time limit for the search to occur in the warrant is for the place to be searched. When computers are seized under the warrant to be searched elsewhere, they are not subject to that time limit. United States v. Boker, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 111320 (W.D. N.C. July 18, 2017).
The district court concluded defendant wasn’t in custody in his own car for an interview with two postal inspectors that resulted in his arrest. Whether Miranda warnings were given before the recording started, a fact in dispute, isn’t even dispositive. United States v. Vanderbeck, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 13168 (3d Cir. July 21, 2017).*
Defendant was in a “high crime” area around an apartment complex, and he was nervous when accosted by a law enforcement officer, something normal. This just wasn’t enough to be reasonable suspicion. United States v. Alvin, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 12972 (3d Cir. July 19, 2017).
The court credits that consent was given by defendant because officers entered with a key and he voluntarily turned it over. United States v. Hernandez-Gonzalez, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 109928 (S.D. Fla. July 6, 2017).*
Time and proximity are important in the reasonable suspicion calculus. The closer in time with proximity to the scene of a crime, the more likely the suspect is involved in the suspected or already occurred criminal activity. Here, however, two alleged lookouts to two robberies was not enough. “Looking at the totality of the circumstances, the lookouts, which boiled down to two black men in a white car, at high noon on a weekday, in downtown D.C., were simply insufficient to generate any particularized suspicion that the appellants here were the suspects being sought in connection with the Prince and Whitaker robberies.” Armstrong v. United States, 2017 D.C. App. LEXIS 198 (July 20, 2017).
Defendant’s property was searched by two children and their mother, clearly private actors. United States v. Jordan, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 13152 (4th Cir. July 21, 2017).*
Defendant moves to suppress the search of his business because he claimed his consent was coerced. His specific claims of coercion are belied by the security video from the business. Denied. United States v. Hunt-Irving, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 108253 (E.D. Pa. July 12, 2017).
Defendant can’t move to suppress his co-defendant’s stop when he wasn’t there. United States v. Garcia, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 188501 (D. Minn. May 9, 2016).*
The government showed probable cause for a search warrant for defendant’s cell phones. United States v. Cruz, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 188511 (D. Minn. May 9, 2016).*
The specific triggering event for this anticipatory warrant was handing the package to defendant, but that did not happen. The police entered anyway and seized. The Sixth Circuit recognizes that the triggering event has to be considered in a common sense fashion. United States v. Miggins, 302 F.3d 384, 395 (6th Cir. 2002); United States v. Penney, 576 F.3d 297, 310-11 (6th Cir. 2009). Those cases are distinguishable here because the factual differences between what happened and the triggering event were minor. Here they are not. Finally, the good faith exception did not apply on these facts. In addition, defendant undertook a burden to show that the FedEx employee searching his package was seeking to aid law enforcement, but he failed in that burden. United States v. Perkins, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 109865 (E.D. Tenn. July 5, 2017), overruling in part 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 110512 (E.D. Tenn. April 20, 2017): Continue reading →
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't."
—Me
“I still learn something new every day.”
—Pete Townshend, The Who 50th Anniversary Tour, "The Who Live at Hyde Park" (Showtime 2015)
"I can't talk about my singing. I'm inside it. How can you describe something you're inside of?"
—Janis Joplin
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"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
"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]
“You know, most men would get discouraged by
now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!”
---Pepé Le Pew
"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)
