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Full-Text Articles in Law
"You Crossed The Fog Line!"—Kansas, Pretext, And The Fourth Amendment, Melanie D. Wilson
"You Crossed The Fog Line!"—Kansas, Pretext, And The Fourth Amendment, Melanie D. Wilson
Scholarly Articles
In Whren, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned pretextual traffic stops. In practice the holding of Whren condones police investigations that target certain suspect classes of people, like Hispanics, for increased police scrutiny. In permitting pretextual stops, the Court ignored the risk that such practices will encourage police to distort the truth, overlooked the cost of under-enforcement of the laws, and ignored the consequences to the criminal justice system of race and ethnicity based discrimination.
Kansas law exacerbates these risks by making fog-line stops a model for protecting ulterior motives from a sifting judicial inquiry. In Kansas, it makes …
An Exclusionary Rule For Police Lies, Melanie D. Wilson
An Exclusionary Rule For Police Lies, Melanie D. Wilson
Scholarly Articles
Our legal system treats the police as if they are impartial fact gatherers, trained and motivated to gather facts both for and against guilt, rather than biased advocates attempting to disprove innocence, which is the reality. Because of its partiality in favor of officers, the criminal justice system lacks the appropriate structure to expose and effectively deter police lies, which distort the truth about criminal or unconstitutional conduct.
This Article, presented in three parts, argues that the current system should be changed to provide the structure necessary to promote honest police work. Specifically, it urges a modification to the exclusionary …