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The Quantum Of Suspicion Needed For An Exigent Circumstances Search, Kit Kinports
The Quantum Of Suspicion Needed For An Exigent Circumstances Search, Kit Kinports
Kit Kinports
For decades, the United States Supreme Court opinions articulating the standard of exigency necessary to trigger the exigent circumstances exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement have been maddeningly opaque and confusing. Some cases require probable cause, others call for reasonable suspicion, and still others use undefined and unhelpful terms such as "reasonable to believe" in describing how exigent the situation must be to permit the police to proceed without a warrant. Nor surprisingly, the conflicting signals coming from the Supreme Court have led to disagreement in the lower courts.
To resolve this conflict and provide guidance to law enforcement …
Heien'S Mistake Of Law, Kit Kinports
Heien'S Mistake Of Law, Kit Kinports
Kit Kinports
The Supreme Court has been whittling away at the Fourth Amendment for decades. The Court's 2014 ruling in Heien v. North Carolina allowing the police to make a traffic stop based on a reasonable mistake of law generated little controversy among the Justices and escaped largely unnoticed by the press-perhaps because yet another Supreme Court decision reading the Fourth Amendment narrowly is not especially noteworthy or because the opinion's cursory and overly simplistic analysis equating law enforcement's reasonable mistakes of fact and law minimized the significance of the Court's decision. But the temptation to dismiss Heien as just another small …
The Supreme Court's Quiet Expansion Of Qualified Immunity, Kit Kinports
The Supreme Court's Quiet Expansion Of Qualified Immunity, Kit Kinports
Kit Kinports
This Essay discusses the Supreme Court’s tendency in recent opinions to covertly expand the reach of the qualified immunity defense available to public officials in § 1983 civil rights suits. In particular, the Essay points out that the Court, often in per curiam rulings, has described qualified immunity in increasingly broad terms and has qualified and retreated from its precedents, without offering any explanation or even acknowledging that it is deviating from past practice.In making this claim, I focus on three specific issues: the manner in which the Court characterizes the standard governing the qualified immunity defense; the question whether …