Law Commons^™

Criminal Procedure Decisions From The October 2006 Term, Susan N. Herman

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Probable Cause And Reasonable Suspicion: Totality Tests Or Rigid Rules?, Kit Kinports

Journal Articles

This piece argues that the Supreme Court's April 2014 decision in Navarette v. Calfornia, like last Term's opinion in Florida v. Harris, deviates from longstanding Supreme Court precedent treating probable cause and reasonable suspicion as totality-of-the-circumstances tests. Instead, these two recent rulings essentially rely on rigid rules to define probable cause and reasonable suspicion. The article criticizes the Court for selectively endorsing bright-line tests that favor the prosecution, and argues that both decisions generate rules that oversimplify and therefore tend to be overinclusive.

Recent Decision Note, Thomas L. Shaffer

Thomas L. Shaffer

No abstract provided.

United States V. Ross: Search And Seizure Made Simple, Donald L. Dalton

Pepperdine Law Review

The United States Supreme Court in United States v. Ross vastly simplified the process of searching closed containers found in an automobile during a lawful Carroll search yet, at the same time, placed in question the importance of the search warrant in the scheme of fourth amendment jurisprudence by equating the policeman's determination of probable cause with that of the magistrate.

Debate: The Constitutionality Of Stop-And-Frisk In New York City, David Rudovsky, Lawrence Rosenthal

All Faculty Scholarship

Stop-and-frisk, a crime prevention tactic that allows a police officer to stop a person based on “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity and frisk based on reasonable suspicion that the person is armed and dangerous, has been a contentious police practice since first approved by the Supreme Court in 1968. In Floyd v. City of New York, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that New York City’s stop-and-frisk practices violate both the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. Professors David Rudovsky and Lawrence Rosenthal debate the constitutionality of stop-and-frisk in New York City in light of …

"What Hath Hiibel Wrought?": The Constitutionality Of Compelled Self-Identification, Robert A. Hull

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Camreta And Al-Kidd: The Supreme Court, The Fourth Amendment, And Witnesses, Kit Kinports

Journal Articles

Although few noticed the link between them, two Supreme Court cases decided in the same week last Term, Ashcroft v. al-Kidd and Camreta v. Greene, both involved the Fourth Amendment implications of detaining witnesses to a crime. Al-Kidd, an American citizen, was arrested under the federal material witness statute in connection with an investigation into terrorist activities, and Greene, a nine-year-old suspected victim of child abuse, was seized and interrogated at school by two state officials. The opinions issued in the two cases did little to resolve the constitutional issues that arise in witness detention cases, and in fact …

Predictive Policing And Reasonable Suspicion, Andrew Ferguson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Predictive policing is a new law enforcement strategy to reduce crime by predicting criminal activity before it happens. Using sophisticated computer algorithms to forecast future events from past crime patterns, predictive policing has become the centerpiece of a new smart-policing strategy in several major cities. The initial results have been strikingly successful in reducing crime.This article addresses the Fourth Amendment consequences of this police innovation, analyzing the effect of predictive policing on the concept of reasonable suspicion. This article examines predictive policing in the context of the larger constitutional framework of “prediction” and the Fourth Amendment. Many aspects of current …

The Supreme Court And Its Purported Preference For Search Warrants, Robert M. Bloom

Robert M. Bloom

No abstract provided.

Disentangling Administrative Searches, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

Everyone who has been screened at an international border, scanned by an airport metal detector, or drug tested for public employment has been subjected to an administrative search. Since September 11th, the government has increasingly invoked the administrative search exception to justify more checkpoints, unprecedented subway searches, and extensive wiretaps. As science and technology advance, the frequency and scope of administrative searches will only expand. Formulating the boundaries and requirements of administrative search doctrine is therefore a matter of great importance. Yet the rules governing administrative searches are notoriously unclear. This Article seeks to refocus attention on administrative searches and …

Probabilities In Probable Cause And Beyond: Statistical Versus Concrete Harms, Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Probability, Probable Cause, And The Law Of Unintended Consequences, Lawrence Rosenthal

Lawrence Rosenthal

This brief essay responds to Max Minzer's article "Putting Probability Back into Probable Cause." The essay supports Professor Minzer's proposal for the use of empirical evidence of the success of a given investigating officer or investigative technique in assessing the existence of probable cause to search or seize, but offers a caveat. If an officer's "hit rate" becomes central to Fourth Amendment analysis, there is a serious danger of overdeterrence which, in turn, could lead to a dangerous escalation in violent crime. The essay offers some proposals for minimizing the risk of overdeterrence in an empirically-based regime of probable cause.

Section 1983 Civil Rights Litigation From The October 2006 Term, Martin Schwartz

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

In The Trenches: Searches And The Misunderstood Common-Law History Of Suspicion And Probable Cause, Fabio Arcila

Scholarly Works

A detailed analysis of the common law during the Framers’ era, and of how it reflected the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions, shows that many judges believed they could issue search warrants without independently assessing the adequacy of probable cause, and that this view persisted even after the Fourth Amendment became effective. This conclusion challenges the leading originalist account of the Fourth Amendment, which Professor Thomas Davies published in the Michigan Law Review in 1999.

Learned treatises in particular, and to a lesser extent a few case decisions, had articulated a judicial duty to monitor probable cause. But it is a mistake …

Grand Jury Discretion And Constitutional Design, Roger Fairfax

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The grand jury possesses an unqualified power to decline to indict - despite probable cause that alleged criminal conduct has occurred. A grand jury might exercise this power, for example, to disagree with the wisdom of a criminal law or its application to a particular defendant. A grand jury might also use its discretionary power to send a message of disapproval regarding biased or unwise prosecutorial decisions or inefficient allocation of law enforcement resources in the community. This ability to exercise discretion on bases beyond the sufficiency of the evidence has been characterized pejoratively as grand jury nullification. The dominant …

Standing Room Only: Why Fourth Amendment Exclusion And Standing Can No Longer Logically Coexist, Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Searches & The Misunderstood History Of Suspicion & Probable Cause: Part One, Fabio Arcila

ExpressO

This article, the first of a two-part series, argues that during the Framers’ era many if not most judges believed they could issue search warrants without independently assessing the adequacy of probable cause, and that this view persisted even after the Fourth Amendment became effective. This argument challenges the leading originalist account of the Fourth Amendment, which Professor Thomas Davies published in the Michigan Law Review in 1999.

The focus in this first article is upon an analysis of the common law and how it reflected the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions. Learned treatises in particular, and to a lesser extent a …

The Liberal Assault On The Fourth Amendment, Christopher Slobogin

ExpressO

The Liberal Assault on the Fourth Amendment Christopher Slobogin As construed by the Supreme Court, the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement regulates overt, non-regulatory government searches of homes, cars, and personal effects–-and virtually nothing else. This essay is primarily about how we got to this point. It is fashionable to place much of the blame for today’s law on the Warren Court’s adoption of the malleable expectation of privacy concept as the core value protected by the Fourth Amendment. But this diagnosis fails to explain why even the more liberal justices have often gone along with many of the privacy-diminishing holdings …

Searches And The Misunderstood History Of Suspicion And Probable Cause: Part One, Fabio Arcila

ExpressO

This article, the first of a two-part series, argues that during the Framers’ era many if not most judges believed they could issue search warrants without independently assessing the adequacy of probable cause, and that this view persisted even after the Fourth Amendment became effective. This argument challenges the leading originalist account of the Fourth Amendment, which Professor Thomas Davies published in the Michigan Law Review in 1999.

The focus in this first article is upon an analysis of the common law and how it reflected the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions. Learned treatises in particular, and to a lesser extent a …

Detector Dogs And Probable Cause, Richard E. Myers

ExpressO

In this Article, Professor Myers argues that an alert, even by a well-trained dog with an excellent track record in the field, cannot by itself constitute probable cause to search. By using a Bayesian analysis of the value of dog alerts, he demonstrates that additional evidence is needed before probable cause exists. He shows why police won’t make changes to their use of dogs without outside prodding, and explores who might do so. The article makes some suggestions that, if adopted, will improve the courts’ approach to detector dog technologies, allowing them to better strike the balance between the competing …

Declining To State A Name In Consideration Of The Fifth Amendment's Self-Incrimination Clause And Law Enforcement Databases After Hiibel, Joseph R. Ashby

Michigan Law Review

In response to a report of an argument on a public sidewalk, a police officer approaches two people standing in the vicinity of the reported dispute. The officer requests that each person provide her name so the officer can run the names through databases to which the police department subscribes. After searching each name through various databases, the officer might discover that one of the individuals made several purchases of cold medicine containing pseudoephedrine and that the other just received a license from the State to procure certain hazardous chemicals. These two people might be in the early stages of …

The Reasonable Policeman: Police Intent In Criminal Procedure, Craig M. Bradley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The "Routine Traffic Stop" From Start To Finish: Too Much "Routine," Not Enough Fourth Amendment, Wayne R. Lafave

Michigan Law Review

Yale Kamisar, about which I have said too much elsewhere in this issue of the Review, could rightly be called "Mr. Confessions," for he has not only authored books and a host of articles on the subject of police interrogation, but for years has been printing Miranda cards in his basement and selling them to police departments all across the nation. Moreover, he may be the only law professor in the country who has both personally coerced a confession and had a confession coerced out of him. As Kamisar has himself noted, my own "intellectual sandbox" has been the …

The Coherence Of Orthodox Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence, Samuel C. Rickless

ExpressO

In the legal academy it is widely believed that the U.S. Supreme Court's orthodox (post-Katz, pre-Houghton) fourth amendment jurisprudence is theoretically incoherent. In particular, the Court has been criticized (on doctrinal and textual grounds) for accepting (i) Justice Harlan's definition of a "search" as an infringement of a subjective expectation of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable, (ii) the Warrant Requirement and Probable Cause Requirement (according to which searches and seizures without a warrant or probable cause are presumptively unreasonable), and (iii) the Exclusionary Rule (according to which any evidence obtained in violation of a person’s fourth …

I Couldn't Wait To Argue, Timothy Coates

The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process

No abstract provided.

The Middle Class Fourth Amendment, Craig M. Bradley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

We Can Do This The Easy Way Or The Hard Way: The Use Of Deceit To Induce Consent Searches, Rebecca Strauss

Michigan Law Review

In October of 1995, Aaron Salvo was studying and living at Ashland College. College officials informed local FBI agents that they suspected Salvo of possible child molestation and related conduct based on incriminating electronic mail. FBI agents approached Salvo at his dormitory, asked to speak with him in private about the suspicious mail, and suggested they speak in Salvo's dorm room. Salvo agreed to speak with the officers, but declined to do so in his room because his roommate was there, and he did not want to get anyone else involved in the embarrassing nature of the upcoming conversation. Salvo …

Criminal Procedure: United States V. Holt: The Exception To The Exception That Swallows The Rule, J. Michael Hughes

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Qualitative Dimension Of Fourth Amendment "Reasonableness", Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Supreme Court doctrine protects two seemingly distinct kinds of interests under the heading of privacy rights: one "substantive," the other "procedural." The Fourth Amendment guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures" has been generally interpreted to protect procedural privacy. Searches are typically defined as governmental inspections of activities and locations in which an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy from observation. In the typical case, this reasonable expectation of privacy may be breached only where the government has acquired a quantitatively substantial objective basis for believing that the search would uncover evidence of a crime. Substantive privacy rights have not …

What's In A Word? A Comparative Analysis Of Article I, § 12 Of The New York State Constitution And The Fourth Amendment To The United States Constitution As Interpreted By The New York Court Of Appeals And The United States Supreme Court, Douglas Holden Wigdor

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.