Fourth Amendment Commons^™

The 'High Crime Area' Question: Requiring Verifiable And Quantifiable Evidence For Fourth Amendment Reasonable Suspicion Analysis, Andrew Ferguson, Damien Bernache

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This article proposes a legal framework to analyze the "high crime area" concept in Fourth Amendment reasonable suspicion challenges.Under existing Supreme Court precedent, reviewing courts are allowed to consider that an area is a "high crime area" as a factor to evaluate the reasonableness of a Fourth Amendment stop. See Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119 (2000). However, the Supreme Court has never defined a "high crime area" and lower courts have not reached consensus on a definition. There is no agreement on what a "high-crime area" is, whether it has geographic boundaries, whether it changes over time, whether it …

One Stop, No Stop, Two Stop, Terry Stop: Reasonable Suspicion And Pseudoephedrine Purchases By Suspected Methamphetamine Manufacturers, Andrew C. Goetz

Michigan Law Review

This Note attempts to inject some clarity into courts' reasonable suspicion calculus for cold medicine purchases. It argues that the key factor in analyzing such purchases is whether the purchaser or purchasers appear to be circumventing pseudoephedrine purchasing restrictions in order to obtain inordinately large quantities of pseudoephedrine. Part I provides a general background on the domestic manufacture of methamphetamine in small, clandestine laboratories. Part II then examines the interplay between outward innocence and reasonable suspicion under the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Finally, Part III establishes a framework for identifying purchasing strategies that methamphetamine manufacturers commonly use to circumvent …

Disappearing Safeguards: Fisa Nonresident Alien "Loophole" Is Unconstitutional, Brenton Hund

Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law

The note argues that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) contains a "nonresident alien loophole" that undermines constitutional protections, particularly for U.S. persons. This loophole, expanded by amendments such as the Patriot Act and the Lone Wolf Amendment, allows the government to conduct surveillance on nonresident aliens under relaxed standards, which can incidentally target U.S. citizens without meeting FISA's stricter requirements. The analysis contends that this loophole violates the Fourth Amendment by enabling surveillance on U.S. persons without probable cause or proper warrants, eroding privacy rights in the name of national security. The note advocates for legislative reforms to close …

Reflections On Standing: Challenges To Searches And Seizures In A High Technology World, José F. Anderson

All Faculty Scholarship

Among the profound issues that surround constitutional criminal procedure is the obscure often overlooked issue of who has standing to challenge an illegal search, seizure or confession. Privacy interests are often overlooked because without a legal status that allows a person to complain in court, there is no way to challenge whether one is constitutionally protected from personal invasions. Standing is that procedural barrier often imposed to prevent a person in a case from objecting to improper police conduct because of his or her relationship of ownership, proximity, location, or interest in an item searched or a thing seized. Although …

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 …

Schooling Miranda: Policing Interrogation In The Twenty-First Century Schoolhouse, Paul Holland

Faculty Articles

This article directs courts to base their application of Miranda on an explicit and contextually sound consideration of the relationships among students, officers and administrators. This article argues that Miranda applies when a state agent questions a student under circumstances in which it would be reasonable for the student to believe that she is the subject of law enforcement authority, regardless of whether a law enforcement officer conducts the questioning. The determination that Miranda applies is not tantamount to a decision that the student was in custody. It is merely a prelude to the custody inquiry. This article does not …

Expanding Terry: Compulsory Identification In Hiibel V. Sixth Judicial District Court, Humbolt County , Trevor Hickey

Brigham Young University Journal of Public Law

No abstract provided.

American Courts Are Drowning In The "Gene Pool": Excavating The Slippery Slope Mechanisms Behind Judicial Endorsement Of Dna Databases, 39 J. Marshall L. Rev. 115 (2005), Meghan Riley

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Neither Big Brother Nor Dead Brother: The Need For A New Fourth Amendment Standard Applying To Emerging Technologies, Casey Holland

Kentucky Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Constitutional Law—Fourth Amendment—Knock And Announce: The Ninth Circuit Knocks And The Supreme Court Announces A Re-Emphasis On The Case-By-Case Analysis.United States V. Banks, 540 U.S. 31 (2003), Erin Elizabeth Cassinelli

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

How Earl Warren's Twenty-Two Years In Law Enforcement Affected His Work As Chief Justice, Yale Kamisar

Articles

Before becoming governor of California, Earl Warren had spent his entire legal career, twenty-two years, in law enforcement. Professor Kamisar maintains that this experience significantly influenced Warren's work as a Supreme Court justice and gave him a unique perspective into police interrogation and other police practices. This article discusses some of Warren's experiences in law enforcement and searches for evidence of that experience in Warren's opinions. For example, when Warren was head of the Alameda County District Attorney's Office, he and his deputies not only relied on confessions in many homicide cases but also themselves interrogated homicide suspects. The seeds …

Racial Profiling Of African-American Males: Stopped, Searched, And Stripped Of Constitutional Protection, 38 J. Marshall L. Rev. 439 (2004), Floyd D. Weatherspoon

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Pretextual Use Of Search Warrants In Federal White Collar Criminal Investigations Of Legitimate Businesses To Conduct Custodial Interrogations Of Targets, Employees, And Occupants: Can They Really Do That?, Patrick R. James, Matthew R. House

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Unconstitutional Police Searches And Collective Responsibility, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Then the police officer told the suspect, without just cause, "I bet you are hiding [drugs] under your balls. If you have drugs under your balls, I am going to fuck your balls up."

Jon Gould and Stephen Mastrofski document astonishingly high rates of unconstitutional police searches in their groundbreaking article, "Suspect Searches: Assessing Police Behavior Under the U.S. Constitution." By their conservative estimate, 30% of the 115 police searches they studied – searches that were conducted by officers in a department ranked in the top 20% nationwide, that were systematically observed by trained field observers, and that were coded …

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 …

In The Absence Of Democracy: The Designation And Material Support Provisions Of The Anti-Terrorism Laws, Jennifer Van Bergen

Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal

The article argues that post-9/11 laws, particularly the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the USA PATRIOT Act (USAPA), have dangerously expanded governmental power at the expense of civil liberties. These laws, through provisions like material support for terrorism and the designation of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs), enable prosecutions that often violate due process and First Amendment rights. The article contends that sacrificing civil liberties for national security is both unnecessary and harmful, part of a historical pattern that undermines democracy and the rule of law.

State V. Fisher: Canine Sniffs - Who Let The Dogs Out, Shannon R. Hurley-Deal

North Carolina Central Law Review

No abstract provided.

In The Wake Of Kyllo V. United States: The Future Of Thermal Imaging Cameras, 36 J. Marshall L. Rev. 507 (2003), Paul Kleppetsch

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

What Constitutes An Arrest Within The Meaning Of The Fourth Amendment, Thomas K. Clancy

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Bête Noire: How Race-Based Policing Threatens National Security, Lenese C. Herbert

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article asserts that race-based policing, enabled and exacerbated by race-blind judicial review, creates an ire with a purpose that promises, especially after September 11, to make us all less safe. The illegitimate marginalization of American citizens aggravates an already alienated population and primes them for cooperation with those who seek to harm the United States. Race-based policing guts the expectation of fair-dealing, legitimacy, and justice in the criminal justice system, creating marginalized populations, especially of African Americans. Lack of judicial redress in the face of such policing irrevocably stains already beleaguered African Americans (and others so policed) as inferior …

Cultural Context Matters: Terry's "Seesaw Effect", Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

This Article investigates why the enforcement of a given legal doctrine may vary with changes in the cultural context in which it is applied. It argues that officials apply the law along an "enforcement practices continuum" in accord with changes in the prevailing articulations of the meaning of cultural identity norms associating particular groups with crime.

Terry v. Ohio doctrine allows police officers to make "stops" and "frisks" of limited scope upon reasonable suspicion of crime rather than requiring the higher standard of probable cause. The Article contends the officer discretion resulting from this "scope continuum" approach permits cultural identity …

Cultural Context Matters: Terry's "Seesaw Effect", Frank Rudy Cooper

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Can Police Track Your Wireless Calls? Call Location Information And Privacy Law, Laurie Thomas Lee

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Road Work: Racial Profiling And Drug Interdiction On The Highway, Samuel R. Gross, Katherine Y. Barnes

Michigan Law Review

Hypocrisy about race is hardly new in America, but the content changes. Recently the spotlight has been on racial profiling. The story of Colonel Carl Williams of the New Jersey State Police is a wellknown example. On Sunday, February 28, 1999, the Newark Star Ledger published a lengthy interview with Williams in which he talked about race and drugs: "Today . . . the drug problem is cocaine or marijuana. It is most likely a minority group that's involved with that. " Williams condemned racial profiling - "As far as racial profiling is concerned, that is absolutely not right. It …

Warrantless Home Arrests And Police Liability Under Utah Law, Matthew Bell

BYU Law Review

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 …

A Constitutional Crisis In The Digital Age: Why The Fbi's "Carnivore" Does Not Defy The Fourth Amendment, Aaron Y. Strauss

Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Identifying And (Re)Formulating Prophylactic Rules, Safe Harbors, And Incidental Rights In Constitutional Criminal Procedure, Susan R. Klein

Michigan Law Review

The Miranda conundrum runs something like this. If the Miranda decision represents true constitutional interpretation, and all unwarned statements taken during custodial interrogation are "compelled" within the meaning of the Self-Incrimination Clause, the impeachment and "fruits" exceptions to Miranda should fall. If it is not true constitutional interpretation, than the Court has no business reversing state criminal convictions for its violation. I offer here what I hope is a satisfying answer to this conundrum, on both descriptive and normative levels, that justifies not only Miranda but a host of similar Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Court decisions as well. In Part …

The Paths Not Taken: The Supreme Court's Failures In Dickerson, Paul G. Cassell

Michigan Law Review

Where's the rest of the opinion? That was my immediate reaction to reading the Supreme Court's terse decision in Dickerson, delivered to me via email from the clerk's office a few minutes after its release. Surely, I thought, some glitch in the transmission had eliminated the pages of discussion on the critical issues in the case. Yet, as it became clear that I had received all of the Court's opinion, my incredulity grew.

Miranda, Dickerson, And The Puzzling Persistence Of Fifth Amendment Exceptionalism, Stephen J. Schulhofer

Michigan Law Review

Dickerson v. United States preserves the status quo regime for judicial oversight of police interrogation. That result could be seen, in the present climate, as a victory for due process values, but there remain many reasons for concern that existing safeguards are flawed - that they are either too restrictive or not restrictive enough. Such concerns are partly empirical, of course. They depend on factual assessments of how much the Miranda rules do restrict the police. But such concerns also reflect a crucial, though often unstated, normative premise; they presuppose a certain view of how much the police should be …