Fourth Amendment Commons^™

Cross-Enforcing The Plain Smell Doctrine, Alexa Perez

Washington Law Review

In a state that has legalized marijuana, does a state officer have probable cause to conduct a warrantless search of a vehicle based on the smell of marijuana alone, because marijuana is still prohibited under federal law? This Article is the first to consider that unsettled question. Over the last ten years, almost every state has altered the legality of marijuana in some way, either through decriminalization or legalization. Yet the possession, use, and cultivation of marijuana continue to be illegal at the federal level. Prior to these reforms, state courts generally upheld warrantless searches of vehicles based on nothing …

Wrong Or (Fundamental) Right?: Substantive Due Process And The Right To Exclude, Jack May

Washington Law Review

Substantive due process provides heightened protection from government interference with enumerated constitutional rights and unenumerated—but nevertheless “fundamental”—rights. To date, the United States Supreme Court has never recognized any property right as a fundamental right for substantive due process purposes. But in Yim v. City of Seattle, a case recently decided by the Ninth Circuit, landlords and tenant screening companies argued that the right to exclude from one’s property should be a fundamental right. Yim involved a challenge to Seattle’s Fair Chance Housing Ordinance, which, among other things, prohibits landlords and tenant screening companies from inquiring about or considering a …

Reasonable In Time, Unreasonable In Scope: Maximizing Fourth Amendment Protections Under Rodriguez V. United States, Thomas Heiden

Washington Law Review

In Rodriguez v. United States, the Supreme Court held that a law enforcement officer may not conduct a drug dog sniff after the completion of a routine traffic stop because doing so extends the stop without reasonable suspicion in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable seizures. Tracing the background of Rodriguez from the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Terry v. Ohio, this Comment argues that Rodriguez is best understood as a reaction to the continued erosion of Fourth Amendment protections in the investigative stop context. Based on that understanding, this Comment argues for a strict reading of Rodriguez, …

Private Police Regulation And The Exclusionary Remedy: How Washington Can Eliminate The Public/Private Distinction, Jared Rothenberg

Washington Law Review

Private security forces such as campus police, security guards, loss prevention officers, and the like are not state actors covered by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures nor the Fifth Amendment’s Miranda protections. As members of the umbrella category of “private police,” these private law enforcement agents often obtain evidence, detain individuals, and elicit confessions in a manner that government actors cannot, which can then be lawfully turned over to the government. Though the same statutory law governing private citizens (assault, false imprisonment, trespass, etc.) also regulates private police conduct, private police conduct is not bound by …

Per Curiam Signals In The Supreme Court's Shadow Docket, Zina Makar

Washington Law Review

Lower courts and litigants depend a great deal on the Supreme Court to articulate and communicate signals regarding how to interpret existing doctrine. Signals are at their strongest and most reliable when they originate from the Court’s merits docket. More recently, the Court has been increasingly relying on its orders docket—colloquially referred to as its “shadow docket”—to communicate with lower courts by summarily reversing and correcting errors in interpretation without briefing or oral argument.

Over the past decade the Roberts Court has granted certiorari to summarily reverse a growing number of qualified immunity cases, issuing over a dozen unsigned per …

Gone Fishing: Casting A Wide Net Using Geofence Warrants, Ryan Tursi

Washington Law Review

Technology companies across the country receive requests from law enforcement agencies for cell phone location information near the scenes of crimes. These requests rely on the traditional warrant process and are known as geofence warrants, or reverse location search warrants. By obtaining location information, law enforcement can identify potential suspects or persons of interest who were near the scene of a crime when they have no leads. But the use of this investigative technique is controversial, as it threatens to intrude upon the privacy of innocent bystanders who had the misfortune of being nearby when the crime took place. Innocent …

Revising Reasonableness In The Cloud, Ian Walsh

Washington Law Review

Save everything—just in case––and search for it later. This is a modern mantra fueled by the ubiquity of smartphones, laptops, tablets, and free or low-cost data storage that leads users to store massive amounts of data in the cloud. But when users trust third-party cloud storage providers with private communications, they also surrender Fourth Amendment constitutional certainty. Existing statutory safeguards for these communications are lower than Fourth Amendment warrant and probable cause standards; this permits the government to seize large quantities of users’ private communications stored in the cloud with only minimal justification. Due to the revealing nature of such …

Privacy In The Cloud: The Fourth Amendment Fog, Sarah Aitchison

Washington Law Review

The Cloud has changed how individuals record, store, and aggregate their personal information. As technology’s capacity for holding an individual’s most intimate details and recording day-to-day experiences increases, Fourth Amendment privacy protections become less equipped to respond to technological advances. These advances allow private companies to store an immense amount of their consumers’ personal information, and government entities to obtain that information. In response, tech companies have begun refusing to comply with government demands for information collected and stored in their devices and in the Cloud, and are increasingly ending up in court, fighting orders to disclose consumer information. A …

Dangerous Warrants, Nirej Sekhon

Washington Law Review

The Supreme Court has cast judicial warrants as the Fourth Amendment gold standard for regulating police discretion. It has embraced a “warrant preference” on the premise that requiring police to obtain advance judicial approval for searches and seizures encourages accurate identification of evidence and suspects while minimizing interference with constitutional rights. The Court and commentators have overlooked the fact that most outstanding warrants do none of these things. Most outstanding warrants are what this article terms “non-compliance warrants”: summarily issued arrest warrants for failures to comply with a court or police order. State and local courts are profligate in issuing …

Orwell's 1984 And A Fourth Amendment Cybersurveillance Nonintrusion Test, Margaret Hu

Washington Law Review

This Article describes a cybersurveillance nonintrusion test under the Fourth Amendment that is grounded in evolving customary law to replace the reasonable expectation of privacy test formulated in Katz v. United States. To illustrate how customary law norms are shaping modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, this Article examines the recurrence of judicial references to George Orwell’s novel, 1984, within the Fourth Amendment context when federal courts have assessed the constitutionality of modern surveillance methods. The Supreme Court has indicated that the Fourth Amendment privacy doctrine must now evolve to impose meaningful limitations on the intrusiveness of new surveillance technologies. …

Searching For The Appropriate Standard: Stops, Seizure, And The Reasonable Person's Willingness To Walk Away From The Police, Desiree Phair

Washington Law Review

A person is “seized” by an officer, and thus entitled to Fourth Amendment protections, if a reasonable person would not feel free to leave. Although courts must set a standard for when a person has been seized by an officer, few real-world studies exist regarding when individuals feel truly free to disregard the police. In addition, gathering new data poses challenges. This Comment presents newly produced data sets and then explores adjustments to the current reasonable person standard, arguing the advantages of focusing on officer actions as opposed to the current focus on whether a defendant feels “free to leave.” …

Digital Border Searches After Riley V. California, Thomas Mann Miller

Washington Law Review

The federal government claims that the Fourth Amendment permits it to search digital information on cell phones, laptops, and other electronic devices at the international border without suspicion of criminal activity, much less a warrant. Until recently, federal courts have generally permitted these digital border searches, treating them no differently from searches of luggage. Courts that have limited digital border searches have required only that the government establish reasonable suspicion for the most exhaustive kind of digital search. The Supreme Court has not yet weighed in, but last year it held in Riley v. California that the search incident to …

Policing By Numbers: Big Data And The Fourth Amendment, Elizabeth E. Joh

Washington Law Review

This article identifies three uses of big data that hint at the future of policing and the questions these tools raise about conventional Fourth Amendment analysis. Two of these examples, predictive policing and mass surveillance systems, have already been adopted by a small number of police departments around the country. A third example—the potential use of DNA databank samples—presents an untapped source of big data analysis. Whether any of these three examples of big data policing attract more widespread adoption by the police is yet unknown, but it likely that the prospect of being able to analyze large amounts of …

York V. Wahkiakum School District And The Future Of School Searches Under The Washington State Constitution, Kerem Murat Levitas

Washington Law Review

In March 2008, the Supreme Court of Washington decided York v. Wahkiakum School District, a case involving mandatory, suspicionless drug testing of student athletes. The court struck down the testing regime, but, unable to agree on the grounds for invalidating the testing, issued three separate opinions. The lead opinion argued that suspicionless testing could never be countenanced under the Washington Constitution. Two concurrences argued that suspicionless testing could be permissible under certain circumstances pursuant to a variant of the federal special-needs doctrine. This Note reviews search-and-seizure protections under the United States and Washington constitutions, their application to school search …

Protestors Have Fourth Amendment Rights, Too: In Graves V. City Of Coeur D'Alene, The Ninth Circuit Clouds Clearly Established Law Governing Searches, Holly Vance

Washington Law Review

In Graves v. City of Coeur d'Alene, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded that a police officer should not have arrested a protestor at an Aryan Nations parade when the protestor refused to allow the officer to search his backpack. The court held that the arrest was illegal because the officer had no probable cause to believe the protestor was carrying a weapon. However, the court also held that the arresting officer was entitled to qualified immunity and thus not liable for his violation of the protestor's rights. Qualified immunity is a privilege that …

State V. Parker: Searching The Belongings Of Nonarrested Vehicle Passengers During A Search Incident To Arrest, H. Matthew Munson

Washington Law Review

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article I, Section 7 of the Washington Constitution generally require a warrant supported by probable cause to conduct a search or seizure. One exception to these requirements is a search incident to arrest, which permits the police to search arrested persons and the area within the arrestee's reach for weapons and evidence. Prior to State v. Parker, when police arrested an occupant of an automobile in Washington, they could search the entire passenger compartment of the vehicle with the exception of locked containers. In State v. Parker, a plurality of …

Shut The Blinds And Lock The Doors—Is That Enough?: The Scope Of Fourth Amendment Protection Outside One's Own Home, Ramsey Ramerman

Washington Law Review

The Fourth Amendment was designed to be a barrier that protects citizens from unreasonable government intrusion and surveillance. However, for the Amendment to grant meaningful protection, the rules that govern the scope of that protection must supply guidance to police and citizens. While the Fourth Amendment unquestionably protects people in their own homes, the scope of the Amendment's protection outside the home is not clear. In Rakas v. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court held that courts should define the scope of Fourth Amendment protection by considering sources outside of the Fourth Amendment. While Rakas provides guidance to courts, it …

Search And Seizure, Third-Part Consent: Rethinking Police Conduct And The Fourth Amendment, Gregory S. Fisher

Washington Law Review

Two recent decisions offer different approaches for assessing police conduct in third-party consent cases. In Illinois v. Rodriguez the United States Supreme Court held that police may rely on third parties' apparent authority to consent to a search so long as police reasonably believe in third parties' authority. In State v. Leach, the Supreme Court of Washington held that police cannot rely on third parties' consent when defendants are present and able to object, even if defendants did not object to the search. This Comment argues that courts should focus on police conduct, rather than on defendants' presence or on …

Aliens' Fourth Amendment Rights Against Government Searches Abroad—United States V. Verdugo-Urquidez, 856 F.2d 1214 (9th Cir. 1988), Cert. Granted, 109 S. Ct. 1741 (1989), Richard J. Dolan

Washington Law Review

The "war on drugs" and the effort to contain international terrorism have raised questions of when the Constitution restricts the actions of the United States government abroad. This Note analyzes United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, a case in which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that aliens have fourth amendment rights against United States government searches of their residences abroad. The Note agrees that the court's holding was correct, but suggests the court's "natural rights" theory was too broad to comport with prior Supreme Court limitations of aliens' constitutional rights. Instead, the Note suggests that the relationship between an alien …

A Reprise Of Warrants, Probable Cause, And Articulable Suspicion In Immigration Enforcement—Laduke V. Nelson, 762 F.2d 1318 (9th Cir. 1985), Barbara J. Selberg

Washington Law Review

This Note analyzes LaDuke v. Nelson, in which the Ninth Circuit held that the farm and ranch check practices of the INS violated the fourth amendment in that seizures were made without warrants, probable cause, or articulable suspicion of illegal alienage. The court's alternative holding criticized the INS for conducting searches without warrants, probable cause, or effective consent. For LaDuke to stand it must be carefully distinguished from the Supreme Court's most recent fourth amendment decisions, which juxtapose the individual's interest in privacy and security with the government's interest in effective law enforcement. LaDuke should stand because it provides an …

Defining A Fourth Amendment Search: A Critique Of The Supreme Court's Post-Katz Jurisprudence, Michael Campbell

Washington Law Review

This Comment attributes the inadequacies of the Burger Court's application of Katz to that Court's identification of an interest in privacy with an interest in the secrecy of information. An interest in privacy, however, should more properly be defined as an interest in being left alone. Accordingly, this Comment proposes that a search be defined by reference to the conduct of the government, rather than by reference to the information uncovered by that conduct. Specifically, a search should be defined as conduct that violates a social norm of privacy. Such a definition of search would have several beneficial consequences. Among …

Issuance Of Search Warrants By A Washington Special Inquiry Judge—State V. Neslund, 103 Wn. 2d 79, 690 P.2d 1153 (1984), Alice M. Wright

Washington Law Review

Since its creation in 1971, the Washington special inquiry judge procedure has operated virtually without constitutional challenge. However, the recent case of State v. Neslund raised the issue of whether a special inquiry judge can properly act as a neutral and detached magistrate to issue search warrants. The United States Constitution and the Washington State Constitution set forth basic guarantees of privacy and fairness, including the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Generally a "reasonable" search must be accompanied by a search warrant issued upon a determination of probable cause by a neutral and detached magistrate. This …

Issuance Of Search Warrants By A Washington Special Inquiry Judge—State V. Neslund, 103 Wn. 2d 79, 690 P.2d 1153 (1984), Alice M. Wright

Washington Law Review

Since its creation in 1971, the Washington special inquiry judge procedure has operated virtually without constitutional challenge. However, the recent case of State v. Neslund raised the issue of whether a special inquiry judge can properly act as a neutral and detached magistrate to issue search warrants. The United States Constitution and the Washington State Constitution set forth basic guarantees of privacy and fairness, including the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Generally a "reasonable" search must be accompanied by a search warrant issued upon a determination of probable cause by a neutral and detached magistrate. This …

Terry Stop Or Arrest? The Washington Court Attempts A Distinction—State V. Williams, 102 Wn. 2d 733, 689 P.2d 1065 (1984), Beryl N. Simpson

Washington Law Review

In State v. Williams the Washington Supreme Court attempted to set forth specific criteria for determining when a temporary detention exceeds the bounds of a Terry stop and becomes an arrest, with the concomitant probable cause requirement. The court relied on both the fourth amendment and article 1, section 7 of the state constitution as the bases for its standards. The holding, however, is fact-specific, and the court's discussion of the permissible scope and intensity of an investigatory stop does not adequately establish guidelines for the police to apply in a future situation. Further, because the court did not ground …

Criminal Procedure—Luggage Found During A Lawful Warrantless Search Of An Automobile May Not Be Searched Without A Warrant—Arkansas V. Sanders, 442 U.S. 753 (1979), Suzanne Oliver

Washington Law Review

In Arkansas v. Sanders, the U.S. Supreme Court held that in the absence of exigent circumstances, police must obtain a warrant before searching luggage taken from an automobile lawfully stopped and searched for contraband. The majority opinion, written by Justice Powell, sharply restricts further extension of the "automobile exception" to the warrant requirement of the fourth amendment. The Court found the exception inapplicable for two reasons. First, a suitcase in the custody of police lacks the inherent mobility of an automobile. Second, there is a much greater expectation of privacy associated with luggage than is associated with a car. A …

Constitutional Law: Search And Seizure—The Role Of Police Officer Good Faith In Substantive Fourth Amendment Doctrine—Michigan V. De Fillippo, 443, U.S. 31 (1979), Richard E. Gifford

Washington Law Review

This note challenges the Court's implicit assumption that a policeman's good faith reliance is relevant in determining whether the fourth amendment has been violated. That assumption is incompatible with precedent. Prior decisions suggest good faith reliance should not be considered until after the court has established that a violation occurred and applicability of the exclusionary rule is at issue. Without offering a coherent explanation for its departure from precedent, the DeFillippo Court casually added police good faith to the already complex body of substantive search and seizure law. Thus, the decision created yet another dimension of disquieting uncertainty in the …

Criminal Procedure—Filing By Information: Determination Of Probable Cause Required Before Extended Restraint On Liberty—Gerstein V. Pugh, 420 U.S. 103 (1975), Cynthia B. Whitaker

Washington Law Review

Robert Pugh was arrested in Florida without a warrant and charged by prosecutor's information. Pugh and other incarcerated arrestees charged by information without a preliminary hearing brought a class action suit in federal district court challenging the constitutionality of the charging procedure. Plaintiffs maintained that the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment required that accused persons be accorded a determination of probable cause for detention soon after their arrest. They also argued that the prosecuting attorney was not sufficiently neutral or detached to make the necessary determination. The district court accepted the plaintiffs' arguments, and the Court of Appeals …

The Applicability Of The "New" Fourth Amendment To Investigations By Secret Agents: A Proposed Delineation Of The Emerging Fourth Amendment Right To Privacy, Robert L. Bergstrom

Washington Law Review

Recent Supreme Court search and seizure cases are the harbingers of a new conceptual way of analyzing fourth amendment questions. The author describes the separate fourth amendment issues of applicability and reasonableness and critically analyzes the Court's development of new privacy rules of applicability. The Court fails to recognize that privacy has both quantitative and qualitative aspects; the limited quantum of privacy analysis may account for this failure. This comment proposes a new fourth amendment privacy model and illustrates its application in various secret agent situations.

The End Of An Experiment In Federalism—A Note On Mapp V. Ohio, Arval Morris

Washington Law Review

When one views the full panoply of constitutional rights from the perspective of total United States Supreme Court history, he soon becomes aware that relatively few cases have directed that Court's attention to the constitutional immunity from unreasonable searches and seizures. However, the right expressed by the fourth amendment is obviously one of the most fundamental' for it gives legal protection to the "right of a man to privacy in his home, a right which is one of the indispensable ultimate essentials of our concept of civilization." Since this right is "basic to a free society"' and "implicit in the …

The Washington Law Of Arrest Without Warrant—Incidental Search, Robert D. Duggan

Washington Law Review

The scope of this comment is limited to considerations of the substantive law of arrest without a warrant and the permissible scope of searches and seizures incidental thereto. The discussion of substantive requirements for arrest without warrant and its incidental search will be confined to present Washington case law as measured against the federal constitutional and common law backgrounds.