The Criminal Lawyer

Last month, we posted on the senate hearings on whether the feds need to get a warrant before getting emails and other stuff stored in the cloud.  The Obama administration would rather let the feds continue to get such stuff without bothering to get a warrant, as they now can do under (very outdated) current law.  As we put it:

As the law currently stands, if an email is more than 180 days old, the feds are allowed to snag it without a warrant, under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act.  In yet another bit of Orwellian fractal weirdness, the ECPA was designed to ensure that online communications had just as much privacy protection as anything in the offline world.  (Given the erosion of Fourth Amendment protections in the brick-and-mortar world, a cynic might be tempted to crack that the ECPA has lived up to its expectations.)

And we quoted Sen. Patrick Leahy, who last year argued to drag law enforcement and the Fourth Amendment into the modern era:

Today, ECPA is a law that is often hampered by conflicting privacy standards that create uncertainty and confusion for law enforcement, the business community and American consumers.

For example, the content of a single e-mail could be subject to as many as four different levels of privacy protections under ECPA, depending on where it is stored, and when it is sent. There are also no clear standards under that law for how and under what circumstances the Government can access cell phone, or other mobile location information when investigating crime or national security matters. In addition, the growing popularity of social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, present new privacy challenges that were not envisioned when ECPA was passed.

Simply put, the times have changed, and so ECPA must be updated to keep up with the times.

Well, today Sen. Leahy proposed a new bill that might do just that.  The bill (pdf here) would get rid of that 180-day loophole, and require the feds to get a warrant no matter how old the email or data might be.

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Obviously, we’re in favor of that.  But this bill goes farther than that.  If adopted, this bill would also:

1. Prohibit cloud services from knowingly (more…)

Interesting Fourth Amendment decision from the Supreme Court this morning, in a case which at first glance didn’t seem all that cert-worthy.  The facts are as run-of-the-mill as they come — an undercover buy-and-bust, the dealer ran into a building, arrest team followed in just as one of the doors slammed shut but couldn’t tell which of 2 apartments the guy went into, from the hallway they smelled dank weed burning, the smell was stronger by the apartment on the left, the cops banged on the door and announced themselves, the cops heard stuff being moved around inside and figured it was evidence being destroyed, the cops burst in and found significant amounts of pot and cocaine.

The first time we read the facts in this case, we couldn’t help wondering “seriously, what’s the problem here?”  We’re well aware that the cops’ story might not be entirely truthful, but on the facts as given there just didn’t seem to be grounds for suppression.  The cops are allowed to pursue a suspect into the hallway of an apartment building (here it was a breezeway, arguably even less private).  The cops were entitled to bang on the door that smelled of burning marijuana.  There’s no Fourth Amendment prohibition against the police banging on your door and shouting “police police police.”  On hearing sounds consistent with destruction of evidence, it’s pretty well settled that an exigency now existed.  That’s one of the dozen or so exceptions where society’s interest in something (here, preservation of evidence) trumps the right against warrantless searches.  So seriously, what was the problem?

The problem was that the police arguably created the exigency themselves.  If they hadn’t banged on the door and announced their presence, there wouldn’t have been any evidence-destruction sounds.  Can the police manufacture an exception to the warrant requirement, one that would not have existed otherwise, and then rely on that exception to conduct a warrantless search?

Ah, now it gets interesting.

Writing for an 8-1 majority in Kentucky v. King, Justice Alito neatly described (more…)

Wiretaps are arguably the greatest invasion of privacy that the government can do.  They’re listening in on private conversations, not intended to be overheard by anyone else.  So to get a wiretapping warrant, the government has to do more than for a normal search warrant.  There has to be more than just probable cause that they’re likely to find evidence of a crime.  Only certain crimes count.  There has to be good reason to do a wiretap as opposed to some other less-invasive investigative technique.  Only particular conversations can be sought, over particular phones.  Etc. etc. etc.

Not only is there a heavier burden to meet before a wire can be granted, the government has to comply with some very strict rules as they carry out the eavesdropping.  On that issue of particular conversations, for example, they have to do what they can to minimize the amount of non-relevant or privileged conversations that get listened to.  This is called “minimization.”  When it appears that a call isn’t pertinent (i.e., it isn’t evidence of a crime), or that it’s privileged (as a call with one’s attorney, doctor or spouse), then they have to stop listening and recording.  The call gets “minimized.”

The cops or agents who are monitoring the wire have to do more than just act in good faith.  Their minimization has to be objectively reasonable — the law only cares what an ordinarily reasonable person have thought in the circumstances, not what the cop himself happened to think.  So a properly-run wire is going to have minimization procedures that are spelled out at the beginning of the investigation, in writing, signed by every agent before they get to monitor any calls, with a reference copy there at the monitoring location just in case there are any questions later.  The prosecutor is going to be involved throughout, and it’s really the prosecutor’s responsibility to make sure that everyone knows what they can and cannot do.  It’s also the prosecutor’s job to review all the calls that were intercepted and, among other things, make sure that the cops are minimizing properly.

But what happens if the government doesn’t do that?  What happens if oblivious or malicious agents record and listen to all kinds of personal calls that have nothing to do with the crime they’re investigating?  What happens if a lazy or inexperienced prosecutor fails to nip it in the bud, or if a malicious prosecutor allows it to keep happening?

It’s an important issue these days, because the feds have been doing exactly that.

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As we’ve pointed out a few times, the feds have been all gung-ho for doing wires on white-collar stuff these days, but the white-collar teams aren’t exactly the most experienced at doing wiretaps properly.  For one thing, the feds hardly (more…)

Our jury’s still out, and there’s so much stuff to catch up on.  There’s the 5th Circuit’s denial of Jeff Skilling’s appeal, even though the Supreme Court had struck down the “honest services fraud” charge last summer.  We were so ready to write something about it yesterday, but work intervened, and now we’re not in the mood.  Maybe this weekend.

Instead, we’re all intrigued about the Senate hearings earlier this week on whether federal law enforcement ought to get a warrant before doing any search and seizure out there in the cloud.  Apparently, the Obama administration says the warrant requirement is just too much of a hassle.

The term “cloud computing” covers a lot of things, but for these purposes we’re talking about people storing data not on their own hard drives, but out there somewhere in the ether of the internet.  Of course, “out there somewhere” means “stored on someone else’s servers.”  Which means it’s there for the taking (or destruction) if those remote servers were to be compromised.  And of course, that means it’s out there for the seeing if law enforcement decides to go poking around in the cloud.

As the law currently stands, if an email is more than 180 days old, the feds are allowed to snag it without a warrant, under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act.  In yet another bit of Orwellian fractal weirdness, the ECPA was designed to ensure that online communications had just as much privacy protection as anything in the offline world.  (Given the erosion of Fourth Amendment protections in the brick-and-mortar world, a cynic might be tempted to crack that the ECPA has lived up to its expectations.)

As Vermont senator Patrick Leahy put it last September, when the Senate first starting considering changes to the ECPA, the statute

was a careful, bipartisan law designed in part to protect electronic communications from real-time monitoring or interception by the Government, as emails were being delivered and from searches when these communications were stored electronically. At the time, ECPA was a cutting-edge piece of legislation. But, the many advances in communication technologies since have outpaced the privacy protections that Congress put in place.

Today, ECPA is a law that is often hampered by conflicting privacy standards that create uncertainty and confusion for law enforcement, the business community and American consumers.

For example, the content of a single e-mail could be subject to as many as four different levels of privacy protections under ECPA, depending on where it is stored, and when it is sent. There are also no clear standards under that law for how and under what circumstances the Government can access cell phone, or other mobile location information when investigating crime or national security matters. In addition, the growing popularity of social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, present new privacy challenges that were not envisioned when ECPA was passed.

Simply put, the times have changed, and so ECPA must be updated to keep up with the times

Think of it this way:  You’re storing your emails on a third party’s servers.  Isn’t there some lessening of your privacy expectations in that situation?  And on top of that, until maybe six or seven years ago, it wasn’t that outrageous to deem emails left on a third party’s servers for more than six months — instead of storing them to one’s own hard drive or local server for preservation — to be “abandoned.”  AOL users lost their emails after just a month or so.  If you didn’t actively save it to your hard drive, you didn’t want it.  (Forget, of course, the user’s reasonable expectation that the email would no longer exist in the first place.  Do not waste brain cells wondering whether one can abandon something that one believes to have already been destroyed.)

The point is, the law sort of made sense back in the 80s.  And it still kinda made sense when Google was new and Facebook was still in the future.

But now, things have changed.  In ways that are both dramatic and obvious to anyone who might be reading this post.  Now, by default, the vast majority of users do not store their emails locally (if they even know how to do so).  Emails are almost always accessed through a third party’s servers.  Almost nobody downloads their emails — and even if they do, the original remains on the server.

The vast majority of users expect that their emails, protected by their usernames and passwords, will remain private.  Even though the emails are stored out there in the cloud, the ordinary reasonable expectation is that they are private.

As we all know, the Fourth Amendment prohibits the search and seizure of stuff where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, unless law enforcement gets a warrant based on a showing of probable cause to believe that particular evidence of a particular crime will be discovered by the search.  (For those of you desiring a quick primer on the various exceptions that apply, you can certainly do worse than to listen to N. Burney and G. Mehler’s brilliant CLE lecture, “Search and Seizure in 60 Minutes“)

The exceptions to the Fourth Amendment essentially boil down to situations where the evidence would cease to exist if a warrant were sought, or there’s some other thing we want the police to be able to do (such as make sure people are safe) that might be deterred if they weren’t allowed to use evidence observed in the process.  None of the exceptions are based on a policy of “we probably wouldn’t have probable cause to search in the first place.”

But that is precisely the policy offered by the Obama administration this week.  We kid you not.  Here’s associate deputy attorney general James A. Baker, testifying on why the administration doesn’t want to have to get a warrant to search the cloud:

In order to obtain a search warrant for a particular e-mail account, law enforcement has to establish probable cause to believe that evidence will be found in that particular account. In some cases, this link can be hard to establish.

And if they aren’t allowed to search in cases where they cannot establish probable cause in the first place?  The consequences would be dire, he (more…)

This’ll be quick, because we’re pretty busy working on a wiretap case, which is always time-consuming if done right.  But as our mind’s on that topic anyway, we thought we’d quickly point out that the latest round of insider-trading cases is again largely derived from wiretaps.  Here’s a roundup over at the WSJ’s law blog.

We just wanted to jump in and point out that just because there were wiretaps, by no stretch of the imagination does that mean the case is a slam dunk.  There are all kinds of ways that agents and prosecutors can and do screw up wire cases.  If properly challenged, the recordings and all evidence gotten as a result of them can get thrown out, which pretty much kills the case.  Don’t go saying this can’t happen, because we happen to see it plenty.  (The one we’re working on right now is a prime example of how not to conduct a wiretap investigation, for example.)

But even if the evidence doesn’t get suppressed, that doesn’t mean it can’t be successfully attacked at trial.  Cross-examining taped evidence isn’t the easiest skill to master, but it’s definitely doable.

If you’re really interested, you can go take our CLE lecture on how to defend these kinds of cases over at West Legal Ed Center (shameless plug).  Or if you prefer, here’s a quick cut-and-paste from a longer post we put up the first time this happened, when the Galleon case broke (original post here):

Wiretap evidence is anything but a sure thing. We know. We did wires for years in the Rackets Bureau of the Manhattan DA’s office, and now we defend them. We’ve taught a nationwide CLE on how to successfully defend them for West LegalEdCenter. Wiretaps are not a sure thing.

They can be defeated with technicalities. Eavesdropping is probably the greatest invasion of privacy that the government can inflict, and so we make law enforcement jump through all kinds of hoops before they are allowed to get an eavesdropping warrant. There are so many i’s to dot and t’s to cross, that the feds hardly use wiretaps in the first place. You’d think otherwise, but (more…)

When the police ask if they can come in, SAY NO.  It doesn’t always end as badly as this, but it almost always ends badly.

When the police (or investigators from a regulatory agency, or any enforcement types) ask you questions, SAY NOTHING.  You don’t have to talk to them, and it can end badly.

If the cops are getting physical, DON’T FIGHT THEM.  You will always lose, and it’s just something else to charge you with.

Not blaming the victim here, but don’t let it happen to you.

For more useful advice — for law-abiding citizens just as much if not more than others — see this fine video called 10 Rules for Dealing with Police:

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Credit goes to the partner, btw, who’s probably looking at a helluva lot of harassment for breaking the wall of silence.  Breaking the golden rule that Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill Of Another Cop is not a career-advancing move.

You’ve probably all seen the video by now of the motorcyclist recording himself speeding down a Maryland road, only to get pulled over by a plainclothes cop who leaps out brandishing a gun and otherwise behaving inappropriately.  And you’ve probably heard how the motorcyclist is now facing trial on charges of illegal wiretapping, for the recording of the officer.

The case has become the most visible in a rising tide of police backlash against citizens videotaping them while they abuse their authority.  We wrote on this (and the reasons why the police are losing respect) here.

Well now Judge Emory Pitt has thrown out the charges against the motorcyclist, ruling that police and others who exercise their authority in public “should not expect our actions to be shielded from public observation.”  You can read the Baltimore Sun article here.

Although this isn’t controlling precedent for any other courthouse, the ruling makes perfect sense. A police officer — or anyone else, for that matter, who is doing something in the open in as public a place as a freeway — would be an idiot not to expect that others are going to see what he’s doing. If it’s freely observable by the general public, then what possible expectation can there be that it’s private?

The same goes for cops who get taped beating people in a plaza, tasing people in an auditorium, or even just being dicks at a demonstration. The public is watching. So there’s no reason why the rest of the public shouldn’t be allowed to see it as well.

As Balthasar Gracián wrote in 1647, “always behave as though others were watching.” Good advice. Perhaps soon the police will begin taking it to heart.

On May 8, 2005, we were having a party.  It was our birthday, and our firstborn had just turned 1 a few days before, so it called for a big celebration with friends and family.  For us, it was a time of new beginnings.  But for Jerry Hobbs, May 8 2005 was the end.  He found his 8-year-old daughter and her 9-year-old friend brutally stabbed to death, in a park in Zion, Illinois.  He immediately called the police, who immediately made him their number-one suspect.  He’d just gotten out of jail in Texas, after all, so why investigate further?  He was subjected to a long, intense interrogation, and eventually made a statement that sounded like a confession.  He recanted the statement, saying it was coerced, but that didn’t matter, and he was charged with the murders.

Shortly after his interrogation, the police found DNA on the girls’ bodies that didn’t match Hobbs.  The DA discounted it, saying it must have been cross-contamination and couldn’t have been relevant to the crime.  But the DNA was in semen found on the girls’ bodies — and inside one girl’s vagina — and that’s not cross-contamination.  The DA insisted that it was still irrelevant, and that the semen must have been on the ground before the attack.  Seriously.  Hobbs remained in custody, charged with the double murder, for more than five years, though his case never went to trial.

He was in jail until a couple of hours ago, that is.  As it happens, that DNA on the girls’ bodies was extremely relevant.  Jorge Torrez, who had lived in Zion at the time, was arrested in Arlington, Virginia a few months back, and charged with the abduction and repeated rape of one woman as well as attacking another woman.  Virginia, unlike Illinois, takes DNA samples along with fingerprints when someone is arrested.  The DNA taken at Torrez’s arrest went into the database, and popped up as a match to the DNA found on the girls.  The Illinois prosecutors dithered for weeks, but this morning they finally released Hobbs from prison (though they refused to issue an apology, insisting they and the police had done everything right).  Still, an innocent man went free at last.

And if Torrez’s DNA had not been swabbed on arrest?  Hobbes’ coerced, false confession might well have resulted in yet another wrongful conviction.

This raises a lot of issues.  There’s the misuse of DNA evidence, and there’s the false confession, but those are topics for another time.  (If you’re interested in learning ways to defend such cases, you can check out our “Hope for Hopeless Cases” CLE series, particularly lectures IV and V.)

Today, however, our beef is with the civil liberties argument against taking DNA samples at arrest.

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The argument is that people who haven’t yet been convicted of a crime should not be compelled to give DNA samples.  It smacks of “Big Brother” and “Minority Report.”  The government might conceivably (more…)

The police need a warrant to search your home.  Except when they don’t.  The warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment is there to protect your privacy, and sorry, but sometimes your privacy isn’t the most important thing at the moment.

One exception to the warrant requirement is the Emergency Exception.  In a nutshell, it says the police are allowed to go into your home without a warrant when there is good reason to believe that someone inside is seriously hurt, or in danger, and needs their assistance right away.

Different states define the rule in different ways.  In New York, the rule was set in 1976 in the Mitchell case.  Mitchell has two objective conditions, and one subjective condition.  If all three are met, then the police are allowed to go in without a warrant.

Objectively, the circumstances have to be such that a reasonably prudent officer would have thought there was an emergency at the time.  Objectively, the officers on the scene had to have probable cause to believe that there was an emergency inside the house.

Subjectively, the officers had to actually be going inside to help.  They couldn’t be using the emergency as a pretext to really look for drugs, for example.

So far, so good.  Sort of.

One problem is that there is no requirement here that the police actually believe there is an emergency.  There is no subjective requirement that the police on the scene be aware of the circumstances that would lead a reasonable person to think there was an emergency.  There is no subjective requirement that the police on the scene actually think there’s an emergency.

That’s not a huge problem under the Mitchell rule, because the no-pretext prong sort of implies that the police need to subjectively believe there’s an emergency.

But what happens if you take away that no-pretext prong?  You get an absurd rule.  Police who did not themselves believe there was any emergency could still go in without a warrant — and hope that some clever prosecutor down the road can come up with a scenario where an objective cop, aware of all the circumstances that the police themselves might not have been aware of, might have thought there was an emergency.  And if you think no New York police officer would break down your door in the hopes that it can get justified down the line (if your case even gets that far)… well, the word “naive” springs to mind.

Well, guess what?  Back in 2006, in its Brigham City decision, the U.S. Supreme Court specifically rejected the no-pretext prong of the Mitchell rule.  The Court was being true to its 15-year trend of rejecting subjective rules in federal Fourth Amendment law.  The Supreme Court line of cases does not care whether the police had some pretext or ulterior motive.  So long as there was some legitimate basis for the police conduct, they don’t really care what the police themselves were thinking.

But New York hasn’t had to deal with the issue though.  Not, that is, until a case we argued earlier this year.  

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This January, we found ourselves before the Second Department one month after the Supreme Court had reaffirmed (more…)

Now that we’re all immigration lawyers, we figured we’d better take a gander at the complaint filed yesterday by the feds, seeking to strike down Arizona’s new immigration law.  The feds say Arizona’s law is preempted by federal law and policy, and so must be struck down under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, art. VI, cl. 2.  (You can read the complaint for yourself here.  The text of the law can be found here.) 

After reading the complaint in its entirety, we have to say that it’s mostly stupid. 

The law was hotly criticized by the Obama administration even before it was enacted back in April, so it’s no surprise that this action was filed.  We’re surprised it took this long to do it.  And we’re even more surprised, given how long it took, that the feds did such a shoddy job of it.

In broad strokes, Arizona wants to deter illegal aliens from sticking around in Arizona.  To that end, among other things, the law:

• Tells Arizona police they have to verify someone’s lawful presence if, during an otherwise lawful stop, they have reasonable suspicion that the person might be here unlawfully.  §11-1051(B) [referred to as Section 2 in the complaint]. 
• Amends existing law, permitting police to make a warrantless arrest if the officer has probable cause to believe that a misdemeanor or felony has occurred, to add that the police can make a warrantless arrest on probable cause to believe the suspect committed an offense for which he could be deported.  §11-1051(E) [in Section 2 of the bill, but perplexingly referred to as Section 6 in the complaint]. 
• says Arizona citizens can sue for money damages if any Arizona state or local official or agency “adopts or implements a policy” of not enforcing federal immigration laws to the extent permitted by federal law.  §11-1051(G) [Section 2]. 
• makes it a crime of trespassing to be present in Arizona in violation of federal law.  §13-1509(A) [Section 3]. 
• amends existing state law against smuggling human beings (§13-2319 [Section 4]) to permit the police to stop a car they reasonably suspect to be in violation of both a traffic law and the already-existing law against smuggling.  
• prohibits illegal aliens from seeking work in the state.  §13-2928(C) [Section 5].
• makes it illegal for “a person who is in violation of a criminal offense” to transport or harbor illegal aliens.  §13-2929(A) [Section 5].

The general argument the feds make is deliciously ironic: Requiring compliance with federal law would conflict with federal law.  At first glance, it seems like everyone at the DOJ who approved this complaint skipped Logic 101, and listened instead to John Cleese’s logic monologue on the Holy Grail album.  But this is not really the stupid bit. 

Their argument is more along the lines of (1) the feds get to determine policy of how and when the feds enforce their own laws; (2) Arizona isn’t telling the feds what to do, but it’s going to be enforcing the same laws more thoroughly; so (3) Arizona is messing with the feds’ policy.  This is one of the stupid bits, because nowhere does Arizona tell the feds what to do or how to do it.

The Complaint commits some intellectual dishonesty, however, to make it seem so anyway.  They repeatedly misquote the Arizona law to say a citizen can sue “any” official or agency for failing to enforce the immigration law.  They make it sound like Arizona citizens could sue federal officials for failing to enforce federal law.  But that’s not at all what is said.  The Arizona law only (more…)

There are four Mondays left in June.  Four more days in which the Supreme Court is expected to announce its decisions in the 27 or so cases still out there this term.  That’s about one case per day from now till then.  We’re picturing the Justices pulling all-nighters, stacks of empty pizza boxes in the halls at 2 a.m. next to the burn bags (do they still use burn bags there?), and sleepy zombie-like clerks dropping in their tracks every now and then.

Some of those cases have to do with boring old civ pro or shipping or labor law.  But a whole bunch are about the cool stuff, criminal law.  Here are a few of the criminal cases we’re watching particularly closely:

Black v. United States
Weyrauch v. United States
Skilling v. United States

This trio of cases attack the “honest services” fraud law.  18 U.S.C. § 1346 was supposed to prevent political corruption, but Congress wrote it so sloppily that it’s become a catch-all crime for federal prosecutors.  Anyone can get charged with it, and nobody knows what it means.  The Court telegraphed its dislike of the statute during oral arguments of all (more…)

As everyone reading this is probably aware, last Monday the website Gizmodo announced an exclusive look at Apple’s iPhone 4, which hasn’t been officially released yet. In their post (here), they said “you are looking at Apple’s next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it. We disassembled it. It’s the real thing, and here are all the details.” The post was written by blogger Jason Chen, and featured video of him showing details of the phone, and a lot of photos.

As time went on (see all the posts here), it came out that Gizmodo had paid $5,000 for the phone. The guy they bought it from wasn’t the phone’s owner, but had merely found it in a beer garden back in March. An Apple employee had lost it there.

So, if they bought it from someone who wasn’t the owner, and they knew it was supposed to be a secret, did the folks at Gizmodo commit any crimes here?

Law enforcement got involved very fast. By Friday, law enforcement in San Mateo had gotten a search warrant (viewable here) to seize Jason Chen’s computers, disks, drives, and any records pertaining to the Apple prototype 4G iPhone.

The search warrant was executed that same day, and a bunch of computer stuff was seized (the inventory is also viewable here).

Yesterday, the chief deputy district attorney for San Mateo County told the WSJ’s “Digits” blog (here) that nobody’s saying a crime happened or not. They’re still investigating.

Meanwhile, however, Gawker Media (the owner of Gizmodo) issued a letter on Saturday (viewable here) stating that “under both state and federal law, a search warrant may not be validly issued to confiscate the property of a journalist.”

In support of that statement, Gawker Media cited California Penal Code §1524(g) (viewable here), which prohibits search warrants for items described in Evidence Code §1070.

Evidence Code §1070 (here) says a judge can’t hold a journalist in contempt for refusing to disclose his sources, or for refusing to disclose unpublished information gotten while preparing a story.

So we have to ask, does Gawker Media know what it’s even talking about?

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There’s a big difference between a search warrant and (more…)

The Fourth Amendment says the police can’t go into your home or other private place without a warrant. Over the years, we’ve come up with a lot of exceptions to the warrant requirement. So many, in fact, that getting a warrant has become the exception, and the exceptions have become the norm.

That’s because privacy isn’t the only interest society has here. The various exceptions to the warrant requirement allow the police to go in when other important interests outweigh the privacy interest.

One common exception to the warrant requirement is the Emergency exception. Under the emergency rule, the police can go in when there is good reason to believe there’s someone inside who needs help right away — either they’re seriously hurt, or they’re in danger.

In New York, that rule was formalized by the Mitchell case in 1976. The Mitchell rule has two objective conditions, and one subjective condition. If all three are met, then the police would be allowed to enter under the emergency rule. The objective conditions require that a reasonably prudent officer would first have thought there was an emergency, and second would have had probable cause to believe the emergency was inside the place to be searched. The subjective condition was that the police had to actually be going inside to help someone — the emergency couldn’t be a pretext for some other ulterior motive such as looking for evidence.

For about 15 years, now, the U.S. Supreme Court has been rejecting subjective rules like that. So far as federal law is concerned, the Supremes don’t care if the police had some ulterior motive or pretext. So long as there was a legitimate basis for the police conduct, they don’t care what the police were actually thinking.

So in 2006, in the Brigham City case, the Supreme Court specifically addressed the three-part Mitchell rule, and said New York’s subjective condition is not required under federal law. All federal law requires is that the police had an objectively reasonable basis to believe that there was an emergency, and probable cause to believe that the emergency was inside the place to be searched.

That’s only the federal rule, however. Federal law only provides a minimum of protections, a base line of individual rights. The states can’t give less protection, but they can certainly grant greater protections. So New York remains free to adopt the Brigham City rule, or keep the Mitchell rule, or come up with a new one. (New York could even get rid of the emergency exception altogether, though that would be a silly result — nobody wants the police to be forced to watch helpless from the sidewalk while someone is being beaten to death on the other side of a window.)

But to date, New York’s courts have neither adopted nor rejected (more…)

Our friends at the Cato Institute forwarded this to us, and it looks like it even might be halfway decent. The folks at Flex Your Rights are about to release a new DVD, “10 Rules for Dealing with Police.” It looks like a primer on how the police can lie and trick people into giving up their constitutional rights. Not a shock to those of us who do this stuff for a living, but it might be worth a watch for others.

In a seemingly ho-hum decision today, the Supreme Court made the shocking pronouncement that the states cannot afford their citizens more rights than the bare minimum allowed federally. A complete reversal of 200 years of American jurisprudence. And though it’s buried at the end of the opinion, it’s at the core of this otherwise routine Fourth Amendment case.

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Although the Fourth Amendment says the police need a warrant to search your house, most of the time they never get one. We have exceptions to the warrant requirement in circumstances where getting a warrant would be pointless, or where concerns for safety take priority. One such exception is when the police have reason to believe that someone is in immediate need of assistance, because they might be hurt or in danger.

The issue is very simple — did the police have an objectively reasonable basis for believing that someone in the house needed help right away?

The issue is not whether, using perfect hindsight, there really was such an emergency. We only care about whether the police acted reasonably under the circumstances. If it sure looked like someone needed police help, then the fact that nobody actually did need help is irrelevant. The police are allowed to check it out to make sure.

The Supreme Court issued an opinion today, in Michigan v. Fisher, repeating this fairly basic rule. They had to, the majority wrote in a 7-2 per curiam opinion, because the Michigan Court of Appeals mis-applied the law, replacing the rule’s “objective inquiry into appearances with its hindsight determination that there was in fact no emergency.”

What happened was fairly simple. Some concerned citizens directed the police to Fisher’s house, where he was supposedly “going crazy.” Once they got there, it looked like Fisher’s pickup truck had smashed into his fence, and there was blood on the crumpled hood. There was blood inside the truck, and on the door to the house. Three of the windows had been busted from the inside. Looking through a window, the police saw Fisher screaming and throwing things, but they couldn’t see what or whom at. Fisher had a little cut on his hand, and the front door was barricaded with a sofa. The cops asked if Fisher needed medical attention, and he told them to fuck off and get a warrant. One of the cops pushed the front door open a bit, then saw Fisher pointing a shotgun at him through the door’s window. The cop beat a hasty retreat. End of intrusion.

The trial court and the state’s highest court said the gun had to be suppressed, because the police never should have poked in through the front door in the first place.

The Supremes said this sure looked like a reasonable basis to believe someone needed immediate assistance. Fisher clearly acted as if he posed a threat to himself, if not to an unseen target of his violence inside the house. The police couldn’t see everything through the window, so pushing open the front door and peeking in was justifiable. The fact that nobody else ultimately was found to be inside, and that Fisher’s only injury was very minor in actuality, doesn’t change what the police knew at the time.

Stevens and Sotomayor dissented, saying that the Supreme Court essentially usurped the trial court’s role here. The Supremes weren’t there to assess the evidence during the hearing, so it was improper for them to say the trial court got the facts wrong. That’s not a bad argument. But that’s not really what the Supremes were doing here. They weren’t saying the court got the facts wrong — in fact, everyone pretty much agreed on the relevant facts — all they were saying is the Michigan Court of Appeals got the law wrong. And it certainly is the Supreme Court’s job to ensure that the law is being applied correctly.

What the Supreme Court did get wrong (though Stevens and Sotomayor missed it) is in saying that the Michigan court erred in holding the police to a higher standard than federal Fourth Amendment law requires. This is a hugely significant error of jurisprudence, and it should not go unremarked-upon.

The rights espoused in the federal Constitution are not the only rights that American citizens may have. They are nothing more than a minimum, a floor below which no government may go. But the states have their own constitutions, and are permitted to grant extra rights and freedoms to their citizens.

For example, on this same Fourth Amendment topic, the most important recent Supreme Court case is Brigham City v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398 (2006), which said that the federal Constitution does not forbid the police to have had an ulterior motive. So long as the police had objectively reasonable grounds to believe that an emergency was at hand, the federal Fourth Amendment does not care whether the police wanted to see if there was any contraband there as well. It’s like the Whren case, saying that so long as the cops had probable cause in the first place, the federal Constitution doesn’t care whether the stop was really just a pretext so the cops could do something else. This is consistent federal law.

But the states are free to adopt the Brigham City rule or not, as they see fit. New York, for example, hasn’t gotten around to making that call yet. Its rule under People v. Mitchell, 39 N.Y.2d 173 (1976) imposes a requirement that the so-called emergency search not be a pretext for something else. Brigham City, if adopted, would do away with that requirement. But for the moment, it is still New York law, under the New York constitution.

The same goes here. Michigan’s highest court is the final arbiter of what the Michigan constitution requires. And if they say that the citizens of Michigan are entitled to greater protections from police intrusion than are afforded by the federal minimums, then the Supreme Court has no place saying otherwise.

And yet that is precisely what the Supremes have done here. The opinion is per curiam, but it reads as if Roberts wrote it. But whoever wrote it screwed up. They reversed because “the Michigan Court of Appeals required more than what the Fourth Amendment demands.” That is not grounds for reversal. Period. For the Supremes to even think that it is reflects a disturbing antifederalist, Hamiltonian, big-government, centralized-government arrogance that is totally contrary to basic principles of American jurisprudence.

Right result, wrong reason. Bad decision.