Posts Tagged search

Pennsylvania Strengthens 2nd/4th Amendments

From National Review:

Unless a police officer has prior knowledge that a specific individual is not permitted to carry a concealed firearm, and absent articulable facts supporting reasonable suspicion that a firearm is being used or intended to be used in a criminal manner, there simply is no justification for the conclusion that the mere possession of a firearm, where it lawfully may be carried, is alone suggestive of criminal activity.

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Supreme Court Chips Away At Fourth Amendment

From Rare.us:

On Monday, SCOTUS continued this assault on the Fourth Amendment. It concluded that even when the government admits a stop was illegal, it can still use that evidence to prosecute you.

Under Heien, the cops only had to prove reasonable ignorance of the law: “I didn’t realize stopping this person was illegal, but I found this evidence, so we should use it.”

Now, under Monday’s Utah v. Strieff, even that charade is no longer necessary. Police can simply say: “Yeah, that stop was illegal, but I found this evidence, so we should use it.”

This is all the more reason for citizens to familiarize themselves with jury nullification. You can learn more about it from the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA).

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Fourth Amendment Negated By AOL Terms of Service

From TechDirt:

The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer alerts us to a district court ruling in NY that effectively says that by merely agreeing to AOL’s terms of service, you’ve waived your 4th Amendment rights. The case is the United States v. Frank DiTomasso, where DiTomasso is accused of producing child porn — with most of the evidence used against him coming from AOL. DiTomasso argues that it was obtained via an unconstitutional search in violation of the 4th Amendment, but judge Shira Scheindlin rejects that, by basically saying that AOL’s terms of service make you effectively waive any 4th Amendment right you might have in any such information.

All the more reason to use services like Silent Circle and encrypt your email.

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Police Need To Know The Law, Same As Citizens

From The CATO Institute:

To execute any search or seizure, a police officer must reasonably suspect that a crime has been or is being committed based on the facts available to him at the time he executes the search or seizure. Under this standard, searches can be lawful even if the officer is mistaken in his understanding of the facts before him, as long as his understanding led him to reasonably suspect criminal activity. But what if the officer is mistaken about whether a particular activity is actually criminal?

Full post here

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Supreme Court to Rule on Drug Dogs

From Threat Level:

The home-sniff case, also arriving from the Florida Supreme Court, tests a decade-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent in which the justices ruled that police need a warrant to use thermal-imaging devices outside a house to detect marijuana-growing operations, saying it amounted to a search. In that case, the high court ruled in 2001 that “rapidly advancing technology” threatens the core of the Fourth Amendment “right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.”

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