A UNC School of Government Blog
In United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. __ (2012), and Florida v. Jardines, 569 U.S. __ (2013), the Supreme Court announced a new, or perhaps revived an old, understanding of the Fourth Amendment that is closely tied to property rights and trespass. In Jones, the Court ruled that attaching a GPS tracking device to a … Read more
Whether the plain view doctrine makes sense in the context of computer searches, and if it doesn’t, what courts should do about it, are controversial issues. We don’t have any North Carolina case law on point but decisions are piling up around the country. This post summarizes the controversy. Computer searches may be very thorough. … Read more
The first two posts in this series (here and here) discussed opinions from state supreme courts in Arizona and Minnesota considering, post-McNeely v. Missouri, 133 S.Ct. 1552 (2013), whether a suspect’s submission to implied consent testing was voluntary consent within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. This post discusses why that sort of analysis is … Read more
Yesterday’s post discussed challenges to implied consent laws raised by defendants following the Supreme Court’s decision last spring in Missouri v. McNeely, 133 S.Ct. 1552 (2013). The post summarized the Arizona Supreme Court’s holding that, independent of the state’s implied consent law, the Fourth Amendment requires an arrestee’s consent to be voluntary to justify a … Read more
The United States Supreme Court held last term in Missouri v. McNeeIy, 133 S. Ct. 1552 (2013), that the natural dissipation of alcohol in a person’s bloodstream does not constitute an exigency in every impaired driving case sufficient to excuse the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. McNeely’s holding comported with the analysis that the North Carolina … Read more
In a post last week, I mentioned that it looks increasingly likely that Supreme Court will grant certiorari in a case considering cell phone searches. In this post, I’ll support that remark by describing two cases in which certiorari petitions have been filed and explaining why each is a strong candidate for Supreme Court review. … Read more
This blog post is divided in two parts. This is Part II. Part I was posted yesterday. That post offered a general introduction, defined a strip search, and discussed the legality of consent searches involving strip searches. This post discusses the legality of nonconsensual strip searches. As mentioned in Part I, strip searches at jails … Read more
This blog post is divided in two parts. This is Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow. Introduction. These posts will discuss strip searches by law enforcement officers that usually occur during investigative stops, frisks, arrests, executing search warrants, and related actions. These posts will not include strip searches at jails, which are discussed … Read more
The line between a consensual encounter and a seizure can be blurry. Generally, there is no seizure when an officer simply approaches a person and asks the person a question. But there is a seizure when an officer approaches a person with a show of authority that would make a reasonable person feel that he … Read more
Maybe so, according to a recent Reuters report. Apparently, the Special Operations Division of the DEA receives information from the NSA and passes it to DEA field agents. The agents then begin criminal investigations based on the information. There are two possible problems with the program described by Reuters. End run around privacy protections. First, … Read more