US Supreme Court Arizona v. Gant 07-542

Decision here.

   This case has been discussed a lot in law enforcement circles, so most officers should be familiar with it.

   In this case, officers were investigating a drug complaint at a house.  They met with Gant briefly at the house and then left, then learned that there was a warrant for his arrest.  When they returned, Gant wasn't there but they made a couple other arrests.  Gant returned later, parked in the driveway, and was arrested after he got out of his car.  The arresting officers waited for additional officers to respond (since their cars each had a prisoner already), then secured him in the back of another responding car, then searched his car.  They found a gun and drugs.

   The trial court held that there was no PC for the search of Gant's car, but that the search was valid as a search incident to arrest because Gant had occupied the car shortly before being arrested.  The Arizona Supreme Court reversed, holding that the search was unreasonable.

   The US Supreme Court affirmed.  Previous decisions have justified searches incident to arrest based on the government's interest in preserving evidence and protecting officers.  Accordingly, the court held that "Police may search a vehicle incident to a recent occupant's arrest only if the arrestee is within reaching distance of the passenger compartment at the time of the search or it is reasonable to believe the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of arrest. When these justifications are absent, a search of an arrestee's vehicle will be unreasonable unless police obtain a warrant or show that another exception to the warrant requirement applies. "

US Supreme Court Arizona v. Johnson 07-1122

Decision here.

   In this case, Johnson was the passenger in a car stopped for a non-criminal traffic infraction.  Three officers participated in the traffic stop, and the one who was speaking to Johnson chose to instruct him to get out of the car in order to question him about his gang involvement (based on his manner of dress, his association with a place that was home to a crips gang, and his admission to a recent prison sentence).  For the same reasons, the officer searched him for weapons, and found a gun.

   Johnson was convicted, appealed, and eventually the case worked its way to the Supreme Court.  The Court held that Johnson had been lawfully detained as a passenger in a traffic stop, and that the officer had reason to believe that he was armed and dangerous, and that because of this the officer didn't need to develop additional suspicion that Johnson was involved in criminal activity in order to conduct her search.  His conviction was upheld.

US Supreme Court Pearson v. Callahan 07-751

Decision here. 

   This case lays out the rules for how qualified immunity works (overturning Saucier v. Katz in the process.  Saucier v. Katz was a much less informative read, anyway).  We'll get to that in a minute.

   Here's the facts: In 2002, officers with the Central Utah Narcotics Task Force set up a buy with a confidential informant.  The CI arranged to buy meth from Callahan in his (Callahan's) house.  He was searched beforehand, wearing a wire, and had a marked $100 bill with which to purchase said meth.  After buying the meth, he gave the arrest signal and officers made entry into the trailer where they arrested Callahan, recovered the bill, and seized a lot of meth.  There were a couple of different legal theories they used to justify their entry, but neither of them were any good.

   First, they relied on exigent circumstances.  Callahan was initially convicted at trial under this theory, and appealed his conviction.  On appeal, the prosecution admitted that there really hadn't been anything exigent about this case, and Callahan's conviction was reversed.  Then Callahan sued the officers for violating his Fourth Amendment rights.

   In defending their entry, the police relied on a contrivance of consent-once-removed.  The idea was that Callahan had consented to the CI's entry into the trailer, and now the CI was consenting to the police entry into the trailer.  I would have taken issue with this because the CI's presence in the trailer doesn't automatically confer upon him standing to consent to additional entries (side note: this decision mentions that the courts had allowed undercover officers to gain entry with consent, develop PC for an arrest, and then call for backup.  Apparently, the courts were more reluctant to give the same power to CIs, and rightly so).  The courts took issue with the use of consent-once-removed because in the interim between the events of this case and the  § 1983 suit, the Supreme Court had decided Georgia v. Randolph, which pretty much laid consent-once-removed to rest.  So the trial court ruled that consent-once-removed searches could no longer be considered reasonable, but that since the law hadn't been clearly established in 2002 so the officers were entitled to qualified immunity.  Callahan appealed.

   The Tenth Circuit held that the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity.  That court held there are only two justifications for a warrantless entry: consent, and exigent circumstances.  Given that there was no exigency, and that the court wasn't willing to humor this consent-once-removed thing, qualified immunity was denied.  Now, the officers appealed to the Supreme Court.

   Qualified Immunity is a legal doctrine that protects law enforcement from getting sued for acts within the scope of their duties.  It's not just a shield from personal liability, it's a way to get cases dismissed entirely before going to trial and resolving factual disputes.  In order for someone to successfully overcome qualified immunity, they have to show two things:
 1- The evidence (viewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiff) has to show that the officers violated a constitutional right.
 2- The right in question must have been clearly established at the time of the incident (in other words, existing case law has to have been sufficient to put the officers on notice that their actions were illegal).

   So the way it works is that if a cop gets sued, then the cop can claim qualified immunity.  The trial court then decides if the above criteria are met.  If both #1 and #2 above are true, then the officer is not entitled to qualified immunity and the case goes to trial (where either side could still win).  If either of the above conditions are false, then the officer is entitled to qualified immunity and the case is dismissed without ever getting to a trial.

   The rest of this post is going to get a little academic, but if everything above makes sense then you've got the most important parts down.

   Under Saucier v. Katz, the trial court was required to address those two points in the order that I listed them.  Every time an officer claimed qualified immunity, the court would have to first decide if a constitutional right had been violated.  If one had been, then the court would decide if that right was clearly established.  This case overturned Saucier.  The same two criteria still had to be met, but now the courts were free to address the two criteria in whichever order they wanted; and if either of the points was enough to preserve qualified immunity, then the court didn't have to consider the other.  Admittedly, that doesn't have too much impact on how the police do our jobs, but it's a huge deal for the courts.  It allows them to resolve cases without unnecessarily making significant case law.

   The courts usually like to resolve whatever case is in front of them by making the smallest decision that will do.  That way, the most fundamental questions of law are left more or less undisturbed except in cases that really turn on on important issues.  Under Saucier, any time anyone sued a cop the courts were forced to create constitutional case law no matter how stupid and pointless the actual lawsuit was, even in cases where a higher court was already exploring the same issue using a case better suited to determining what the precedent should be.  With Saucier overturned, the court could resolve stupid cases just by taking judicial notice that the right alleged to have been violated wasn't clearly established, and leave it at that.  Important issues could be left for cases that deserved more attention.

   Back to the case at hand... the Supreme Court applied its own reasoning to this case and addressed the above qualified immunity questions in the newly-authorized reverse order (maybe I've been reading too many of these decisions, but I thought that was pretty funny).  The court held that at the time of the incident, the invalidity of the consent-once-removed doctrine hadn't been clearly established by existing case law, so the officers were entitled to qualified immunity.  Since that was sufficient to resolve the lawsuit, the court declined to address whether or not any constitutional right was actually violated (although, as mentioned above, that question was probably sufficiently addressed in Georgia v. Randolph).

   tl;dr: the cops won, and the court found a new way of explaining why.

US Supreme Court Herring v. US 07-513

Decision here.

   Herring went to the impound lot to pick up his car.  He apparently had had a number of run-ins with the police before, when a deputy saw him he contacted the county clerk to find out if there were any local warrants for his arrest.  There weren't, so he had the clerk contact a neighboring county to see if there were any warrants for Herring's arrest there.  The clerks of the neighboring county checked their records and found that there was a warrant.  The deputy pulled Herring over and arrested him, in the process finding meth and a gun (Herring was a convicted felon).

   The deputies requested a hard copy of the warrant be faxed to their station, but the clerks couldn't find a hard copy so they called the court.  It turned out that the warrant had been canceled five months ago, the court had informed law enforcement of this fact, and someone had forgotten to take it out of the law enforcement database.  The error took about ten minutes to discover, but by then it was too late; the meth and gun had already been found.  The court found that the arresting officers were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing or negligence, but assumed that whoever had dropped the ball was also a law enforcement official and had acted negligently. Even so, the court admitted the evidence because the clerical error was merely negligent and not deliberate, it was attenuated from the arrest, and the preventative benefit (if any) of suppressing the evidence was outweighed by the cost.  Herring appealed.

   The Supreme Court agreed with the trial court, and ruled that the evidence was properly admitted.  The court noted that exclusion would have been justified if the police had been reckless in their maintenance of the warrant database or if they had intentionally made false entries to justify future arrests, but that wasn't the case here.  It was just an isolated error, and suppressing evidence wouldn't make it any less likely to recur, so there was no reason to apply the exclusionary rule.

Tenth Circuit US v. Chavez 07-2008

Decision here.

   The DEA was conducting an investigation of Mr. Moreno, using information from a reliable confidential informant.  The CI made arrangements for Moreno to sell a kilo of cocaine at a particular truck stop.  Moreno told the CI that he would be bringing a driver along.  On the day the transaction was to take place, the DEA watched Moreno drive his own truck to a house, which he left shortly afterwards as a passenger in Chavez's truck.  When the pair stopped at a gas station, the DEA instructed the CI to call Moreno again.  Moreno told the CI that he had just left, and was on his way to the truck stop.

   In order to protect the secrecy of their investigation, and the identity of the CI, the DEA contacted a K9 officer with the New Mexico State Police.  They described the truck to the officer (including the appearance, license number, and number of occupants), told the officer that the truck was transporting coke, and instructed him to find his own reason to stop the truck.  The officer found Chavez's truck, and conducted a traffic stop for failing to turn on its headlights in a safety zone.  The trouble is, although the officer believed this to be a violation, it wasn't.

   The officer wrote Chavez (who was driving) a ticket for the imaginary violation and for NPOI, and then told Chavez and Moreno that they were free to go.  Before they left, he started talking to them again and eventually asked for consent to search the car.  When asked what would happen if they refused, he told Chavez and Moreno that if they refused he would have the dog sniff their truck before allowing them to leave (so apparently both "consent" and "free to go" mean something different to that officer than they mean to me.  Whatever).  Chavez and Moreno each signed consent forms, and the officer searched the truck.  He found the cocaine.  Chavez and Moreno were arrested, and later moved to suppress the cocaine.  They argued that the cocaine had been found as a result of an unlawful stop, because the NMSP officer who made the stop wasn't aware of the facts which would have justified it; he just knew that the DEA said there was reason to stop the car.  The trial court denied the motion to suppress.  Chavez entered a conditional guilty plea, and appealed the denial of the suppression.

   The Tenth Circuit applied the collective knowledge doctrine (also known as the fellow officer rule) to this case, and described two different ways that officers impart the requisite knowledge to each other: horizontally and vertically.

   Knowledge may be imparted horizontally in cases where different officers learn different facts during the same investigation, and if you put all the information together then it amounts to probable cause (or reasonable suspicion, if that's what you're going for).  In cases like that, the important question is whether the officers actually communicated with each other and pooled their knowledge.  The courts won't assume that just because one officer knows something every other officer does to.  That may sound obvious, but it has to be said because someone already screwed it up (in US v. Shareef, which is referred to in this decision).

   Knowledge may be imparted vertically if one officer tells another that there is PC for a search (or RS for a stop).  In cases like this, the important question is whether or not the first officer really had PC.  If so, the stop is good.  If not, the stop is bad through no fault of the arresting officer's (like in Whitely v. Warden).

   Applying this reasoning to the case at hand, the court didn't bother to address whether or not the NMSP officer could stop Chavez for the imaginary violation, or whether or not he obtained valid consent, or any of that. The court held that the facts known to the DEA were sufficient to establish probable cause, and that they had effectively communicated this to the NMSP officer, so he was entitled to act based on their probable cause. This is also a case that illustrates that an officer's subjective intent is not relevant, so long as the actions he takes are objectively reasonable based on the information available to him at the time.

US Supreme Court US v. Karam 06-8056

Decision here.

   Karam was stopped by a Wyoming trooper for following too closely.  During the traffic stop, the trooper told Karam he was going to give him a warning.  The trooper also talked to Karam about his travel plans and whatnot while he was running his license through the computer (apparently Wyoming is one of those places where the drivers in traffic stops sit in the patrol with the cop.  Crazy bastards).  Karam said something early on about needing to use the bathroom, and the trooper pointed out that there was a truck stop which Karam had just passed.  Karam said something which the trooper believed (possibly mistakenly) to mean that he had stopped there to buy tea, which the trooper knew to be false.  Karam gave vague, inconsistent responses about where he was going and where he had stayed, and claimed to have flown from Akron to LA and decided to rent a car to drive back to Arkon.  Karam's car apparently contained some cardboard boxes which the trooper thought were suspicious because he was aware of another case where marijuana had been packaged in similar boxes.  Other than that, it contained less luggage than the trooper would have expected for the trip.  Karam was given a warning for the traffic violation, released, and then asked for consent to search his car.  He refused.

   Then the trooper told him he was not free to leave, and detained him while they waited for a K9 to arrive and sniff the car.  The dog alerted, the car was searched, the drugs were found, Karam was arrested and eventually convicted.  He appealed, and the US Supreme Court affirmed his conviction.

   The court explained that investigative detentions must be justified at their inception, and reasonably related in scope to the circumstances that justify the stop.  Traffic stops are similar to investigative detentions, so the same applies to them (they can last long enough to check records, fill out tickets/warnings, etc).  During the stop, an officer is allowed to ask questions both related and unrelated to the reason for the stop, so long as unrelated matters don't prolong the stop.  Once the business of the stop has been handled, an officer may continue the stop only if the officer develops additional reasonable suspicion for continuing the stop or if the stop becomes consensual (I've always thought downgrading from a compulsory stop to a consensual one is a stretch, but so far no one has screwed that up badly enough for the courts to drop the hammer).

   In this particular case, the court discounted some of the factors that the state courts had relied on for determining that there was PC.  Even though reasonable suspicion can be based on factors which have innocent explanations, the court is only willing to give us just so much leeway with that.  The court held that there was nothing suspicious about a stack of cardboard boxes in a car,  The court also held that even though LA apparently exports drugs and Akron apparently imports them, there is nothing suspicious about driving from one metropolitan area to another (even if you flew the other way a week and a half ago).

   The court noted that Karam may not have actually claimed to have stopped at the truck stop, but that the trooper understood him to have claimed that.  Reasonable suspicion must be based on facts known to the officer at the inception of the stop, but it can also be based on facts which an officer mistakenly believes to be true so long as the mistake of fact is reasonable.  So even if Karam didn't actually say that he stopped, if the trooper thought he heard that then this perceived lie can be considered in determining whether or not there was reasonable suspicion.

   Other than that, there was the inconsistent responses about travel arrangements.  The court held that although none of the facts relied on in this case would alone constitute reasonable suspicion, reasonable suspicion is not a "divide-and-conquer" analysis; the situation has to be taken as a whole.  The various facts of the case viewed together were sufficient to justify detaining Karam until the drug dog showed up.

US Supreme Court Brendlin v. California 06-8120

Decision here.

   Police in California stopped a car to see if the registration was current, without first developing reasonable suspicion to stop the car.  Brendlin was a passenger in the car.  The officer effecting the stop recognized him, learned that he was wanted for a parole violation, and arrested him.  This led to a search of the car, which led to the discovery of meth paraphernalia, and Brendlin was charged with manufacturing.  Brendlin moved to suppress the evidence, saying that the initial stop was invalid.  This one went back and forth on each appeal.  The government conceded that there wasn't a reason to stop the car, but argued that Brendlin was not seized at the time of the illegal traffic stop, but only when he was actually placed under arrest, and therefore did not have standing to challenge the stop.

   The Supreme Court held that the passengers of a car are seized during traffic stops, and therefore they may challenge the validity of the stop.