The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: fourth amendment
The Professor Who Brought Reform To American Law Enforcement

The Professor Who Brought Reform To American Law Enforcement

Many people, looking back on their lives, wonder if anything they've done made any difference in the lives of their fellow humans. Yale Kamisar only had to turn on any TV police drama to be reminded that millions of people had benefited from his work.

Kamisar, who died at age 92 on January 30, was a law professor who spent most of his career at the University of Michigan. Like most academics, he toiled away without imposing unduly on the attention of the public at large.

But in 1966, the Supreme Court took notice of an article he had written contrasting the protections afforded defendants in court with the conditions suspects endured when being questioned in police stations. The justices cited the essay four times in one of the most important decisions of the past century, Miranda v. Arizona.

That decision, with a majority opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren, required police to recite a warning to anyone they arrest: "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you."

The case involved Ernesto Miranda, who signed a confession only after being handcuffed, forced to stand and browbeaten for four hours by police, who ignored his plea for an attorney and, when his lawyer arrived, refused to grant him access to his client. Such abuses were common police practice at the time, but Kamisar helped the court see a way to combat it.

John F. Kennedy once said, "Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan." It was only Kamisar, though, who became known as "the father of Miranda."

The point of the ruling was to give suspects a measure of protection in the coercive environment of a police station. It was controversial not only at the time but for decades afterward. An official in Richard Nixon's Justice Department argued that the Miranda warning would harm public safety by "preventing a defendant from making any statement at all."

But the concept gained broad acceptance, and in 2000, the Supreme Court strongly, and unexpectedly, reaffirmed it. "Miranda has become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture," said the court — in an opinion written by that former Justice Department official, Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

The Miranda warning was not enough by itself to prevent police abuses, as Kamisar recognized. He was an early proponent of recording interrogations — an idea that has been adopted by more than half the states. But the warning serves as a regular reminder to police, suspects and the public that even the worst of us have rights that the government must respect.

Kamisar might have kicked back and spent the rest of his life dining out on that achievement. But his prodigious scholarship continued, and it continued to be a formidable influence on other matters, being cited in more than 30 Supreme Court decisions.

Remember that line in the Miranda warning about your right to a lawyer, at public expense if necessary? It stems from the court's 1963 decision that the Constitution requires ensuring that defendants have legal counsel — a decision that also cited Kamisar.

He was vigilant in trying to make sure that constitutional guarantees had real force. Among his most passionate causes was defending the exclusionary rule, which generally bars the use of evidence that police obtain through illegal searches.

When the Supreme Court applied this restriction to states in 1961, critics howled that it would cripple law enforcement and let the guilty go free. Kamisar pointed out that their complaint was really about the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

The court, after all, didn't alter the Fourth Amendment or the obstacles it posed to law enforcement. All it did was provide a penalty and remedy for constitutional violations.

"If the police feared that evidence they were gathering in the customary manner would now be excluded by the courts," Kamisar noted, "the police must have been violating the guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure all along." The exclusionary rule made this fundamental liberty something more than a quaint ideal.

Constitutional rights are mere words on paper until human beings find ways to give them life. Americans have far more protection against police abuses than they once did, and Yale Kamisar is one of the reasons why.

Follow Steve Chapman on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Charnesia Corley And An Assault On The Fourth Amendment

Charnesia Corley And An Assault On The Fourth Amendment

Here is a challenge for you. Reconcile the following:

In 1791, the Bill of Rights was ratified, including the Fourth Amendment, guaranteeing “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

In 2015, a 21-year-old woman named Charnesia Corley says she underwent a public body-cavity search for drugs at a gas station in Texas.

Explain, if you can, how the former and the latter can be simultaneously true.

According to Corley, a sheriff’s deputy in Harris County — Houston is the county seat — pulled her over for a traffic violation in June. Claiming he smelled marijuana, he searched the car, then called a female deputy to search Corley. She says the woman told her to pull her pants down. Corley, who was handcuffed, says she told the deputy she couldn’t and protested that she was wearing no panties. Whereupon, according to Corley, the deputy pulled the pants down herself and began her search.

Corley told CNN she “popped up” when she felt the woman’s fingers inside her and protested. Corley says the deputy replied: “I can do what I want to do, because this is a narcotics search.” Another female deputy was summoned. Corley found herself on the ground with, she says, both women on top of her. And if you were looking for the textbook definition of an “unreasonable” search, surely you could not find a better one than a bare-bottomed woman held down on the pavement in full public view while her vagina is forcibly probed for drugs.

The Harris County Sheriff has declined comment, citing an “ongoing internal affairs investigation” — and a possible civil suit. According to at least some reports, deputies did find marijuana — 0.02 ounces — though it is unclear where. The Associated Press reports that charges against Corley — drug possession and resisting arrest –were dropped last week.

Apparently, none of this is unique. The Washington Post tells us there have been similar cases in Oakland, Chicago, Atlanta, and in Citrus County and Coral Springs, Florida. The victims have been both male and female.

And so, we reap the fruit of our own short-sightedness. In their hysteria over drugs and sanguine surety that only guilty people need worry about their rights, too many of us have watched with acquiescence the steady erosion of the freedoms that stand between us and a police state. The government arrogates unto itself the power to seize a person’s money without even bringing charges, the Supreme Court gives police unfettered power to stop cars on any pretext in order to hunt for drugs, police stop and frisk — and cuff and beat — without probable cause, and some of us shrug and say, so what?

Well, this is what: Charnesia Corley ends up humiliated and sexually assaulted, spread-eagle on the ground with our collective fingers up her individual private parts. Apparently, some of us find that less terrifying than 0.02 ounces of pot.

It is past time those somnambulant people woke up to what is happening here, to what is being stolen. Drugs are a danger, yes. But in response to that danger, we have accorded police too much deference, leeway and power. That observation is not about disrespecting them, but requiring that they respect us, the people they work for.

There is, not to put too fine a point on it, zero respect in a sheriff’s deputy publicly poking her fingers into another woman’s vagina — on suspicion, mind you, of marijuana possession. How can you reconcile that with the Fourth Amendment? You can’t.

“I can do what I want to do.” So the deputy reportedly told Corley. And that should scare you.

Because it wasn’t just arrogant. It was also, apparently, correct.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: Thomas Hawk

Supreme Court Permits ‘Reasonable Mistakes’ By Police In Searches

Supreme Court Permits ‘Reasonable Mistakes’ By Police In Searches

By Michael Doyle, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a North Carolina car search, in an 8-1 decision that provides more wiggle room for law enforcement officers who make a “reasonable” mistake about the law.

With conservative and liberal justices all but united, the court ruled that the 2009 search was permissible even though the Surry County Sheriff’s Office sergeant who conducted it erred in thinking the car violated state law governing warning brake lights.

“To be reasonable is not to be perfect, and so the Fourth Amendment allows for some mistakes on the part of government officials, giving them fair leeway for enforcing the law in the community’s protection,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the sole dissenter, arguing that the decision means “further eroding the Fourth Amendment’s protection of civil liberties in a context where that protection has already been worn down.”

The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. The Supreme Court has previously ruled that a search might be permissible if the officer makes a reasonable factual mistake. Roberts cited the example Monday of an officer stopping a motorist for traveling alone in an HOV lane, only to discover that two children are slumped over asleep in the back seat.

The case decided Monday extended the same kind of reasoning to different kinds of mistakes, dealing with the law.

“Reasonable men make mistakes of law, too, and such mistakes are no less compatible with the concept of reasonable suspicion,” Roberts wrote.

Underscoring the case’s broader significance, 19 states filed a brief siding with North Carolina.

The case grew out of a police stop on the morning of April 29, 2009, when Sgt. Matt Darisse of Surry County pulled over a Ford Escort on Interstate 77 near Dobson, N.C., about 90 miles north of Charlotte. Darisse had begun following the car because he thought the driver looked “stiff and nervous.”

Darisse thought he had reason to pull the car over and subsequently search it when he noticed that only one of its brake lights went on while the car slowed. At the time, Darisse said he thought North Carolina law required that cars have two working brake lights; the North Carolina Court of Appeals later ruled Darisse was wrong.

The driver, who was not involved in the case decided Monday, and the car’s owner, Nicholas Brady Heien, did not object to a search. Following a search of about 40 minutes, Darisse found in the side compartment of a duffle bag a sandwich bag containing cocaine.

Heien pled guilty, while reserving the right to appeal.

“Only by refusing to excuse such mistakes can officers be properly deterred from engaging in such overly ambitious readings of the traffic code, at the expense of individual liberty,” Stanford Law School professor Jeffrey L. Fisher wrote in a brief filed on Heien’s behalf.

The court’s majority, though, reasoned that law enforcement officers sometimes must act quickly, even in cases where the law’s technical specifications may be hard to come by.

“A law prohibiting ‘vehicles’ in the park either covers Segways or not,” Robert noted as an example, “but an officer will nevertheless have to make a quick decision on the law the first time one whizzes by.”

Heien, now 26, was released from prison in 2012, state records show.

AFP Photo/Mark Wilson

Supreme Court: Police May Not Search Smartphones Without Warrant

Supreme Court: Police May Not Search Smartphones Without Warrant

By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Police may not search the smartphones of people who are put under arrest unless they have a warrant, the Supreme Court has ruled, a unanimous and surprising victory for privacy advocates.

The justices, ruling in cases from California and Massachusetts, said the 4th Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” prevents a police officer from examining a cellphone found on or near a person who is arrested.

Cellphones differ from other objects a person might carry, such as wallets, purses and notepads. Police have been allowed to search those during an arrest.

Because technologically sophisticated phones may hold huge amounts of personal data, they may not be searched without a warrant from a magistrate, the justices said.

Lower courts were split on the issue. Civil libertarians had voiced alarm at permitting routine searches of smartphones, since more than 10 million people are arrested every year, according to the FBI.

But law enforcement officials said smartphones can be invaluable in solving crimes. In one of the two cases in which the court ruled, David Riley was pulled over by a San Diego police officer in 2009 for having expired tags on his car. When the officer saw his driver’s license was suspended, he checked the car and found two loaded guns.

Police then put Riley under arrest and examined his Samsung smartphone. It contained photos revealing his gang affiliation and one of an Oldsmobile that had been used in a drive-by shooting. Riley was charged with attempted murder in the drive-by gang shooting.

He was convicted and sentenced to 15 years to life. The California Supreme Court rejected his claim of a privacy violation, ruling that police may search a smartphone after making an arrest.

AFP Photo/Indranil Mukherjee