A group of Los Angeles hotel owners challenged a Los Angeles city ordinance which authorizes police to search through hotels’ guest registers without a warrant. The City claimed that hotel owners have no expectation of privacy in a business record that they are required by the City to keep. And the City claimed it has a significant interest in fighting crimes committed in and around the hotel property. Thus, the City asserted that, in such a highly regulated industry, there is no need for probable cause, much less a warrant. In short, Los Angeles argued that the Fourth Amendment does not apply.
Rodriguez v. United States
(opposing extended traffic stop without reason or warrant as an unlawful seizure)
Rodriguez is a Fourth Amendment case involving a search and seizure after the predicate traffic stop had ended. In this case, the police stopped a vehicle, and the officer wrote the driver a warning for momentarily veering onto the shoulder. However, even though the stop had ended, the officer continued to talk to the occupants and asked them if they minded him searching the vehicle with his drug dog. When the driver declined, the cop seized the car and occupants, ordering them not to move. He then performed a dog-sniff drug search.
Heien v. North Carolina
(opposing warrantless stop and search based on police mistake of law)
Heien is a Fourth Amendment case involving a traffic stop for something that the officer incorrectly believed was a crime. Although the car should not have been stopped, the North Carolina courts upheld the police’s seizure of the car’s passenger’s illegal property because the police’s mistake in stopping the car was “reasonable.” Heien sought U.S. Supreme Court review, and CLDEF submitted an amicus curiae brief in support of his position. CLDEF’s brief critiqued the use of the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test that has been routinely used by federal courts to justify intrusions of liberty through a multitude of subjective shades of grey. Instead, armed with an understanding that the Fourth Amendment protects property rights, the inquiry becomes objectively black and white — whether the government does or does not have a superior property interest in the person and/or vehicle it wishes to detain. Viewed in that light, the police had no right to stop someone who had violated no law, regardless of how “reasonable” an officer’s mistake may seem to a court.
United States v. Wurie
(opposing warrantless searches of cell phone pursuant to a lawful arrest)
Wurie was a Fourth Amendment case involving the warrantless search of a cellular phone pursuant to an arrest. The government argued that, any time it makes an arrest, it has the right to search a person’s cell phone without a warrant as a matter of course, “incidental” to the arrest. Wurie was convicted based upon information found in the search, and he sought U.S. Supreme Court review.
Cotterman v. United States
(opposing border exception to the Fourth Amendment)
Cotterman was a Fourth Amendment case about whether the federal government can seize a laptop at a border checkpoint and copy the contents without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. Cotterman was convicted based on such a search, and he sought review by the U.S. Supreme Court. CLDEF’s amicus curiae brief, in support of the petitioner, argued that the case should not be analyzed based on non-textual “reasonable expectation of privacy” standards, but instead involved a “general search” absolutely prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. This would be no different than if the government seized a person’s firearms and copied down the serial numbers as part of a general search to see if they were stolen. CLDEF’s effort in this case continues to press for a revitalized Fourth Amendment principle to protect property, not just some watered-down notion of a reasonable expectation of privacy — an expectation which is rapidly shrinking in the digital age.
James R. Clapper Jr. v. Amnesty International USA
(opposing FISA’s secret warrantless spying on U.S. citizens)
This case involved a challenge, by attorneys sometimes representing foreign persons, to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Amendments of 2008, involving the government spying on U.S. citizens without a warrant. The lower court dismissed the case, finding the plaintiffs lacked standing, but the Second Circuit reversed. The Government sought U.S. Supreme Court review.
Christopher Hedges v. Barack Obama, et al., Amicus Brief
On April 16, 2012 an amicus brief was filed on behalf of CLDEF in the case of Christopher Hedges v. Barack Obama, et al. in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in support of plaintiffs. This lawsuit challenges the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012’s illegal detention provision.
United States v. Antoine Jones
(opposing police GPS tracking device on vehicle)
This case constitutes a major victory for CLDEF! Jones involved the police attaching a GPS tracking device to Jones’ vehicle without a warrant. The police tracked Jones’ movements for nearly a month. Jones was convicted, but the Court of Appeals overturned the conviction. The government sought U.S. Supreme Court review. The government argued that Jones had no expectation of privacy of his movements on the road.
United States v. Antoine Jones, Amicus Brief (on the Petition for Writ of Certiorari)
On May 16, 2011 an amicus brief was filed on behalf of CLDEF in the case of United States v. Antoine Jones in the United States Supreme Court. Our amicus brief urges the Supreme Court to grant the petition for writ of certiorari in this case, not for the reasons stated in the government’s petition, but to resolve a split among the circuits on the Fourth Amendment’s relevance and application to covert installations of global positioning systems (“GPS”) on an American citizen’s automobile by restoring the Fourth Amendment to its original text and purpose. Our amicus brief argues that the original objective, property-based text and purpose of the Fourth Amendment should be revived and applied, while the current ad hoc subjective, privacy-based view of the Fourth Amendment should be rejected.
Searches and Seizure
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
– Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
The Fourth Amendment was put into the Bill of Rights to protect one’s private property interests in his “person[], houses, papers, and effects.” Any government intrusion upon such property is per se “unreasonable,” unless the government has a superior property interest in the person or things to be searched or seized.
Thus, even if the government has probable cause and a warrant, a search or seizure of property is unreasonable unless the government can show that the thing to be seized is: (i) the fruit of a crime; (ii) the instrumentality of a crime; or (iii) contraband. If the only interest of the government is to obtain “evidence,” that would be an impermissible (“unreasonable”) seizure. For many years, this was the law of the land, known as the “mere evidence rule.”
Additionally, even if the government may search for and seize such property, it must first establish to the satisfaction of a member of the judicial branch that there is probable cause, supported by a sworn affidavit, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the property to be seized. The warrant requirement ensured that the government was not engaging in an unjustified search, but required an affidavit of someone with personal knowledge of the presence of one of the three types of property that could be seized. Should the affidavit be false, the person who signed it could be sued for trespass, as could the government officials wrongfully carrying out the search.
All aspects of the Fourth Amendment have been eroded during the Twentieth Century, to the point that the government now asserts the right to search and seize: (i) on many occasions, without any warrant; (ii) on other occasions with a warrant from someone other than a judge; and (iii) on all occasions, seeking anything whatsoever it wants if it has a warrant. The mere evidence rule has been abandoned. The warrant requirement is riddled with exceptions. And the property basis of the Fourth Amendment has been undermined by an atextual standard known as “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The first legal writing in America about a right of privacy did not occur until the 1890’s, and thus it could not be said that the Founders were referring to privacy in crafting the Fourth Amendment.
CLDEF focuses on restoring the original understanding of the Fourth Amendment. The first breakthrough occurred when the position advanced in CLDEF’s amicus curiae brief in United States v. Jones, was largely adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court — bringing back the property basis of Fourth Amendment.
These important Fourth Amendment principles were set out in a 2013 Law Review article by CLDEF lawyers Herbert W. Titus and William J. Olson, entitled
“U.S. v. Jones: Reviving the Property Foundation of the Fourth Amendment,” published in the Case Western Reserve University School of Law Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet.
Below are some of the Searches and Seizures matters in which CLDEF has been involved.
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