Fourth Amendment

The Ninth Circuit declined a rehearing en banc, leaving in place a panel opinion holding that a warrantless forensic search of the defendant’s phone was outside the scope of a permissible routine border search and violated the Fourth Amendment. The Court held that warrantless border searches are limited in scope to routine customs inspections for contraband, not evidence, that the only kind of contraband on a phone is child pornography, and that the officers did not have reasonable suspicion that the phone contained child pornography.

The Ninth Circuit vacated the defendant’s conviction and held that the attenuation doctrine should not have been applied to deny his motion to suppress. The officers’ second, discretionary search of the defendant’s home was a direct result of a prior unlawful sweep of the home during which officers discovered that the defendant had a condition of supervised release allowing searches. The temporal proximity between the searches and the investigatory motives of the officers outweighed the intervening nature of discovering the condition of supervised release, and evidence discovered during the second search should have been suppressed.

Applying the Rehaif analysis to a defendant who was convicted at trial for unlawful possession of a firearm as a convicted felon, the Fourth Circuit reversed the defendant’s conviction as plain error, holding that the failure to properly advise the defendant of, or charge him with, the element of knowledge of his felon status substantially affected his rights and deprived him of a defense at trial, despite the defendant running from the police, his prior 12-year prison term, and his stipulations at trial regarding his prior conviction and civil rights, .

The Fifth Circuit reversed the grant of a defendant’s motion to suppress evidence under a broad, written consent to search a cell phone and seize property prior to issuance of a search warrant. Applying the objective standard, the Court held that a reasonable person would understand consent to examine a phone includes its contents and that permission to seize materials includes permission to seize and review phone contents later.

The Eleventh Circuit upheld a defendant’s conviction and held there was no investigatory stop where officers did not make a show of authority and other people left the scene as the officers approached.

The Eleventh Circuit reconsidered its prior panel decision and upheld a district court’s denial of a motion to suppress evidence found during a traffic stop because the officer had reasonable suspicion for the stop and, although he improperly prolonged the stop, the exclusionary rule did not apply.

On September 2, 2020, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion that, while affirming the convictions of the defendants raising the appeals, held that the mass surveillance program operated by the National Security Agency (NSA) violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and was potentially unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. In 2013, Edward […]

The Seventh Circuit upheld a defendant’s drug convictions and denial of suppression because the officer had probable cause to search the trunk of the defendant’s car due to the smell of burnt marijuana and the defendant’s observable reaction when asked about the trunk.

The Sixth Circuit upheld a search warrant under the good faith exception in Leon where there was no probable cause and the affidavit only relied on undated text messages between the defendant and a drug purchaser, loose marijuana and untested substances found in the defendant’s trash, and the defendant’s prior criminal history.

Sitting en banc, the Fourth Circuit held that the exigent circumstances and emergency aid exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement did not justify the officers’ suspicion-less stop and frisk of the defendant who was an area where officers had heard gun shots being fired less than a minute before. There were other individuals and there was no particularized evidence that the defendant had been involved in the shooting or posed a danger to others.