Tag Archives: Fourth Amendment

  New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance indicted 63 gang members involved in murders, shootings, assaults, firearms possessions and gun trafficking. Lawyers.com videojournalist Ed Alpern reports that police busted members in some of the city’s most violent street gangs by monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. New York City veteran criminal defense attorney, H. Hershel Katz, pointed out that the defendants were from low income projects. He described them as “kids whose life expectancies to them is …

The nail-biting manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect on Apr. 19 led police from door to door in Watertown, Mass., looking for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. How were police able to search people’s homes without warrants?   No Warrant, but Still Need a Reason The Fourth Amendment, of course, requires police to have warrants supported by “probable cause” to conduct searches. But exceptions allow police to make emergency searches without warrants – and sometimes even without probable cause. The “exigent circumstances” …

Suspicion of driving under the influence is not grounds in and of itself for police to draw blood from a suspect without first acquiring a warrant, the Supreme Court ruled today. In Missouri v. McNeely, the Court upheld a Missouri State Supreme Court ruling that police could only take a blood test without a warrant in an emergency or under exigent circumstances. A person’s blood alcohol content naturally dropping over time does not count. “The question presented here is whether the …

Some 85,000 people in Arkansas who collect unemployment might soon have to pee in a cup. A bill that would require recipients of unemployment benefits to sign up for random drug testing has passed the state Senate, just one out of a number of similar measures being considered by states nationwide. At least seven states have passed laws on drug testing for people who receive public assistance, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and another 29 have proposed similar bills this …

Can police track your location via your cell phone without so much as obtaining a warrant? The answer, for now, is maybe. At issue is the practice of pinging a phone through the service carrier to create a real-time GPS or triangulation data point that law enforcement can use to figure out the phone’s location. A ruling issued in March by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared that the judges would “assume without deciding that pinging is a search.” …