It’s not necessarily about complaints. What if the driver is shit-faced drunk or the cop sees a dead body in the back seat? The stop was illegal and the fruits will/should be suppressed.
ETA: And even if the cop arrests the guy for a brief period, the stop was so clearly illegal that he owes the murderer/DUI driver damages under 1983.
I doubt that the fruits will be suppressed with the dead body in plain view.
So there was an illegal stop, but discovering that there was an arrest warrant was found my the majority of justices to make the evidence gathered admissible. Likewise, an investigation of why there is a dead body in plain view in a backseat after an unlawful stop should not render the evidence inadmissible.
You’re correct; my apologies. And thank you for the cite.
Except there are others involved beyond the rewarded drivers and the officer.
These programs seem to be well publicized, usually around Christmas time. I am very confident that if any agency around here tried this the District Attorney or the State Attorney Generals Office would quickly approach the Chief or Sheriff of such agency and politely inquire if they are out of their freaking minds.
But that’s here. YMMV in Podunk.
When Wisconsin finally got concealed carry and unlicensed open carry was codified (it was always legal but some statutes were made to prevent LEO’s from charging Disorderly Conduct for it) practically every cop in the state had to go through in-service training regarding the law.
To the best of my memory nobody brought up the scenario of “printing”. Printing here is not illegal. And unlicensed open carry is legal. If someone is printing, is the weapon still considered concealed as it can technically be seen? So can I demand to see a CCL from someone printing? There are strict laws regarding law enforcement and hassling people carrying, crimi8nal laws that can land an officer in jail!:eek: For instance, I can talk to an OCer all I want, but I cannot detain him unless there are other circumstances. I also cannot just run someones name just out of curiosity to see if the have a Concealed Carry License. That in itself is a crime.
I think I’ll rattle off an email to Assistant State Attorney General Dave Perlman and see what his opinion is regarding printing.
Did I say the complaints had to come from the drivers or the officers? I did not. I do not live in Podunk, and I would be shocked if the NYPD ever started such a program. But what would shock me more is if the NYPD Commissioner started taking orders from any of the five District Attorneys with jurisdiction in NYC.*
You asked how they get away with it- and the answer is that nobody has complained - or at least no one has done so in an effective way. Not that no one has griped or that no one has asked the Sheriff if he was out of his mind - but nobody has gone to court and filed a lawsuit alleging that their constitutional rights were violated when they were stopped and detained without any cause. I’m not for one second saying the stops are not illegal and I am confident that if someone files that suit they would win. But there won’t be a precedent until someone files that suit- and that may never happen. Maybe where you live the police would end the program if the District Attorney or the State AG told them to stop- but that still wouldn’t set a precedent.
*He would presumably consult with the NYPD Legal Bureau before starting such a program, but that’s not nearly the same thing.
Oh, this is silly.
Do you think a speeder could claim the ticket was illegal, because ‘I was going way over the limit, but the cop caught up to me, so he was speeding even faster’? Or ‘this bank robbery charge is illegal, because as I was running away with the loot, that cop assaulted me with his Taser’?
We, as a society, have chosen to authorize certain people (law enforcement officers) with a limited allowance to violate certain laws in order to prevent crime or capture people committing crimes. Even to violating our most serious law, the taking of a life, when necessary.
As to the limits, every officer has supervisors who set the guidelines, based on their judgement comparing the law the officer is violating vs. the crime being committed. For example, there are lots of online videos of officers being instructed by a supervisor to break off pursuit when they feel it is becoming too dangerous to other drivers/pedestrians in the area. And after every time an officer fires his taser or gun, there is a review by his supervisor (and sometimes even by a DA or grand jury).
In the specific case you mention:
When our AG puts out an official memoradium (as opposed to an advisement memoradium. The are not the same things) it has to be obeyed or LEO’s can be stripped of their certification almost immediately.
And it doesn’t take a citizen complaint to get the ball rolling. If the AG hears about something he deems inappropriate he can act on his own.
I’m just surprised nobody objectedd to these programs yet. If some other cop pulls me over with no cause I’m going to be pissed! Gift card be damned.
I wholeheartedly disagree. The discovery of the arrest warrant was an objective factor in the middle of the investigation that, at least in that case, re-authorized the stop so to speak.
Under your theory, there would never be an illegal search because once the cops find the incriminating evidence, the search is good.
How is that different than discovering, by merely having a view through car windows “in the middle of the investigation”, that there’s a dead body in the backseat? That’s not an objective factor?
Why don’t you lay out the attenuation factors in Brown v Illinois and see what answer that gives you?
You can just answer the questions I asked instead of asking me to lay something out. Or you can lay them out.
Because the plain view doctrine requires that the officer be in a position which he has a legal right to be in. The stop of the vehicle in this hypothetical was illegal. The officer should not have been in a position to be able to look through the car windows.
This post seems kind of dickish, man.
If you had a computer question, would you like me to respond with “Why don’t you list the fields in an TCP packet and see what answer that gives you”?
The stop was illegal, but does the officer have the legal right to be outside of someone’s car and look through a rear window? Of course he/she does. The body is still in plain view.
https://study.com/academy/lesson/plain-view-doctrine-definition-cases.html
Even though the stop was unlawful, the officer wasn’t trespassing or otherwise illegally infringing on a right to privacy.
Also:
So let’s suppose the officer witnesses the body and gets a warrant. The plain view doctrine is now irrelevant.
I’ll answer your question, but I predict you won’t accept my answer.
ANSWER: the dead body is admissible when the stop of the car is legal because of the plain view doctrine. The plain view doctrine generally holds that when an officer is legally in a position from which he can view something for which the illegal nature is immediately apparent and sufficient to give rise to probable cause, then no search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment has taken place.
By the same token, if the stop is illegal, the dead body is NOT being viewed by an officer legally in a position to view the body, and the plain view doctrine is not triggered.
This is consistent with the overall prophylactic intent of the exclusionary rule: to deter police misconduct.
When the police learn that an arrest warrant exists, and when the way they have learned this is the result of a stop that was ultimately not supported by reasonable suspicion BUT is not the result of flagrant misconduct, the relationship between the immediate police conduct and the cause of the arrest is very thin. It’s attenuated.
(Brown, quoting Nardone v. US).
There are three factors to be weighed in determining whether the attenuation doctrine may be properly applied: the temporal proximity between the police misconduct and the discovery of the evidence at issue, the presence of intervening circumstances, and the “…the purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct.”
The existence of a valid arrest warrant that pre-dated the stop is a good example of “intervening.” The temporal proximity leans against the government. And in the Utah case, the court specifically found that while the officer was ultimately mistaken in his traffic stop, he was not intentionally or flagrantly violative of the Fourth Amendment. So that factor favors admission.
This is why the dead body is handled differently than the arrest warrant.
It is fruit of the poison tree. The only reason the officer was able to see inside my car window was the fact of his illegal stop. Same as if he later got a warrant to search my car based upon his illegal view.
Change the facts a little. Say the windows were tinted and the officer could not get a good view, so he takes his baton and breaks the back window giving him an unobstructed view. Would you still say plain view?
What if he smashed the front door of my house and saw a pile of cocaine on the kitchen table? Plain view?
What if he forced me at gunpoint to empty the contents of my glovebox on the ground in front of him? Would you argue that he has a right to stand there and a right to look at the ground, so plain view?
If my question were, “How does a computer know in what sequence to reassemble TCP packets?” then sure – especially if you had already told me that TCP packets are sequenced and acknowledged, and I had rejected that claim for some unknown reason and insisted that TCP and UDP were handled similarly.
Correct. And I think when you look at it from a personal privacy perspective it makes sense.
In the first example, the driver has a right to travel on the highways without police interference unless the police have a reasonable articulable suspicion of law breaking. Yes, the driver has committed a murder, but the government does not know that and cannot discover it by violating the Fourth Amendment.
In the arrest warrant case, the government had previously found probable cause to arrest the man. The man had no right to be free from government interference because of this previous determination. This restriction on his freedom was not caused by the illegal actions of the officer. Now, of course, the police did kick the ball back into the fairway, so to speak, by the way that they discovered the existence of the arrest warrant, and that was enough to convince three Justices to dissent from the holding.
However, the big difference between the two cases was that in the hypo, the driver had every right to his privacy, and in the second, the man had no right because of a previous determination of probable cause unrelated to the officer’s illegal conduct.