Addendum to a botched drug raid

Here is a link to the actual warrant for the botched drug raid. The article states that the warrant had been uplifted to Scribd, but when you check the link you will find that the warrant has been removed from the site. I guess there is a limit to Art Acevedo's transparency when the shit hits the fan.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the police seized 18 grams of marijuana and 1.5 grams of cocaine from the house. That's right, a little more than half-an-ounce of weed and little powder.

So here's my question, did the police kick in the wrong door or did they just flat out lie in the warrant application? It's one or the other.

What say you, Joe Gamaldi?

Anatomy of a botched drug raid

Last month five officers from the Houston Police Department were injured - four were shot - in a drug raid gone incredibly wrong. At the time we were barraged with statements from HPD that the police raided the house, shot the dogs and killed the residents, Donald Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, because a confidential informant told them the couple had heroin and guns in the house.

Joe Gamaldi, the head of the local police union, claimed the police had targets on their backs and that he was sick and tired of people claiming the police were the bad guys. He even threatened to keep tabs on those who criticized the police. Woo-hoo! Over here, Joe!

The local media - never ones to look too deeply into any story involving the police - ate it up. The local media never once questioned the reliability of the informant or the rationale behind a "dynamic" entry.

But there was a problem. There was no heroin in the house. There was a small amount of marijuana and cocaine. There were rifles and shotguns, but there was no evidence that they were obtained illegally.

Neighbors and relatives told anyone who would listen that neither Mr. Tuttle nor Ms. Nicholas were involved in the drug trade. Neither had any convictions for drug activity. Neither had any convictions for violent behavior.

Police Chief Art Acevedo (doing his best to play a prevent defense) told the media that police had received a tip from an anonymous called that there were guns and heroin inside the house. Police then sent their informant into the house to get some heroin. They claim he came out with the drug and a tale the house was a veritable Wal-Mart of heroin.

If anyone knows how this shit works in Houston, it should come as no surprise that the officers went to a judge in the municipal courthouse (where the primary business of the day is traffic court) to find a judge who would sign the warrant without asking any pesky questions about probable cause or the need for a "no-knock" warrant. Needless to say, they found a very pliant judge on Lubbock Street.

Since the jump-out boys were from narcotics, no one was wearing bodycams at the time of the raid. I get it. The last thing the police want the public to see is just how much of a shit show these raids turn into.

And now an unnamed officer involved in the raid has been relieved of duty pending an investigation into the botched raid.

For those of y'all keeping score on this, the search warrant said the police believed that heroin and handguns would be found in the house. Neither were.

If anyone out there has any delusion that the police follow a rigid procedure in obtaining evidence, drafting a warrant application and discussing with a judge why the warrant needs to be served, you may now put your glasses back on and witness just how this process works.

In reality the warrant applications filed by the police - and prosecutors - are fill-in-the-blank cookie-cutter forms where the affiant cuts and pastes the basis of his suspicion. This suspicion can rarely be backed up by anything resembling articulable facts. These affidavits are presented to judges who preside over traffic courts who sign them without raising any questions.

The result is what happened in Houston last month. This should be Exhibit A in a lesson as to why the war on drugs has been an abject failure.

See also:

Blakinger, Keri, et al. "Houston police officer connected to deadly raid, shootout relieved of duty," Houston Chronicle (2/8/2019)

Reigstad, Leif, "A no-knock raid in Houston led to deaths and police injuries. Should police rethink the process?" Texas Monthly (2/12019)

Blakinger, Keri and Stephen Tucker Paulson, "Police identify powder recovered in deadly drug raid" Houston Chronicle 2/2/2019)

Iowa takes exception to shrinking 4th Amendment

Take that, SCOTUS!

And with the stroke of a pen (or, more accurately, the tapping of a few keys), the Iowa Supreme Court decided it wasn't playing games with the search and seizure clause of the state's constitution. As Justice Appell put it:

In the words of another state supreme court, we do not allow the words of our Iowa Constitution to be “balloons to be blown up or deflated every time, and precisely in accord with the interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court, following some tortious trail.”

The question at hand was whether a so-called "inventory" search was a valid exception to the 4th Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure. Art. 1, Sec. 8 of the Iowa Constitution contains the same wording as the 4th Amendment.

Bion Ingram was driving to work one morning when he was pulled over for a defective license plate lamp (one of those little lovelies that a motorist can never disprove). The officer then determined that the registration affixed to Mr. Ingram's car didn't quite match the car itself. The officer told Mr. Ingram he was going to have to impound the car but he offered to give him a ride to the nearest gas station so a friend could take him to work.

Then the officer asked if Mr. Ingram has anything of value in the car. He said no. The police then told him they were going to do an inventory search of the car before they towed it. And wouldn't you know it, they found a bag with a glass pipe and a gram of meth. Mr. Ingram was arrested. He challenged the search on the grounds there was no probable cause to search and that there was no warrant.

The trial court said who cares? He was convicted of possession of a controlled substance and filed an appeal.

The court decided that it wasn't going to allow the whims of the US Supreme Court to determine just what an unreasonable search was in Iowa. In its ruling the court held that the Supreme Court's determination of what was reasonable under the 4th Amendment wasn't the law of the land -- just the minimum guaranteed right.

The opinion offers a fairly comprehensive history of automobile exceptions to the 4th Amendment.

The opinion also offers advise to trial attorneys -- when making an objection based on federal constitutional law, make damn sure you make the same objection on state constitutional (or statutory) grounds when available. Failing to do so could open you up for a claim of ineffective assistance.

h/t Owen Barcala

The problem with a property-based Fourth Amendment analysis

One fine day Ryan Collins went out riding a distinctive orange and black motorcycle. I'm going to assume that the weather was fine and the traffic was fairly light because he was cruising around at speeds approaching 140 mph.

While Mr. Collins may have been having himself quite the ride, the local police were not nearly as thrilled as the reports rolled in of an orange and black motorcycle traveling at a high rate of speed.

Somehow the police discovered that the bike didn't exactly belong to Mr. Collins. Through a little bit of snooping, they discovered the bike in question on a Facebook post. Officers went to Mr. Collins' house and found a tarp covering what appeared to be a bike in the driveway.  Officer Rhodes walked up the drive, lifted the tarp and saw the bike - without first obtaining a search warrant.

Officers then waited and arrested Mr. Collins when he returned. After the trial court denied his motion to suppress the discovery of the bike, Mr. Collins was convicted of receiving stolen property.

Last week the US Supreme Court reversed Mr. Collins' conviction on the grounds that Officer Rhodes violated Mr. Collins' fourth amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure when he lifted the tarp.

The state had argued that this particular incident fell under the so-called vehicle exception to the fourth amendment and that the police were acting lawfully when lifting the tarp off what appeared to be a bike sitting in the driveway of a residence.

The Supreme Court held that the bike was parked in the curtilage of Mr. Collins' house and was not in plain sight since it was covered by a tarp.

Now, while this case is a victory for fourth amendment advocates and anyone under suspicion by the police, it continues a recent trend of basing fourth amendment protections on the concepts of property law. The curtilage is considered to that area immediately outside a person's house -- it could consist of patios, porches, sidewalks, breezeways and driveways. These are areas that aren't actually part of the house - but they are close enough, in some cases, to be considered as such.

Just because something is on the curtilage, however, doesn't mean the police can't walk up to it and examine it. Had Mr. Collins just parked his bike in the driveway in plain sight of anyone driving or walking by, the result of this case would have been the opposite. What saved Mr. Collins was the fact he tossed a tarp over the bike as it sat in his driveway. That meant the only way the police could determine the bike was stolen was to walk up the driveway and lift the tarp - a trespass as the court decided.

While this property-based determination of what constitutes an unreasonable search is helpful in case involving physical evidence, it is not so helpful when the same analysis is applied to data such as e-mails or web searches or information stored on the Cloud. In those instances there is no physical property, there is no curtilage, there is no trespass. When we start talking about digital data we're talking more about a relationship between a person and a set of binary digits.

And if we're looking at the relationship between a person and some data stored on a server somewhere, we don't have 18th century property law to fall back on. Rather then making fourth amendment jurisprudence all about property law concepts, maybe we need to go back and re-ask the question "what is unreasonable?"

You're my home

Steven Long was a janitor at CenturyLink Field in Seattle, home of the Seattle Seahawks. As befits many jobs in our society, this one didn't pay Mr. Long enough to afford a place to live. So he lived out of his truck.

In Seattle a car cannot remain parked in the same spot for more than 72 hours (unless I suspect that spot is the driveway of a home). Mr. Long's truck was not in the best of repair and he was unable to move it so it was impounded.

Mr. Long sued the city claiming that because he was living out of his truck, the city could not legally impound his truck. He relied on Washington state's homestead law.

The city argued that the application of the homestead law was improper and that the city was well within its authority to impound the truck. The city denied that impounding the truck amounted to a forced sale of Mr. Long's homestead because there was no constitutional right to housing.

Mr. Long prevailed when the judge ruled that his truck was his home.

This decision comes on the heels of a decision in Clark County, Washington, in which a court held that police officers violated a homeless man's 4th Amendment right to privacy when they lifted up the tarp under which he was sleeping, found a bag of meth and arrested him.

The homeless are being criminalized as a result of gentrification and city's attempts to lure affluent whites from the suburbs to downtown business districts. The homeless are an inconvenience as well as a reminder that our economy hasn't come close to benefiting everyone in society.

First you get cities making it illegal for the homeless to camp under overpasses. Then you make it a crime to provide food to the homeless without a permit.

As a result of conservative lawmakers, funding to mental health providers, homeless shelters and homeless advocacy grounds have been cut to the bone. The minimum wage isn't even enough for a person to live on. We subsidize low-wage employers by proving food stamps, welfare and Medicaid to those who can't afford to live on the wages employers like Wal-Mart, McDonald's and the like pay.

These two court rulings out of Washington are evidence that at least two judges understand the new American economy and the criminalization of the poor.

The bankruptcy of ideas

President Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch is a real throwback. Really a throwback.

He is a self-described "originalist" when it comes to interpreting the Constitution. In other words, in Mr. Gorsuch's reality, the words and phrases in the Constitution mean just what they meant back in the late 18th century.

Let's see. Back in the 1780's slavery was legal in the United States. Women didn't have the right to vote. There were no cars, there were no computers. The United States was a rural agrarian society. There was also a belief back in the early days of the Republic that the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government - not to the individual states. There was also no such thing as judicial review by the Supreme Court until Chief Justice John Marshall went looking for a justification for his ruling in Marbury v. Madison and created it out of whole cloth.

Does this mean that a Justice Gorsuch would hold any warrantless search to be unconsitutional? Would he find that the NSA's data dumps to be illegal since computers weren't something contemplated by the Founding Fathers? Will warrentless searches of cars go away since there wasn't such a thing back in George Washington's days?

Will we return to the 18th century notion of an arrest instead of looking for any way possible to not call an arrest an arrest in order to keep evidence admissible?

Will the ruling in Citizen's United be cast upon the ash heap of history since the notion of the corporate person did not exist in 1789? And what about this quaint notion that campaign contributions are a form of free speech?

Does Mr. Gorsuch believe that every armed conflict the United States has entered since the end of World War II was illegal since there was no declaration of war from Congress?

Mr. Gorsuch's self-proclaimed judicial philosophy is completely vapid. It is but a fig leaf to cover a naked attempt to turn back constitutional protections of the accused, minorities and women. Now, as much as I disliked Antonin Scalia, he made some rulings in 4th Amendment cases that protected the rights of the accused. Of course those rulings were a small counterpoint to his rulings that favored the rights of the powerful over the rights of the powerless.

This bankrupt philosophy isn't a philosophy at all. It is merely a justification to carry out a libertarian agenda that will seek to unleash capitalism at its worst.

Taking away freedom on the cheap

One of our worst nightmares is being wrongly arrested by the police and getting lost in the criminal (in)justice system. Thanks to a cheap drug test kit, many folks around the country have had the pleasure of being arrested, having their cars impounded, losing their jobs and their apartments for no reason at all.

Factor in the pressure some folks have to plead guilty by appointed attorneys in order to get out of jail quicker and you have a situation that should shock the conscience of our nation. Yet it's something we are more than happy to sweep under the rug.

Last week the New York Times Magazine ran an article about the real life aftermath of the cheap roadside test kit focusing on the ordeal faced by one Amy Albritton from Louisiana. Her nightmare occurred right here in my hometown, Houston.

She and a friend were stopped by officers when they were in town for her friend's job interview. One officer claimed to have found a syringe needle in the visor and a (coerced) search of the car then turned up a powder-like substance (that Ms. Albritton said was BC headache powder) and a grain of something on the floorboard.

The officer who broke open the test kit claimed it showed the grain of something was, in fact, a piece of crack cocaine. Ms. Albritton was arrested (her friend disclaimed any knowledge of the substance and, since it was her car, she took the ride downtown) and charged with possession of a controlled substance - a state jail felony punishable by up to two years in prison.

There are no established error rates for the field tests, in part because their accuracy varies so widely depending on who is using them and how. In Las Vegas, authorities re-examined a sampling of cocaine field tests conducted between 2010 and 2013 and found that 33 percent of them were false positives. Data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab system show that 21 percent of evidence that the police listed as methamphetamine after identifying it was not methamphetamine, and half of those false positives were not any kind of illegal drug at all. In one notable Florida episode, Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies produced 15 false positives for methamphetamine in the first seven months of 2014. When we examined the department’s records, they showed that officers, faced with somewhat ambiguous directions on the pouches, had simply misunderstood which colors indicated a positive result.

The next morning Ms. Albritton met with a gentlemen who told her he was her court-appointed attorney. While she claimed innocence, he told her that the prosecutor would offer her 45 days (under a provision of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure that allows certain felonies to be punished as misdemeanors) and that she would be in jail for much longer if she actually chose to fight her case. She gave in and pled guilty before Judge Vanessa Velasquez.

A later test of the substances by the Houston Police Department Crime Lab (who apparently tested substances from closed cases on a regular basis but never notified anyone of the results - among other sins that have been documented previously) showed that the substance in question was not crack cocaine. The tests also showed that there was nothing in the needle and that the powdery substance was BC powder.

All of this was a day late and a dollar short for Ms. Albritton who lost her job and was now hamstrung with a felony conviction due to her wrongful arrest.

Now, if we know that these kits are inherently unreliable and that their accuracy is affected by light and temperature and other environmental factors, why do we allow these tests to be the basis of criminal charges that have serious ramifications for the people involved? Why aren't we waiting for the results of actual lab tests before we file charges against someone? Why are we holding folks in jail for non-violent drug offenses simply because they can't afford to post a bond? And why the fuck are attorneys pressuring their "clients" to plead guilty without the benefit of a lab report?

Field tests provide quick answers. But if those answers and confessions cannot be trusted, Charles McClelland, the former Houston police chief, says, officers should not be using them. During an interview in March, McClelland said that if he had known of the false positives Houston’s officers were generating, he would have ordered a halt to all field testing departmentwide. Police officers are not chemists, McClelland said. “Officers shouldn’t collect and test their own evidence, period. I don’t care whether that’s cocaine, blood, hair.”

Another question, posed by former Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland, is why do we allow the folks who want to arrest someone to run the test that determines if someone gets arrested? Shouldn't that testing be done by someone who is (nominally) not a part of the police department?

Yet another question is why we continue to charge people who possess trace amounts of drugs with felony offenses?

This is reality for a sizable portion of the population yet you will never hear a politician talking about how innocent people get caught up in our criminal (in)justice system. You will never hear then talk about the gross inequities in how different people are treated. Instead you will hear nothing but the common platitudes of those who claim to be tough on crime in order to please white suburbanites whose idea of a colorblind society is an all-white neighborhood.

Why is two greater than four?

Why are we so concerned about the possibility that the Second Amendment might be restricted by legislation but we show no concern when the Nine (now Eight) Wearing Robes carve out restrictions to the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments?

This topic is nothing new to readers of this blog but, given the massacre in Orlando, it's timely once again.

Now the first thing we can do is forget about these ideas floating around that if you are on the government's "No Fly" list you shouldn't be able to buy a gun. There are no concrete criteria for being placed on that list. No one notifies you if you are placed on that list. There is no criteria for removing yourself from that list. Sure, "No fly, no buy" has a nice ring to it - but it's a nonstarter.

Besides, how many of the folks who carried out mass shootings in this country over the last decade were suspected terrorists? Would such a measure have stopped any one of those shootings? Highly doubtful. But it would allow politicians to say they did something in response to Orlando.

As I have said before, what we really need to do is address the gun culture in this country. And we can't do that without addressing racism. As the old white guard have found their numbers decreasing (and their influence over politics receding), the worship of the Second Amendment has become louder.

I suspect the reason such a stink is made over the Second Amendment is because those who held sway for so long because of the color of their skin know that the days of white power in the United States are coming to an end. They have some delusion that by holding onto their guns they can forestall the inevitable. 

They like to trot out the trope that an unarmed populace is at the mercy of its government. Let's look at that for a second. The US government has nuclear weapons, "smart bombs," jets, helicopters, ships and an arsenal of deadly machine guns and other arms at its disposal. Do you really think your shotguns, semi-automatic rifles and .45s stand a chance? Stop being deluded by Red Dawn.

You say you're worried about the slippery slope that gun regulation might bring about? What about the shredding of the Fourth Amendment? Or are you not worried about that because it only protects "them." 

And that's what this is really all about. 

One day you will wake up to find the Fourth Amendment is gone. But then we'll still have the Second Amendment. Some comfort that will be.

Killing the frog one degree at a time

The other day I was leaving the Montgomery County Courthouse up in Conroe after court and noticed a state trooper behind me. As I turned onto the main drag the trooper flipped on his lights. I pulled over into a restaurant parking lot wondering why he pulled me over.

Soon I had my answer.

It turns out that the main bulb in the right taillight had burned out. I asked him if the center light was working. He said it was. He took my license and insurance and I dug through the pocket on the driver's side door for a spare bulb.

While I changed the bulb he printed out a warning and went on about his way.

I did appreciate him telling me my taillight was out - since equipment violations are an oft-used excuse to stop suspected drunk drivers. However, I was also a bit irritated since there was no equipment violation in my case. In Texas you are required to have two working taillights. Since all cars come equipped with three (one on each side and one in the middle), one can be malfunctioning and you aren't breaking the law. In other words, he had no legitimate reason to pull me over.

As I drove away my mind kept wandering back to the recent US Supreme Court case in which the Supremes upended precedent and decided that a traffic stop based on the officer's mistake of law is valid. In Heine v. North Carolina, No. 13-604 (2014), Mr. Heien was driving down the street when a law enforcement officer, Sgt. Matt Darisse of the Surrey County Sheriff's Office, stopped his car because he had a broken brake light. Of course Mr. Heien gave his consent when Sgt. Darisse asked to search the car.

Sgt. Darisse thought that Mr. Heien (who was laying down in the backseat) and Maynor Vasquez (the driver) were acting a bit suspicious so he asked to search the car after handing Mr. Vasquez a warning for the brake light. Well you don't have to be a genius to know what happened next. The search turned up a bag of cocaine. Both men were arrested.

At trial, Mr. Heien argued that the drugs should be suppressed because there was no legal basis for the traffic stop. It is (or, at least, was) well-established that a stop based on an officer's mistake of law was not reasonable, and was, therefore, illegal. Surprisingly enough the trial court didn't see it that way because, by golly, there was cocaine in the car and we must keep that shit off the streets.

On appeal the conviction was reversed because it wasn't illegal to drive a car in North Carolina with only one functioning brake light. The State Supreme Court then reversed the appellate court on the grounds that even though Sgt. Darisse was ignorant of the law, the stop was reasonable.

In an 8-1 decision, based more on looking at the outcome rather than on the process, the US Supreme Court held that a stop (or detention) based on an officer's mistake of law was, nonetheless, reasonable. So, even though we've been told for years that ignorance of the law is no defense against a criminal charge, it is, apparently, an excuse to detain someone illegally.

This decision has turned the Fourth Amendment on its side and is yet another example of how our rights are slowly being taken away from us without anyone noticing. We are the frog in the pot of water that doesn't even realize the temperature is being turned up until it's too late.

Just looking for an excuse to affirm

In 2012, Milton Kay was driving in Orange, Texas without wearing his seatbelt and without having a current registration sticker on his windshield. He was pulled over by Officer McDonald of the Orange Police Department.

While conducting the stop, Officer McDonald smelled the odor of an alcoholic beverage on Mr. Kay's breath and noticed that Mr. Kay was slurring his words.

So, of course, what started out as a routine traffic stop turned into a full-blown DWI investigation -- even without any evidence of impairment while driving. As (bad) luck would have it, Mr. Kay had two prior DWI convictions - one in 1989 and one in 2000 - that turned a routine traffic stop into a felony DWI arrest.

Section 724.012 of the Texas Transportation Code states that if a person with two or more prior DWI convictions is arrested for a DWI and refuses to provide a breath or blood sample, a police officer may require the motorist to submit to a blood draw. In case you didn't know it, when you walked away from the DPS office with your driver's license you told the state that it was okay from them to jab a needle in your arm if you declined to cooperate in a DWI investigation.

And you thought that Fourth Amendment thingie applied, didn't you?

Well, of course it didn't apply in Mr. Kay's case because his alcohol concentration was .024 - three times the legal limit.

At trial Mr. Kay argued that the blood draw was illegal because he didn't agree to it and because there was no showing by the state of exigent circumstances per McNeely. The trial court wasn't inclined to ignore a high blood test result so Mr. Kay's objections to the admissibility of the blood test results were denied. Mr. Kay was subsequently sentenced to 19 years in prison which, if I may editorialize, was absurd given the circumstances surrounding the arrest.

The 1st Court of Affirms Appeals in Houston then got there shot at the case. In Kay v. State, No. 01-13-00595-CR (Tex.App.--Houston [1st] 2014) Justice Rebecca Huddle pointed out that Mr. Kay never specifically mentioned that the blood draw violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the Court affirmed the conviction and told Mr. Kay to enjoy his time in prison.

Here is the relevant portion from Mr. Kay's motion to suppress the blood test result...

[E]vidence in this case has been illegally obtained . . . in violation of the United States Constitution, the Texas Constitution, and Texas Statutory Laws . . . [T]he blood specimen was extracted from [Kay] without his permission and without a search warrant. Generally, tak[ing] of a blood sample is a search and seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution . . . Article I, section 9 of the Texas Constitution requires that a search warrant be issued . . . In addition, Article 38.23 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure forbids any evidence obtained in violation of the law to be admitted against an accused. 

Let's see, Mr. Kay mentioned that the blood draw violated the US Constitution. He mentioned that it violated the Texas Constitution. He mentioned that a warrantless blood draw falls under the purview of the Fourth Amendment. He even cited the Texas Statutory Exclusionary Rule.

Yet, to the First Court of Appeals, that wasn't enough to invoke the protections of the Fourth Amendment and the McNeely case.

Just the other day I praised the legal reasoning of Marc Brown in suppressing some pretty damning evidence because the police violated the accused's Fourth Amendment rights. I wrote that Justice Brown made his decision not on the evidence that was in question, but, instead, on the way in which the evidence was gathered.

Well so much for that type of legal reasoning from Justice Huddle. Instead of looking at whether the evidence was obtained legally, she looked for any reason she could find to justify the trial court's decision to deny Mr. Kay's motion to suppress. What she found makes a mockery of her title of "Justice."

Analyzing the law rather than justifying an outcome

Francheska Jaganathan was motoring along Interstate 10 in Chambers County (just east of Houston) when she was stopped by a state trooper for allegedly ignoring a sign that indicated the left lane was for passing only. When the officer stopped Ms. Jaganathan he smelled the distinct odor of marijuana coming from her car. A search of the trunk revealed a few pounds of marijuana (somewhere between five and 50 based on indictment.

At trial Ms. Jaganathan argued that the search of her car was the result of an illegal arrest and that the evidence discovered should be suppressed. She argued that the officer had not followed her long enough to determine if she was violating the law. The state argued that at the point she was pulled over, Ms. Jaganathan had traveled in the left-hand lane for some 45 seconds and that she was clearly not passing anyone.

The trial court denied Ms. Jaganathan's motion to suppress and she entered a guilty plea. She then appealed.

The First Fourteenth Court of Appeals overturned the trial court's denial of her suppression motion and remanded the case back to the trial court in Jaganathan v. State, No. 14-13-00356-CR (Tex.App.--Houston [1st 14th] 2014) holding that the evidence presented at the trial court level failed to show the officer had reasonable suspicion to believe that Ms. Jaganathan was violating a  provision of the transportation code.

At some point Ms. Jaganathan passed a sign that said the left lane was for passing only. The stated purpose of that provision of the transportation code is to make the highways safer by keeping slower moving traffic out of the left lane. Between the time she passed the sign and the time she was stopped, Ms. Jaganathan passed one vehicle and was gaining ground on another car that had merged into the middle lane. At the same time the officer began pursuing Ms. Jaganathan at a high rate of speed. He testified at the suppression hearing that it would have been unsafe for her to have moved into the lane in front of him while he was in pursuit.

The appellate opinion points out that the officer had only been in active pursuit of Ms. Jaganathan for about 12 seconds and that she was not impeding traffic while driving in the left lane.

Affirming the conviction would have been an easy decision for most judges. The trial court judge, for instance, heard the testimony and denied the motion because she was driving in the left lane and, more importantly, because she had a whole lot of hippie lettuce in the trunk of her car. But Marc Brown, the author of the opinion, looked beyond the grass in the trunk. He made his analysis without regard to the fruits of the search. Instead of looking for a reason to affirm the decision he looked at the facts of the stop itself and the purpose of the law the officer accused Ms. Jaganathan of violating.

That's what a judge should do.

Court releases Obama's drone memo

Thanks to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, the infamous Obama administration "drone memo" is now public. The memo lays out the administration's justification for the use of drones to kill suspected terrorists and those unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of them.

One of the touchstones of the memo is the infamous balancing test the US Supreme Court introduced when weighing Fourth Amendment violations. Never mind that the Fourth Amendment is quite clear in its prohibition against unreasonable search and seizures. As legendary criminal defense attorney Gerry Goldberg would point out, whenever the Supreme Court starts talking about balancing tests, our rights are in danger.

According to the memo we should look to balance the violation of a suspect's Fourth Amendment rights against the interest the government has in violating those rights. In other words, if there was enough dope found, the search is legal and if the government stomps its feet loud enough and proclaims that a person is a terrorist, then it's no harm, no foul.

Balancing tests are what we use to decide whether or not a law should be enforced or repealed. Balancing tests are what we use to decide our course of action in almost any endeavor. A balancing test has no business being involved in determining whether a person's constitutional rights were violated. To do so implies that one's rights under the Bill of Rights are just relative.

But, hey, if we're talking about the Fourth Amendment we already know we're talking about someone who did something they weren't supposed to. We also know that the police found plenty of evidence of that transgression -- otherwise there wouldn't be a need to discuss whether the search or seizure violated anyone's rights.

And who wants to be the person who lets the bad guy go free, anyway? That's certainly not the way to pick up votes during the campaign. Folks want to vote for the judges who are "tough on crime," not the judges who promise to extend the protections of the Bill of Rights to everyone who sets foot in their courtrooms.

And what better way to be tough on crime - or any other bogeyman - than to limit the applicability of the Fourth Amendment? And the best way to do it is to create a straw man and institute a balancing test. Of course the same folks who take that approach with the Fourth Amendment would have a conniption fit if anyone suggested that a balancing test should be used to determine when the Second Amendment should apply.

McNeely strikes again

The State urges that we balance the public and private interests that are implicated in serious DWI cases and find that Texas’s mandatory blood draw statute, section 724.012(b), is a reasonable substitute for the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. -- Weems v. State, No. 04-13-00366-CR, (Tex.App.--San Antonio 2014)

That is a scary argument found in the San Antonio Court of Appeals decision in Weems v. State. The Fourth Amendment is quite clear in its meaning - warrants shall be required to conduct a search. But, even though the language is absolute, our courts have, over the years, whittled away at the edges to such a degree that the Founders wouldn't even recognize what has happened to their Bill of Rights.

And, leading the charge to chip away at the meaning of the Fourth Amendment is the old balancing test. If you don't already realize whenever the Supremes break out the scales in a criminal case, the outcome is not going to be favorable for either the defendant nor the Constitution.

One of the seminal cases in DWI law is Schmerber v. California, 384 US 757 (1966) which made an end run around the Fourth Amendment by finding that a warrantless search may very well be reasonable depending on the totality of the circumstances. The most popular of these circumstances turned out to be exigency. Prosecutors argued for generations that warrantless blood draws were reasonable because alcohol tended to dissipate out of the bloodstream and, if the blood weren't drawn quickly enough, there would be no evidence left to test.

The development of better, more efficient gas chromatographs and the newfound popularity of retrograde guesstimation made exigency less and less of a factor. Meanwhile, states like Texas began enacting so-called implied consent laws as another way to get around the warrant requirement. Texas also enacted a law that made the taking of a blood specimen mandatory when a person died in an alcohol-related crash, when a person was seriously injured in an alcohol-related crash of if the driver suspected of being intoxicated had two or more prior DWI convictions.

And this is where things stood at the time of McNeely.

Then everything changed. As a refresher, in McNeely, the Supreme Court held that the dissipation of blood by itself was insufficient to justify a warrantless blood draw. The Court pointed out that with the advent of No Refusal Weekends and with the decision that affidavits for warrants could be transmitted to the judge via fax, phone or e-mail, it was relatively easy to find a compliant magistrate who would sign on the dotted line and authorize the blood draw.

Texas then began to argue that the implied consent law was its end run around the warrant requirement. Since, in the eyes of the state, every motorist had given their consent to submit to a breath or blood test merely by getting on the road, then the police had a built-in exception to the warrant requirement - consent.

That bit of intellectual dishonesty crashed to earth when the Supreme Court overturned a conviction in Aviles v. State and sent the case back down to Texas for a new trial in line with the holding in McNeely.

In Weems, the defendant was driving after he had been drinking with a friend. He managed to flip his car on the way home. His friend was injured and taken to the hospital. Mr. Weems fled from the scene but was found a short time later. No sobriety tests were performed because Mr. Weems needed medical attention. After Mr. Weems declined to provide a blood specimen, the arresting officer took him to the hospital where a forcible blood draw was conducted. The result showed that, at the time of the accident, Mr. Weems was about three times the legal limit. He was subsequently convicted of driving while intoxicated.

The San Antonio Court of Appeals then proceeded to reverse Mr. Weems' conviction and held that neither the implied consent law, the mandatory blood draw provision of the Transportation Code nor the dissipation of alcohol justified a warrantless blood draw without a showing that an established exception to the warrant requirement existed.

What goes up must come down

Now that the aerial search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet has been called off, resources can now be turned toward finding the unmanned drone that crashed (under mysterious) circumstances in Lake Conroe. While the part of the Indian Ocean many believe the airliner crashed in is considered extremely remote, Lake Conroe has often been described as being on the very edge of civilization.

For some strange reason the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office made the decision - that was then ratified by county commissioners - to spend a quarter of a million dollars on an unmanned drone to provide aerial reconnaissance of SWAT team operations.

Dive teams have been unable to locate the remains of the drone due to conditions at the bottom of the lake.

Now why would a law enforcement agency in a suburban county need a $250,000 unmanned drone? Beyond the obvious reason that they could brag about having one, I can't think of any. While a spokesman for the Sheriff's Office said that the drone wasn't used for surveillance, I seem to recall the NSA claiming that Edward Snowden's claims were false. We all know how that turned out.

The use of unmanned drones by law enforcement is very troubling. The only reason a law enforcement agency would want a device capable of viewing the ground from up high is to find out what folks are doing on their property sheltered from the unauthorized view of law enforcement officers on the ground. With a camera-equipped drone flying overhead there is no such thing as privacy as the eye in the sky can see it all.

The use of drones, as well as the outfitting of police officers in military-style gear, is another move toward the militarization of the police. It is symbolic of the "us-against-them" mentality that seems to have taken hold in law enforcement over the past decade.

The incompetence of the folks operating the unmanned drone has cost Montgomery County taxpayers a lot of money - money that could have been used for parks or roads. Maybe those in charge of the county's purse strings will think twice about writing another check for another shiny toy.

SCOTUS has one more for the road

Lorenzo and Jose Navarette were minding their own business driving a truck down the highway with 30 pounds of marijuana in the bed of the truck. At some point an anonymous driver called 911 and reported that the Navarette's truck had almost run her off the road. The 911  message was relayed to sheriff's deputies in Humboldt County who stopped the truck - after following it for some five minutes without observing any suspicious driving behavior.

The officers, naturally suspecting that Mr. Navarette was driving while intoxicated in the middle of the afternoon detained the brothers so they could conduct a DWI investigation. During the course of the investigation they came across the stash of weed in the back of the truck. The stop quickly changed course from a DWI investigation into a felony dope investigation.

At trial the court denied the Navarette's motion to suppress the marijuana and the brothers pled guilty and received 90 days in jail plus three years probation.

Now let's make certain we have a couple of the pertinent facts straight. First, the motorist who called 911 never left her name. Second, the anonymous driver never said she thought Mr. Navarette was intoxicated - only that he almost ran his or her car off the road.

On appeal the appellate court determined that there was sufficient corroboration in the fact that the police located the truck near the area the anonymous caller told them it was and that the anonymous caller got the license plate number correct. The appellate court then made the leap of logic that the driving behavior described by the unidentified 911 caller rose to the level of reasonable suspicion.

Of course we know what really drove the appellate court's decision-making process: the defendants had dark skin, funny names and a whole lot of weed in the truck. It was yet another example of courts making rulings based on the outcome and not the process.

Yesterday the US Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Navarette v. California, 572 US _____ (2014). And, not surprisingly, held that the stop met constitutional muster because the information provided by a caller who remains nameless was somehow corroborated when the officer saw the truck on the highway and because the driving behavior just screamed out that Mr. Navarette was intoxicated.

The Court went on to say that the fact that the call was made so near the time of the alleged driving behavior (according to the unnamed motorist) indicated that our Friend With No Name hadn't had sufficient time to make up the story. It just had to be true.

The decision is yet another broadside blow to what remains of the Fourth Amendment. It is also part of a line of cases that make a mockery out of a defendant's right to confront the witnesses against him. When was Mr. Navarette permitted to cross-examine the nameless caller? When was he allowed to probe for reasons the driver might make up, or exaggerate, an incident on the road? The officer certainly couldn't testify as to what driving behavior he witnessed that made it apparent that Mr. Navarette was intoxicated.

Justice Antonin Scalia summed it up best in his vigorous dissent:

The Court’s opinion serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail consisting of two parts patent falsity: (1) that anonymous 911 reports of traffic violations are reliable so long as they correctly identify a car and its location, and (2) that a single instance of careless or reckless driving necessarily supports a reasonable suspicion of drunken­ness. All the malevolent 911 caller need do is assert a traffic violation, and the targeted car will be stopped, forcibly if necessary, by the police. If the driver turns out not to be drunk (which will almost always be the case), the caller need fear no consequences, even if 911 knows his identity. After all, he never alleged drunkenness, but merely called in a traffic violation—and on that point hisword is as good as his victim’s. 

What's good for the goose ain't good for the gander

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) was morally outraged when news broke that the CIA had been monitoring the work of Intelligence Committee staffers on an off-site computer system set up for the committee to do its work overseeing the intelligence agency.

She decried one branch of the government snooping on another branch. She warned of violations of the separation of powers. She said the actions of the CIA were unconstitutional.



But this is the same Dianne Feinstein who argued that Edward Snowden wasn't a whistle blower. In fact after the news broke of how the NSA spied on American citizens, collected meta data from telephone and e-mail communications and monitored web searches, she defended the agency's motives and actions.



Ms. Feinstein has drawn her line in the sand. It's okay for the government to make a continued mockery of the 4th Amendment by conducting unauthorized searches of our private data, but they sure as hell better keep their hands off Congress' computers and telephones.

Moral outrage indeed. How about hypocrisy?

Let's play cowboys and vampires

March is a busy time in the Houston area. First there's the Livestock Show and Rodeo that opened this past weekend with the World Championship BBQ Cookoff followed by three weeks of shows, music and carnival rides. There's also Mardi Gras down on the island and St. Patrick's Day (when we reduce all of Irish culture to a glass of green beer). Finally it's Spring Break time and folks will be flocking to the beach.

It's also time, once again, for the Harris County District Attorney's Office, local law enforcement and the black-robed members of the DA's Office to conspire to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment with a No Refusal Month.

For those not familiar with this little game, the DA's Office recruits judges to volunteer to sign search warrants authorizing forcible blood draws for people arrested for DWI who decide not to give a breath or blood sample voluntarily. Note that I didn't say they would review the warrants. Nope. That's not part of the game.

If these judges actually performed their duty the whole No Refusal program would find itself on the ash heap of history. The only way to ensure that blood is drawn is for the judges to be compliant and ignore the shortcomings of the cookie cutter search warrant affidavits that are faxed to them.

Few of the affidavits contain anything more than boilerplate language and conclusory statements that are supposed to pass as articulable facts. But have no fear, there's no random assignment of judges during the No Refusal period, the judges that sign the warrants volunteered to be part of the program. They are advertised as being part of the team.

The DA's Office is quite clear about the purpose of No Refusal - they want to obtain as much evidence as they can to force a defendant to wave the white flag and plead guilty. But what is the judge's role in this farce?

The judge should have no interest in whether a motorist submits to a breath or blood test. Whether there is a test or not if none of the judge's concern. The judge is just supposed to be a neutral and detached arbiter - not a participant in the prosecution.

And finally, just to clear up any confusion that may exist out there, in order for a breath or blood test result to be admissible in court, the suspect must have been under arrest before the officer requested the sample. In other words, the breath or blood test has nothing to do with an officer's decision to arrest a motorist for driving while intoxicated - the officer has already made up his mind before he even asks the motorist to blow.

Just be careful out there.

Passing along the costs of blood testing

As if the costs associated with a DWI arrest aren't high enough, prosecutors with the Harris County District Attorney's Office are working on a plan to charge defendants with the cost of drawing, storing and analyzing their blood samples. As the number of blood tests in DWI cases has skyrocketed in the past few years, area crime labs are being overwhelmed with the kits.

Prosecutors seem to think that the answer to short-handed labs is to transfer the cost of hiring and training new analysts to the motorists accused of driving while intoxicated. The Code of Criminal Procedure would seem to allow the government to do so.

But why are there so many blood tests?

If you guessed "No Refusal Weekends" you are correct.

In an ongoing attempt to coerce motorists into agreeing to give up evidence to help the government's case, local prosecutors, law enforcement agencies and compliant judges have all teamed up to force motorists to submit to breath or blood tests. The reason why is quite obvious - too many motorists were challenging their arrests in court and (in the eyes of prosecutors and judges) too many juries were giving them the benefit of the doubt at trial.

The government, never shy about violating the rights of the accused when it serves their purpose, decided that the best way to obtain convictions was to pressure drivers into submitting to breath tests - even though it isn't against the law to decline the invitation to give the state more evidence. Nevermind the fact that prosecutors have been obtaining convictions in DWI cases for years without the benefit of breath tests or even NHTSA's roadside exercises on film.

Just like the casinos, prosecutors and law enforcement decided to improve the house's odds in a DWI prosecution. The courts played along by allowing officers to fax affidavits to judges and to allow officers to be sworn over the telephone.

Now we have a backlog of blood samples from simple Class B misdemeanors (one step removed from a traffic ticket) because the government decided it needed more evidence to rig the game. The motorist stopped for speeding or not signalling a lane change after leaving a restaurant or bar certainly didn't decide to contribute to the backlog. The decision was made by the officers involved in the stop, local prosecutors and judges who want to appear tough on crime.

No one forced prosecutors and local law enforcement agencies to have nurses on duty to draw blood. No one forced them to provide equipment to judges so they could make their "reasoned legal decisions" from the comfort of their own homes.

If the cost of testing all the blood that's drawn in DWI cases is prohibitive then maybe the government should think twice about pursuing these policies. Passing along the cost doesn't solve the problem. Taxing the citizen accused because prosecutors don't want to have to try breath test refusal cases isn't equitable. The cost should be borne by the parties who insist on coercing motorists to consent to chemical tests.

Blood tests aren't necessary in most DWI cases. The facts regarding the traffic stop, the officers observations at the scene and the motorist's performance on roadside exercises is enough for most juries to decide whether or not the state proved up its case. If prosecutors don't like losing DWI trials then perhaps that might want consider just what the presumption of innocence means. They might also want to consider why our nation's founders made the burden of proof for arresting someone a whole lot less than for convicting that same person.

H/T Grits for Breakfast

Invalidating the Fourth Amendment, Texas style

In Missouri v. McNeely, the US Supreme Court held that the natural dissipation of alcohol in blood is not in and of itself an exigent circumstance that does away with the need for a search warrant to draw blood. The Court did say, however, that it could be one of the factors considered when trying to determine whether there were exigent circumstances that could justify a warrantless blood draw.

In Texas if a person is arrested for driving while intoxicated and has two prior DWI convictions, the Transportation Code provides that the police may take a sample of his blood without a warrant.

And that's exactly what happened to Clayton Reeder in September of 2012. He swerved to avoid hitting a deer that had run out into the road and ended up in a ditch. A state trooper arrived on the scene to investigate the accident and decided that Mr. Reeder was intoxicated. Mr. Reeder was arrested and, since he had two prior DWI convictions, he was charged with a felony DWI.

He declined the offer to provide a blood sample at the hospital so, based on Section 724.012(b)(3)(B) of the Texas Transportation Code, the officer obtained a blood sample anyway. Naturally the alcohol concentration was above the legal limit.

At trial Mr. Reeder asked the court to suppress the results of the blood test on the grounds that the mandatory blood draw violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. The trial court wasn't so moved and denied his motion. Mr. Reeder was later convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.

On appeal to the Sixth Court of Appeals in Texarkana, in Reeder v. State, the question was whether or not the mandatory blood draw provision of the law violated the Fourth Amendment by requiring warrantless blood draws in all felony DWI cases regardless of whether exigent circumstances did or did not exist.

The court, however, had a different idea. Sidestepping completely the issue of whether or not there were exigent circumstances present in Mr. Reader's case, the judges decided that the Implied Consent law in Texas trumped any need for a warrant. The court reasoned that a search was constitutional if it was conducted with the consent of the suspect. Since Texas law states that all motorists are considered to have given their implied consent to providing a sample of their breath or blood if the officer had either reasonable suspicion to stop or probable cause to arrest for DWI, then the forced blood draw was "consensual."

In other words, a statute that threatens a motorist with legal sanctions for not voluntarily giving up evidence to be used against her, trumps a constitutional protection. The decision is yet another example of a court bending over backwards to affirm a conviction regardless of the rationale.

To claim that a statutory provision of the Transportation Code that is not explained to anyone applying for a driver's license trumps a constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure is either laughable on its face or deeply disturbing in its application. Either way it is yet another hole punched through the Fourth Amendment.

A (tiny) step in the right direction

Former state district judge Ken Anderson, the man who prosecuted Michael Morton for a murder he didn't commit, entered into a plea bargain on Friday that will see him serve 10 days in the Williamson County Jail, perform 500 hours of community service and be disbarred. In exchange for his guilty plea on a criminal contempt charge, Mr. Anderson will avoid trial on charges of tampering with evidence that could have seen him sentenced to prison time.

The contempt charge dates back to a 1987 exchange at the bench in which Mr. Anderson told the court and Mr. Morton's attorneys that he had no Brady material. What he didn't reveal was a statement by Mr. Morton's three-year-old son that put someone else in the house at the time of the murder.

Mr. Morton was present in the courtroom when Mr. Anderson entered into the plea agreement.

While there is some satisfaction that Mr. Anderson has paid something for the years he stole from Mr. Morton, there is no way the debt can ever be repaid. Mr. Morton lost seeing his son grow up. He lost all those moments we have with our children. He endured unspeakable horror in the state prison system.

But it wasn't just Ken Anderson who stole that time from Mr. Morton. It was our criminal (in)justice system. It was a jurisprudence that begins with the proposition that if the facts are bad enough a way will be found to uphold the conviction. Our Fourth Amendment resembles a piece of Swiss cheese because the US Supreme Court has spent decades carving out exceptions in order to uphold convictions of folks who did bad things regardless of how the police conducted their investigation.

Such a jurisprudence results in protections and guarantees that are so riddled with holes as to be entirely unrecognizable. We are left with an illogical framework of rights that makes no sense.

If our courts wanted to make it right judges would start off analyzing police behavior in isolation. If the police violated the Fourth Amendment it shouldn't matter what the defendant said or did (or how much of whatever he had on him). The Fourth Amendment doesn't distinguish between alleged offenses. Its language is absolute. Either a defendant's rights were violated or they weren't. There are no two ways about it.

This Alice in Wonderland-esque method of jurisprudence is what landed Mr. Morton in prison for 25 years. Ken Anderson was merely the delivery device for a system broken beyond repair. There are those who would say the end result of the case is a vindication of our criminal (in)justice system. I'm not one of them. Any system that allows an innocent man to lose 25 years of his life is broken. It is broken in the district and county courtrooms. It is broken in the Court of Appeals. It is broken in the Court of Criminal Appeals. And it is broken in Washington at the US Supreme Court.

We lost our way when it became more important to uphold convictions of people who did bad things than it was to uphold the Constitution. Michael Morton paid an awful price. So has every other man or woman who sat in a prison cell for even one day for a crime they didn't commit.