Search & Seizure

Today we will touch on a couple of criminal procedure issues – the ability of officers to enter a person’s property to conduct a so-called “knock and talk” and the ever-popular subject of curtilage. As you know, there can be areas outside of a subject’s home that enjoy the same privacy rights as property located within the subject’s home. In a recent Supreme Court

The subject of today’s article – vehicle inventory searches – is a subject area we have covered before. However, the question we look at in this case, United States vs. Garay[1], is whether the cell phone seized during the inventory should be suppressed because it was not properly listed on the inventory form. More importantly, we actually have a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals

This week we look at a traffic stop case, United States v. Gurule[1], that touches on a number of issues – requiring passengers to exit the vehicle during the stop, consent to search, and frisking the passenger during a consent search. I often say that the success or failure of a case is often determined based on a matter of seconds and the quality

Attorney Ken Wallentine Four years ago, in Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332 (2009), the Supreme Court took a sharp turn in the law of search incident to arrest.  The Court stepped back toward the two justifications for the search incident to arrest exception to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement—preservation of evidence and officer safety—first definitively articulated in Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752