DrugPolicyCases.com | |||
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Searches and Seizures Courts' language discussing what's generally reasonable during a search or a seizure. Sections below deal with various sub-categories of this important topic, but this section contains the language that deals with policy, definitions and general considerations of the issue. Pages: ‹1› ‹2› ‹3› ‹4› ‹5› ‹6›
The Court today does not go so far as to say explicitly that sniff searches by dogs trained to sense contraband always get a free pass under the Fourth Amendment, since it reserves judgment on the constitutional significance of sniffs assumed to be more intrusive than a dog's walk around a stopped car. For this reason, I do not [...] [think that] the Court [...] [is] actually signaling recognition of a broad authority to conduct suspicionless sniffs for drugs in any parked car, about which Justice Ginsburg is rightly concerned, or on the person of any pedestrian minding his own business on a sidewalk. But the Court's stated reasoning provides no apparent stopping point short of such excesses. For the sake of providing a workable framework to analyze cases on facts like these, which are certain to come along, I would treat the dog sniff as the familiar search it is in fact, subject to scrutiny under the Fourth Amendment.
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The Court's response to this lack of evidence is that "there is little reason to believe that American workplaces are immune from [the] pervasive social problem" of drug abuse. Ante, at 674. Perhaps such a generalization would suffice if the workplace at issue could produce such catastrophic social harm that no risk whatever is tolerable--the secured areas of a nuclear power plant, for example, see Rushton v. Nebraska Public Power District, 844 F.2d 562 (CA8 1988). But if such a generalization suffices to justify demeaning bodily searches, without particularized suspicion, to guard against the bribing or blackmailing of a law enforcement agent, or the careless use of a firearm, then the Fourth Amendment has become frail protection indeed.
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Today's decision would be wrong, but at least of more limited effect, if its approval of drug testing were confined to that category of employees assigned specifically to drug interdiction duties. Relatively few public employees fit that description. But in extending approval of drug testing to that category consisting of employees who carry firearms, the Court exposes vast numbers of public employees to this needless indignity. Logically, of course, if those who carry guns can be treated in this fashion, so can all others whose work, if performed under the influence of drugs may endanger others -- automobile drivers, operators of other potentially dangerous equipment, construction workers, school crossing guards. [...] Since drug use is not a particular problem in the Customs Service, employees throughout the Government are no less likely to violate the public trust by taking bribes to feed their drug habit, or by yielding to blackmail. Moreover, there is no reason why this super-protection against harms arising from drug use must be limited to public employees; a law requiring similar testing of private citizens who use dangerous instruments such as guns or cars, or who have access to classified information, would also be constitutional.
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I join the Court's opinion subject to a qualification against reading our holding as a general endorsement of warrantless seizures of anything a State chooses to call "contraband," whether or not the property happens to be in public when seized. The Fourth Amendment does not concede any talismanic significance to use of the term "contraband" whenever a legislature may resort to a novel forfeiture sanction in the interest of law enforcement, as legislatures are evincing increasing ingenuity in doing...
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...[T]he particularly troubling aspect of this case is not that the State provides a weak excuse for failing to obtain a warrant either before or after White's arrest, but that it offers us no reason at all. The justification cannot be that the authorities feared their narcotics investigation would be exposed and hindered if a warrant had been obtained. Ex parte warrant applications provide neutral review of police determinations of probable cause, but such procedures are by no means public. And the officers had months to take advantage of them. On this record, one must assume that the officers who seized White's car simply preferred to avoid the hassle of seeking approval from a judicial officer. I would not permit bare convenience to overcome our established preference for the warrant process as a check against arbitrary intrusions by law enforcement agencies "engaged in the often competitive" -- and, here, potentially lucrative -- "enterprise of ferreting out crime." Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 14-15, 92 L. Ed. 436, 68 S. Ct. 367 (1948).
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