Category Archives: Fourth Amendment

I Don #39;t Care About The Contitution, Take Your Fourth Amendment And Shove It The Hills Hotel
I Don #39;t Care About The Contitution, Take Your Fourth Amendment And Shove It The Hills Hotel FACEBOOK- https://www.facebook.com/TheJunkYardNews READ THE STORY HERE -http://junkyarddog911.blogspot.c...

By: Tom C

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I Don't Care About The Contitution, Take Your Fourth Amendment And Shove It The Hills Hotel - Video

The Fourth Amendment Rights
A video my partner and I made for a government video project in high school. Our video is on the fourth amendment which is "no illegal search and seizures." ...

By: MrDrumboy21 .

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The Fourth Amendment Rights - Video

BANGOR, Pa. -

The Bangor teachers union says no to random drug testing.

A year ago the school board passed the ground breaking measure, but it can't be implemented without union approval.

The Bangor Area School District would have been the first in the state with a random drug testing policy for teachers and staff, but union officials say the policy would violate their Fourth Amendment rights.

The school board passed a random drug testing policy for teachers and staff back in 2013, but the measure still needed approval from the union before being implemented.

Last night the union voted no.

I wasnt totally surprised," said Bangor school board president, Pamela Colton. "I understand the trepidation trying to implement something like this. It would be groundbreaking. No other school district in Pennsylvania randomly drug tests their staff.

The board passed the measure at the urging of the community.

In 2009 Bangor High School teacher Gina Riso died from an overdose at the apartment of Brad Washburn, a former Bangor wrestling coach.

In a statement, union officials say drug testing is not wrong as a pre-employment requirement.

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Bangor Area School District teachers vote no to random drug

(PRWEB) May 22, 2014

Heath D. Harte, an attorney-at-law with over twenty-five years of experience, released a statement today commenting on the proper collection of DNA and protecting a persons fourth amendment rights.

According to the case People v. Walker (New York, 104040)*, the Appellate Division, Third Department suppressed a DNA sample linking the suspect to the victim. The court found the police unauthorized to collect DNA from the alleged suspect, Paul Walker Jr., under the no-knock warrant they carried out on April 2010.

This was a matter of the courts upholding a persons fourth amendment rights. A no knock warrant is issued when the police believe a suspect can destroy evidence in between the time of identifying themselves and entering the premises. In this case, a suspects DNA cannot be destroyed and the court found that his fourth amendment rights were violated, stated Heath D. Harte.

According to court documents, Justice John Lahtinen explained that a founding principle of due process guarantees that if no pressing circumstances exist, the suspect has the right to be heard before the suspects constitutional right to be left alone is overlooked.

All parties involved, especially the police, need to respect due process. To ensure a fair trial and a tight case, the investigation needs to be thorough and carried out with dignity. The suppression of DNA from this case will prove to be an interesting in the outcome of the case, continued Harte.

For more information about the Law Offices of Heath D. Harte please visit: http://www.HarteLawOffice.com

About the Law Offices of Heath D. Harte With over 25 years of experience, the Law Offices of Heath D. Harte is a full service law firm concentrating in criminal law, personal injury law, estate planning, and real estate. While traditional in service and style, with smart use of experience and leveraging state of the art technology to streamline services, the firm cuts out excessive overhead usually associated with law firms. Lower overhead means that the firm can offer the same service one expects from a prestigious law firm, like the Law Offices of Heath D. Harte, at lower, more affordable costs to clients. The firms ultimate goal is to provide aggressive, reliable and effective legal representation at an affordable price. The firm also offers creative fee structures to accommodate clients needs, especially in todays economic climate.

Contact To learn more about The Law Offices of Heath D. Harte locations and services, please contact: The Law Offices of Heath D. Harte 1700 Bedford Street, Suite 102 Stamford, CT 06905 Office: (203) 724-9555 questions(at)hartelawoffice(dot)com http://www.HarteLawOffice.com

http://law.justia.com/cases/new-york/appellate-division-third-department/2014/104040.html

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New York Attorney Heath D. Harte Releases a Statement on Fourth Amendment Rights

Judge Says NSA Phone Surveillance Likely Unconstitutional
A federal judge says the NSA #39;s practice of collecting phone records en masse violates the Fourth Amendment.

By: Devran Hakan

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Judge Says NSA Phone Surveillance Likely Unconstitutional - Video

A group of motorists who were detained at an Aurora intersection nearly two years ago while officers attempted to locate and apprehend an on-the-run bank robber has sued the city for violating their Fourth Amendment right against unlawful search and seizure.

The suit was filed Friday in federal district court on behalf of 14 plaintiffs, some of whom were approached at gunpoint by police at the intersection of Iliff Avenue and Buckley Road, handcuffed and made to wait for two hours while the scene was cleared.

"They had no probable cause to pat my clients down and then handcuff them when they found that had no weapons," said David Lane , the attorney representing the group. "This was overreaching."

He said police should have used more precise location tracking technology to pinpoint the location of Christian Paetsch , the man eventually convicted and imprisoned in the robbery of a Wells Fargo branch on June 2, 2012. Hidden in the stolen money was a GPS tracking device that brought officers to the busy intersection but was unable to provide vehicle-by-vehicle location information.

To surround 19 cars stopped at a light and detain 28 occupants in those vehicles in an attempt to find a robbery suspect violated the motorists' Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure and excessive force, Lane said.

"(Police) brandished ballistic shields and pointed assault rifles directly at innocent citizens, including children under 10 years old," the lawsuit reads. "Officers with police dogs were at the ready. No one was free to leave."

Outgoing police chief Dan Oates said Saturday that U.S. District Judge William J. Martinez had already ruled that prosecutors could use evidence officers gathered during the massive traffic stop, even though the judge acknowledged that "invasiveness" was the "most troubling" aspect of the officers' actions.

"My officers took a very dangerous person off the street and he's in jail today," Oates said. "And nobody got hurt."

The chief, who will leave May 30 to head the Miami Beach, Fla., police force, said the court to date has held that his officers acted reasonably given the circumstances.

Oates and several Aurora police officers are also named in the suit.

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Motorists sue Aurora, police in 2012 traffic stop after bank robbery

The consequences of eliminating Fourth Amendment protections for all international communication with foreigners

Reuters

The U.S. government concedes that it needs a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls between Americans, or to read the body of their emails to one another. Everyone agrees that these communications are protected by the Fourth Amendment. But the government also argues that Fourth Amendment protections don't apply when an American calls or writes to a foreigner in another country.

Let's say, for example, that the head of the NAACP writes an email to a veteran of the South African civil-rights struggle asking for advice about an anti-racism campaign; or that Hillary Clinton fields a call from a friend in Australia whose daughter was raped; or that Jeb Bush uses Skype to discuss with David Cameron whether he should seek the 2016 presidential nomination for the Republican Party. Under the Obama administration's logic, these Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to these conversations, and it is lawful and legitimate for the NSA to eavesdrop on, record, and store everything that is said.

The arguments Team Obama uses to justify these conclusions are sweeping and worrisome, as the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer capturesin his analysis of the relevant legal briefs:

... the government contends that Americans who make phone calls or send emails to people abroad have a diminished expectation of privacy because the people with whom they are communicatingnon-Americans abroad, that isare not protected by the Constitution. The government also argues that Americans' privacy rights are further diminished in this context because the NSA has a "paramount" interest in examining information that crosses international borders.

... the government even argues that Americans can't reasonably expect that their international communications will be private from the NSA when the intelligence services of so many other countries ... might be monitoring those communications, too. The government's argument is not simply that the NSA has broad authority to monitor Americans' international communications. The US government is arguing that the NSA's authority is unlimited in this respect. If the government is right, nothing in the Constitution bars the NSA from monitoring a phone call between a journalist in New York City and his source in London. For that matter, nothing bars the NSA from monitoring every call and email between Americans in the United States and their non-American friends, relatives, and colleagues overseas.

All I'd add is that the Obama administration's encroachments on the Fourth Amendment disparately affect naturalized citizens of the United States, almost all of whom still have friends or family members living in their countries of origin. When I call my parents, email my sister, or text my best friend, my private communications are theoretically protected by the Bill of Rights. In contrast, immigrants contacting loved ones often do so with the expectation that every word they say or write can be legally recorded and stored forever on a server somewhere.

Xenophobia is one factor driving this double-standard. It does real harm to immigrants whose speech is chilled, as is clear to anyone who has made an effort to speak with them.

Yet there has been little backlash against the Obama administration for affording zero constitutional protections to Americans engaged in speech with foreigners, and little sympathy for the innocent Americans, many of them immigrants, who are hurt by the approach Obama and many in Congress endorse.

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NSA Spying Has a Disproportionate Effect on Immigrants

Seize the Rojo
This is a short film project for one of my cousin #39;s Finals for school. The film is based on the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Hope everyone had fun with this project! I did! Nice...

By: Kevin Medrano

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Seize the Rojo - Video

SFPD sued by woman pulled over in high-risk stop after vehicle mistakenly identified as stolen

A federal appeals court this week ruled that a woman's Fourth Amendment rights may have been violated when San Francisco police arrested her after an automated license plate reader mistakenly identified her car as stolen. The decision provides fodder to privacy advocates calling for restrictions on the use of the technology.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth District Tuesday reversed a district court ruling saying the police made the arrest in good faith. A three-judge panel at the appellate court held that a reasonable jury could indeed find that the woman's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure had been violated. The case was remanded back to the district court.

The case involves Denise Green, 47, who was stopped, handcuffed and detained briefly by multiple police officers with drawn guns, on a March night in 2009.

The incident was triggered when Green's car passed a police cruiser whose ALPR mistakenly determined that the vehicle was stolen. According to the appellate court's description of the incident, the photograph taken by the ALPR was blurry and illegible because of darkness.

The police officer operating the license plate reader radioed in a description of Green's vehicle and provided the incorrect license plate number from the ALPR read to dispatch. He did not confirm the tag number visually.

Dispatch quickly identified the plate as belonging to a stolen vehicle prompting a sequence of events that ended with Green being stopped by multiple police cars, handcuffed at gunpoint and detained while officers searched her car and person before letting her go.

Green filed a lawsuit against San Francisco Police Department, the city, county and the police officer in charge of the incident contending Fourth Amendment violations as well as unreasonable use of force and other charges. She asked the court for a summary judgment on her claims.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California rejected Green's motion and agreed with the SFPD's assertion that they had acted under reasonable suspicion.

The judges at the appellate court rejected that argument. In an 18-page opinion, the judges noted that ALPRs have been known to make mistakes and that police should know not to make traffic stops based on an ALPR read alone.

Continued here:

License reader lawsuit can be heard, appeals court rules

A federal magistrate in San Jose has rejected a bid by prosecutors to search an unidentified target's Google e-mail account, criticizing the "seize first, search second" request as overbroad and unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

U.S. Magistrate Paul Grewal could have simply denied the request in a stark order without preamble or explanation.

Instead, Grewal waxed poetic, beginning his seven-page ruling Friday by painting a portrait of how each day he "joins the teeming masses of the Bay Area on Highway 101 or 280," marked by "lengthy queues" at exits in Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Cupertino. "The Technorati are, in short, everywhere" in Silicon Valley, from the "humble downtown San Jose taqueria" to the "overpriced Palo Alto cafe," he said.

Grewal said he was hammering home a point, that "too few understand, or even suspect, the essential role played by many of these workers and their employers in facilitating most government access to private citizens' data."

The magistrate said he had reviewed an application by the government to search the Gmail account of a person suspected of stealing government funds.

The judge noted that "no defendant yet exists, as no case has yet been filed. There are no hearings, no witnesses, no briefs and no debate. Instead, a magistrate judge is left to predict what would or would not be reasonable in executing the warrant without any hard, ripe facts. This is hardly a recipe for success."

Although Grewal said he did find probable cause to believe that the Gmail account in question in fact contained evidence of theft, "what of all the data associated with the account which supplies no such evidence whatsoever?"

Grewal blasted the request as overreaching under the Fourth Amendment, which bans unreasonable searches. He said federal officials failed to provide any date restriction, other than to say the alleged crimes began in 2010.

"Nor has the government made any kind of commitment to return or destroy evidence that is not relevant to its investigation," Grewal wrote.

"This unrestricted right to retain and use every bit Google coughs up undermines the entire effort the application otherwise makes to limit the obvious impact under the plain view doctrine of providing such unfettered government access," he wrote.

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Magistrate waxes poetic while rejecting Gmail search request