Now that we’re all immigration lawyers, we figured we’d better take a gander at the complaint filed yesterday by the feds, seeking to strike down Arizona’s new immigration law.  The feds say Arizona’s law is preempted by federal law and policy, and so must be struck down under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, art. VI, cl. 2.  (You can read the complaint for yourself here.  The text of the law can be found here.) 

After reading the complaint in its entirety, we have to say that it’s mostly stupid. 

The law was hotly criticized by the Obama administration even before it was enacted back in April, so it’s no surprise that this action was filed.  We’re surprised it took this long to do it.  And we’re even more surprised, given how long it took, that the feds did such a shoddy job of it.

In broad strokes, Arizona wants to deter illegal aliens from sticking around in Arizona.  To that end, among other things, the law:

• Tells Arizona police they have to verify someone’s lawful presence if, during an otherwise lawful stop, they have reasonable suspicion that the person might be here unlawfully.  §11-1051(B) [referred to as Section 2 in the complaint]. 
• Amends existing law, permitting police to make a warrantless arrest if the officer has probable cause to believe that a misdemeanor or felony has occurred, to add that the police can make a warrantless arrest on probable cause to believe the suspect committed an offense for which he could be deported.  §11-1051(E) [in Section 2 of the bill, but perplexingly referred to as Section 6 in the complaint]. 
• says Arizona citizens can sue for money damages if any Arizona state or local official or agency “adopts or implements a policy” of not enforcing federal immigration laws to the extent permitted by federal law.  §11-1051(G) [Section 2]. 
• makes it a crime of trespassing to be present in Arizona in violation of federal law.  §13-1509(A) [Section 3]. 
• amends existing state law against smuggling human beings (§13-2319 [Section 4]) to permit the police to stop a car they reasonably suspect to be in violation of both a traffic law and the already-existing law against smuggling.  
• prohibits illegal aliens from seeking work in the state.  §13-2928(C) [Section 5].
• makes it illegal for “a person who is in violation of a criminal offense” to transport or harbor illegal aliens.  §13-2929(A) [Section 5].

The general argument the feds make is deliciously ironic: Requiring compliance with federal law would conflict with federal law.  At first glance, it seems like everyone at the DOJ who approved this complaint skipped Logic 101, and listened instead to John Cleese’s logic monologue on the Holy Grail album.  But this is not really the stupid bit. 

Their argument is more along the lines of (1) the feds get to determine policy of how and when the feds enforce their own laws; (2) Arizona isn’t telling the feds what to do, but it’s going to be enforcing the same laws more thoroughly; so (3) Arizona is messing with the feds’ policy.  This is one of the stupid bits, because nowhere does Arizona tell the feds what to do or how to do it.

The Complaint commits some intellectual dishonesty, however, to make it seem so anyway.  They repeatedly misquote the Arizona law to say a citizen can sue “any” official or agency for failing to enforce the immigration law.  They make it sound like Arizona citizens could sue federal officials for failing to enforce federal law.  But that’s not at all what is said.  The Arizona law only permits a private cause of action against Arizona officialdom, for failure to enforce that particular section of Arizona law.  It is obvious that the DOJ knew what it was doing in trying to make it sound otherwise, and this lame attempt to deceive the court (and the media) is not what we’d have expected.

We also might point out to the feds that policy is different from law.  The Supremacy Clause only prohibits the states from conflicting with federal law.  There is nothing saying the states have to go along with the policies of whoever happens to be enforcing such law at any given time.  The whole stepping-on-our-policy-toes argument is pretty much irrelevant to this analysis.

The feds also complain that Arizona’s goal — attrition of illegal aliens — is only one of many other goals the feds have.  The feds are more focused on getting rid of criminal or terrorist aliens, and don’t really care so much about the rest, says the complaint.  So Arizona locking up the others would be contrary to federal policy and here we go again. 

Paragraph 36 alone makes any number of howlers here.  It says the Arizona law “attempts to second-guess federal policies and re-order federal priorities.”  It tries to “directly regulate immigration.”  It “disrupts the national enforcement regime.”  It attempts to “set state-specific immigration policy.”  It “legislates in an area constitutionally reserved to the federal government.”  It “conflicts with federal immigration laws.” 

We’re not particular fans of the Arizona law, but an honest observer would have to admit that it does none of those things.

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The feds make the bizarre contention that Arizona is “supplanting the federal government’s immigration regime with its own.”  Really?  Where?  Nowhere does Arizona create additional barriers to immigration other than those already enacted in federal law.  Nowhere does Arizona reduce the federal barriers to immigration.  Arizona doesn’t restate or redefine the federal laws. Nowhere does the new law “establish the terms and conditions for entry and continued presence” or “regulate the status of aliens.” All the state did was refer to federal law as it already exists.  Arizona’s only saying that, if you violate federal law in Arizona, then it’s a violation of Arizona law, too.  If it’s not a violation of federal law, it can’t be a violation of the Arizona law.

It’s as if the feds are saying the Supremacy Clause means that, if the feds have outlawed certain conduct, the states cannot outlaw the same conduct.  Forget “as if” — that’s precisely what the feds are saying here.  And that’s nonsense.  Outlawing something the feds also outlaw is safe, legal and commonplace.

The complaint repeats several times that the Arizona law would force the feds to change their priorities and shift their focus away from criminals and terrorists.  The law doesn’t tell the feds what to do, however, or how to do it.  So what is the complaint on about?

It finally explains itself in Paragraph 44:  The number of police requests for verification of immigration status is going to increase.  The Department of Homeland Security will have to spend more time answering those requests.  That’s going to take resources away from stuff the feds think is more important.

The legal term for this argument is “horseshit.”  As in most states, Arizona police already had the discretion to seek such verification on a case-by-case basis.  It’s already part of DHS’s job to provide that verification.  The complaint’s argument is that any increase in demand for DHS’s services already being provided — doing more X when they’d rather be doing Y — would interfere with federal priorities, and “such interference with federal priorities, driven by state-imposed burdens on federal resources, constitutes a violation of the Supremacy Clause.”  Again, horseshit.

Also, it’s hard to imagine how even a sizeable burst in demand for such basic data would divert DHS agents from their field work or whatnot.  This is 2010, after all.  We may not have flying cars or interstellar tourism, but we sure as hell have mad database skillz.  Nigh-instantaneous searches of digital records is commonplace and cheap.  The complaint’s argument here just doesn’t jibe with reality.

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To their credit, the feds did try to make a legitimate argument here.  The problem is, it appears to have been written by lawyers who have less than a passing acquaintance with criminal law or civil-rights law.  The Arizona law is a criminal law, not an immigration law, but the feds seem to have put their immigration people on the job.  Mistake.

The legitimate argument is that people are going to wind up getting detained when they haven’t violated the federal law, and they’re going to be stuck there because they don’t happen to be carrying proof of their lawful presence with them at the time.  No matter what legislative fixes they add to prevent it, the truth is that people are going to get hassled because they look Mexican.  There are valid civil-rights problems that could easily arise in the enforcement of the law. 

But that’s an issue with the enforcement of the law, not with the law itself.  And anyway, it has nothing to do with the Supremacy Clause.  Sorry.

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The complaint keeps dishing out the stupid.  Starting on paragraph 57, it goes on about the bit letting cops make a warrantless arrest if they believe the suspect committed a deportable offense. 

The feds acknowledge that Arizona law already allowed cops to make a warrantless arrest on probable cause to believe that a misdemeanor or felony had occurred.  So the issue is whether there are any deportable offenses that aren’t misdemeanors or felonies. 

§13-601 describes only three classifications of offenses: felonies, misdemeanors and petty offenses.  A cursory review of the petty offenses in Arizona law turns up things like feeding wildlife, failure to appear, giving tobacco to a minor, and such.  There may be something Arizona calls a petty offense that could get you deported, but we haven’t found it. 

This bit, like the rest of the complaint, is much ado about nothing.  It doesn’t seem like Arizona has given its police any more power to make warrantless arrests than before.

The feds also go on about how this section “makes no exception for aliens whose removability has already been resolved by federal authorities.”  But it beggars reason to suspect that the feds have already vetted whether your crime should result in deportation before you have even been arrested for the crime in the first place.  If any of the DOJ lawyers who wrote the complaint are reading this, deportation tends to come after conviction, not before arrest.  Just saying.

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We could go on, but it’s getting late, and we have actual work to do.  We happen to dislike the Arizona law, though it’s obvious that Arizona is in a tough position.  We don’t like the federal immigration laws any better.  They make as much sense as going in the other direction and just annexing Mexico and giving everyone there the vote.  (Actually, that makes more sense than current U.S. policy.  But then again, our stance on immigration is very close to “the more the merrier.”)

It was a foregone conclusion that the Obama administration was going to challenge this law.  They could have gone with an Equal Protection argument, but they didn’t.  Instead they went with the Supremacy Clause.  And that’s revealing.

It reveals that they didn’t think the civil rights issues were winners.  But more than that, it reveals that the administration thinks its policies to be supreme to those of the states.  That’s not what the Supremacy Clause deals with.  That only deals with actual laws, created by Congress, not policies adopted by a president.  It is an act of dangerous hubris for the administration to make these arguments.  A wise court will shut this case down, if only to protect the country from an increasingly powerful federal executive.

But also because it’s just stupid.

As everyone reading this is probably aware, last Monday the website Gizmodo announced an exclusive look at Apple’s iPhone 4, which hasn’t been officially released yet. In their post (here), they said “you are looking at Apple’s next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it. We disassembled it. It’s the real thing, and here are all the details.” The post was written by blogger Jason Chen, and featured video of him showing details of the phone, and a lot of photos.

As time went on (see all the posts here), it came out that Gizmodo had paid $5,000 for the phone. The guy they bought it from wasn’t the phone’s owner, but had merely found it in a beer garden back in March. An Apple employee had lost it there.

So, if they bought it from someone who wasn’t the owner, and they knew it was supposed to be a secret, did the folks at Gizmodo commit any crimes here?

Law enforcement got involved very fast. By Friday, law enforcement in San Mateo had gotten a search warrant (viewable here) to seize Jason Chen’s computers, disks, drives, and any records pertaining to the Apple prototype 4G iPhone.

The search warrant was executed that same day, and a bunch of computer stuff was seized (the inventory is also viewable here).

Yesterday, the chief deputy district attorney for San Mateo County told the WSJ’s “Digits” blog (here) that nobody’s saying a crime happened or not. They’re still investigating.

Meanwhile, however, Gawker Media (the owner of Gizmodo) issued a letter on Saturday (viewable here) stating that “under both state and federal law, a search warrant may not be validly issued to confiscate the property of a journalist.”

In support of that statement, Gawker Media cited California Penal Code §1524(g) (viewable here), which prohibits search warrants for items described in Evidence Code §1070.

Evidence Code §1070 (here) says a judge can’t hold a journalist in contempt for refusing to disclose his sources, or for refusing to disclose unpublished information gotten while preparing a story.

So we have to ask, does Gawker Media know what it’s even talking about?

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There’s a big difference between a search warrant and an order to disclose information.

A search warrant is an order from a court, giving cops permission to search a particular place, and seize specified physical evidence. A search warrant does not give the police any authority to ask questions. It does not compel anybody to disclose any information to law enforcement. All the cops get is the stuff they’re searching for.

Now, the stuff they seize can contain all kinds of information. Search warrants routinely turn up documents, accounts, notes and computer data — all of which can be extremely revealing. But that’s not the same as making a person disclose information.

What the California statutes are talking about, on the other hand, is court orders to compel a journalist to give up his sources and his confidential information. That’s an order making the journalist himself tell that information to law enforcement. There is a big difference between seizing documents and forcing a journalist to betray his confidences.

There’s a good policy underlying section 1070. California wants its journalists to be able to report stories whose sources are people who want to speak on conditions of anonymity. Those who would reveal abuses of power are not likely to do so if those in power could retaliate against them. So anonymity is a good thing. And California says the policy protecting anonymity is more important than any judicial order directing involuntary disclosure.

But the same thing is going on here as with confessions and fingerprints. The state can’t coerce a confession against your will, but it’s perfectly fine for it to take your fingerprints, which can be just as damning. One is an involuntary disclosure, which Americans tend not to approve, and the other is an evidentiary seizure, which the Fourth Amendment says is perfectly fine so long as you have a warrant based on probable cause.

But what about Penal Code §1524(g)? Doesn’t it extend the protection specifically to preclude search warrants to identify confidential sources and information gathered along the way?

Well, for one thing, that’s pretty clearly only applicable to discovery issues. Journalist doesn’t want to disclose source. Court says do it. Journalist refuses. Court issues warrant. Section 1524(g) says you can’t do that.

But that’s not all §1524 says. The very first things it says you can get a search warrant for are:

(1) When the property was stolen or embezzled.

(2) When the property or things were used as the means of committing a felony.

. . .

(4) When the property or things to be seized consist of any item or constitute any evidence that tends to show a felony has been committed, or tends to show that a particular person has committed a felony.

So you can get a warrant to search for stolen property, stuff that was used to commit a felony, and stuff that is evidence of a felony.

Grand theft — and something of this value clearly falls within the definition of grand theft — is a felony in California. A first offender can still wind up doing 16 months.

And receiving stolen property — what Chen and Gawker may or may not have committed — is also a felony that could result in state prison time.

That’s pretty much what the law explicitly says search warrants are for.

Nobody’s saying anyone committed these crimes or not. All that’s needed is probable cause — in plain English, reason to believe it’s more likely than not that a crime was committed, and that evidence of that crime would be found in the place to be searched.

Just from reading Gizmodo posts (like this one), both the buyer and the seller knew it didn’t belong to the seller, that it belonged to Apple, that it was fucking valuable, and that it hadn’t been returned. That may or may not make anyone actually guilty of a crime, but on the face of it it’s good enough for a judge to issue a warrant.

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So Gawker seems to have gotten it wrong. That doesn’t mean law enforcement did it right, and it certainly doesn’t mean anyone committed a crime. But Gawker’s lame and snide letter isn’t doing them any favors.

We see it wasn’t written by a criminal defense attorney, but by Gawker’s COO and “legal representative.”

Let that be a lesson to you, Gawker. Lawyers aren’t fungible. You wouldn’t hire a criminal defense attorney to structure your next merger, would you? Next time the police are pounding on your door, the only reason you should be calling in-house counsel is to get the cell phone number of a good defense attorney.

What would a good defense attorney have done? He certainly wouldn’t have sent the poor guy a lame letter to show to the cops in the hopes of somehow preventing the search. He might get on the phone to the DA and get to the bottom of things. He might physically show up to make sure his client’s rights are protected. He might make sure his client doesn’t say anything, no matter how innocent-seeming, that the cops might later use against him. He might take a look at that search warrant before it’s executed and seek an emergency court order staying its execution. There’s all kinds of things he might do, depending on the facts on the ground. But I guarantee you he’s not going to to what Gawker’s COO did.

[Secret bonus link for Dilbert fans who've read this far.]

The Fourth Amendment says the police can’t go into your home or other private place without a warrant. Over the years, we’ve come up with a lot of exceptions to the warrant requirement. So many, in fact, that getting a warrant has become the exception, and the exceptions have become the norm.

That’s because privacy isn’t the only interest society has here. The various exceptions to the warrant requirement allow the police to go in when other important interests outweigh the privacy interest.

One common exception to the warrant requirement is the Emergency exception. Under the emergency rule, the police can go in when there is good reason to believe there’s someone inside who needs help right away — either they’re seriously hurt, or they’re in danger.

In New York, that rule was formalized by the Mitchell case in 1976. The Mitchell rule has two objective conditions, and one subjective condition. If all three are met, then the police would be allowed to enter under the emergency rule. The objective conditions require that a reasonably prudent officer would first have thought there was an emergency, and second would have had probable cause to believe the emergency was inside the place to be searched. The subjective condition was that the police had to actually be going inside to help someone — the emergency couldn’t be a pretext for some other ulterior motive such as looking for evidence.

For about 15 years, now, the U.S. Supreme Court has been rejecting subjective rules like that. So far as federal law is concerned, the Supremes don’t care if the police had some ulterior motive or pretext. So long as there was a legitimate basis for the police conduct, they don’t care what the police were actually thinking.

So in 2006, in the Brigham City case, the Supreme Court specifically addressed the three-part Mitchell rule, and said New York’s subjective condition is not required under federal law. All federal law requires is that the police had an objectively reasonable basis to believe that there was an emergency, and probable cause to believe that the emergency was inside the place to be searched.

That’s only the federal rule, however. Federal law only provides a minimum of protections, a base line of individual rights. The states can’t give less protection, but they can certainly grant greater protections. So New York remains free to adopt the Brigham City rule, or keep the Mitchell rule, or come up with a new one. (New York could even get rid of the emergency exception altogether, though that would be a silly result — nobody wants the police to be forced to watch helpless from the sidewalk while someone is being beaten to death on the other side of a window.)

But to date, New York’s courts have neither adopted nor rejected the Brigham City rule. It’s still up in the air whether the subjective prong will continue to be part of the rule in New York. This uncertainty has been going on for nearly four years now, and that’s bad for all concerned. It’s certainly high time to settle the issue.

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The other day, we were asked for a solution. We were arguing an appeal here in New York last week, which dealt only with the objective prongs of the rule. The People were appealing from a suppression ruling, and they were claiming that the search was good under the emergency doctrine of Brigham City. The hearing court never applied the subjective prong of the Mitchell rule, so its validity was not really at issue in the case.

So imagine our surprise when the court asked us what New York’s rule ought to be now, whether the state should keep or abandon Mitchell’s subjective prong. We were surprised, but not unprepared of course. We proposed that there does need to be a subjective part of the rule, but not the pretext rule of old.

There needs to be a subjective belief on the part of the police that their search was lawful. They had to have some justification for their search at the time, whether it was an emergency or some other exception to the warrant requirement. Nobody wants a rule that gives the police an incentive to commit a bad search, knowing it’s bad, in the hope that some clever prosecutor down the road can think up some objective justification after the fact.

So what would our proposed rule look like? Let’s take a crack at writing it out in plain English.

Under the Emergency exception, the police may conduct a warrantless search when:

1) Based on evidence actually known to the searching officer before commencing the search, a reasonably prudent officer would have believed that a person was in danger of serious physical injury or death;

2) Based on evidence actually known to the searching officer before commencing the search, a reasonably prudent officer would have thought it more likely than not that the emergency was inside the place to be searched; and

3) Before commencing the search, the searching officer actually and reasonably believed the search to be justified by this or some other exception to the warrant requirement.

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This seems to be nothing more than good common sense.

Unlike previous language, we go out of our way here to specify that the objective basis has to be based on facts known to the officers at the time. They can’t justify their search with facts that they only learned about later — if they don’t have reason to think someone’s injured inside, they can’t justify their bad search just because they happened to find an injured person there. Similarly, they can’t justify their search with baseless suppositions that have no foundation in what they knew at the time — if they don’t have reason to think someone’s injured inside, they can’t justify their bad search after the fact with a hypothetical scenario they clearly hadn’t considered at the time. (And if you think this should go without saying, you should read the People’s brief in the case we just argued.)

We also go out of our way to replace legalese with its plain language definition. So “basis approximating probable cause,” for example, becomes “more likely than not.” This makes the rule more comprehensible, and thus more easy for police to follow and courts to enforce. We’re a big fan of plain language.

Most importantly, of course, we changed the pretext language of Mitchell to a more reasonable requirement that the police at least think they have some lawful basis for their intrusion. And that they have some reasonable basis to think so. They don’t have to have subjectively thought there was an emergency at hand, but they had to have subjectively thought their search wasn’t unlawful.

Any other rule, we think, would send precisely the wrong message to the police. The cops would have an incentive to go ahead and commit searches they know to be bad, on the off chance that some clever prosecutor can think up a justification after the fact (which is precisely what happened in the case we just argued, if you’re wondering).

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We could be wrong, however. So we invite suggestions on what the New York rule ought to be. What do you think?

Our friends at the Cato Institute forwarded this to us, and it looks like it even might be halfway decent. The folks at Flex Your Rights are about to release a new DVD, “10 Rules for Dealing with Police.” It looks like a primer on how the police can lie and trick people into giving up their constitutional rights. Not a shock to those of us who do this stuff for a living, but it might be worth a watch for others.

The Supreme Court took on five Fourth Amendment cases this term. Four have been decided, and the fifth was argued on Tuesday. Although it may be premature to do so before the last decision comes down, we think it’s safe to draw some conclusions about the Court’s jurisprudence here, and predict what it might mean for the course of criminal justice.

The Fourth Amendment protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures. Like most other protections in the Bill of Rights, the whole point is to ensure that the State does not use its awesome power to override the necessary liberties and free will of individuals in a just society. The Bill of Rights prohibits the government from limiting ideas and their expression, from preventing individuals from arming themselves, from forcing soldiers into people’s homes, from extracting confessions by means that override the individual’s free will, from conducting secret “Star Chamber”-like trials or otherwise deny fair trials to defendants, from imposing indecent punishment, etc. If you sum up all the injustices that individuals face under medieval or tyrannical rule, the Bill of Rights pretty much says the U.S. government shall not do such things.

“Unreasonable” search & seizure basically means that, as a baseline, police ordinarily need to get a warrant first, by proving to a judge that they are more likely than not to find what they’re looking for, and that they’ll find it in the place they plan to look. There are exceptions to the warrant requirement, of course. Most searches don’t take place pursuant to a warrant, but under one of the exceptions.

If a person consents to a search, then no warrant is needed. Neither is a warrant needed if there is good reason to believe that evidence is going to be lost, or someone’s going to get hurt, if the cops take the time to get a warrant. There are various other exceptions.

The devil is in the details, of course. So the more exceptions you carve out from the general rule, the more room for error you create, and the more gray areas of confusion can pop up. Over the past few decades, various Fourth Amendment exceptions have indeed created confusion, gray areas, and absurdities.

The Supreme Court has taken the opportunity this term to attack those confusions, gray areas and absurdities head on.

On Tuesday, the Court ruled in Arizona v. Gant with respect to vehicle searches. (We reported on this here.) Back in the 60s, a warrant exception was carved out for searches of an individual and his “wingspan” — the area in his immediate reach — pursuant to a lawful arrest. The purpose was to ensure the safety of the officers and to preserve evidence. So long as the arrest was lawful, the search was lawful. Fast-forward to just after Reagan’s first swearing-in, when the Court expanded the search-incident-to-lawful-arrest to include the search of the passenger compartment of a car in which the arrestee had been riding.

Almost immediately after that ruling, everyone started to get the idea that cops could search the passenger area even after everyone was out of the car. The “wingspan” concept was lost, and instead a bright-line rule arose that, if the cops arrested someone who had been inside a car, then that car could be searched, period. Even after that person had long ago left the scene.

Some policy-makers like bright-line rules, because they require no thought. Individual circumstances need not be considered. An action that might not make sense, upon casual reflection, is still taken, because that’s the rule. If you don’t trust people to be able to weigh circumstances reasonably, then you give them bright-line rules.

And so it was that the police in Gant found themselves searching his car. Gant had already been arrested, handcuffed, and locked in a police cruiser, so the interior of his car was certainly no longer within his reach. So there was no reason to believe that he could destroy any evidence in the car or use something in the car to hurt the police. And he had been arrested for driving with a suspended license, not the kind of crime involving physical evidence, so there was no reason to believe that any evidence of that crime would be found in the car. In fact, the cops admitted on the stand that the only reason they search the car after the arrest was “because the law says we can do it.”

That was absurd. It’s an absurdity that just sort of happened, too. Nowhere in the 1981 Belton case did the Court lay out a bright-line rule. But that rule became the common interpretation, and has been the common interpretation for a quarter of a century.

On Tuesday, however, the Court finally stepped in to undo the absurdity. In a narrowly split 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that the police are not allowed to search a car simply because they made an arrest. The bright-line rule was thrown out the window. Interestingly, the case made for strange bedfellows. Contrary to popular expectation, Scalia and Thomas joined the pro-defendant side, and Breyer joined the pro-government minority. Scalia, in fact, felt that the majority opinion didn’t go far enough to limit the government’s power to search a car after an arrest.

The dissent essentially boiled down to a version of stare decisis — the common interpretation has been around for so long, that it has become the law of the land, and should be treated as such. That’s an interesting, but flawed, rationale. Stare decisis has to do with longstanding judicial precedent, not with some sort of jurisprudential adverse possession. Common practice does not equal legal precedent. Just because nobody has bothered to claim till now that the common interpretation was wrong, that doesn’t mean that nobody ought to be able to claim that now.

Anyway, the rule now is that the bright-line rule is no more. Cops can only search the passenger compartment if they have reason to believe — on a case-by-case basis — that the arrestee can still gain access to the car or that the car contains evidence of the crime for which he had been arrested. They can’t go looking just because the guy was arrested. They can’t go looking for evidence of other crimes. (They can still, however, either get a warrant, or impound the car and do an inventory search.)

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Argued the same day as Gant was decided was Safford Unified School District v. Redding. This also has to do with bright-line rules, in a way.

For context, the oral arguments were made almost to the day on the 10th anniversary of the Columbine shootings. Ten years ago, a couple of juvenile delinquents killed 12 people in a high school, the worst such violence that the U.S. has ever seen.

Due to the resulting hysteria and misinformation about the events, schools nationwide began passing bright-line “zero tolerance” rules out of fear that similar crimes might happen to them. Although it is now known that the killings were totally random, there arose a misconception that the killers sought out specific categories of victims. This led to panicked overreaction whenever a kid was found to have identified people in the school that they didn’t like. In fact, the killers wanted to kill everyone, setting (faulty) bombs to go off in the cafeteria (the fact that nobody every mentions the totally obvious similarities to the plot of the 1988 movie “Heathers” is beyond us).

Zero tolerance policies resulted in the expulsion of even little kids for bringing anything remotely resembling a weapon to school. Even when doing so was clearly absurd, as with water pistols, plastic army men, miniature toys, eating utensils, and the like.

Zero tolerance policies went after anything that might even slightly imply to the most paranoid hysteric an imaginary threat of unlikely harm to students or teachers. This included little girls hugging (because touching without permission can sometimes be a bad thing, all touching must be bad!). It included bringing a cake knife to school to cut a cake one had also brought to school.

And drugs are bad, by definition. So zero-tolerance included bringing any drugs to school. Passing out Tylenol can get kids expelled. It’s serious!

These bright-line zero-tolerance rules are imposed because school administrators are afraid. They’re afraid of their students. And they’re afraid of having to act rationally on a case-by-case basis. So they just over-react to everything, and establish bright-line rules so they don’t have to think.

And so we have Safford Unified School District v. Redding.

In Safford, we have a middle school (also in Arizona), where school authorities caught a 13-year-old girl with (gasp!) prescription-strength ibuprofen. This was a zero-tolerance school, and even though there is no way that ibuprofen counts as a dangerous drug, it was a bright-line prohibited medicine. So this girl was in serious trouble.

The girl (gasp!) pointed the finger at someone else. She said that another girl, Redding, had given her the medicine.

School officials have the authority to preserve the health and safety of their students. Most would say they even have the responsibility to do so. So it is not suprising that the school investigated the culprit’s claims.

Without taking the time to get a warrant, and acting only on the say-so of the girl they actually caught with the medicine, school officials searched Redding’s backpack, and found nothing. Then they took Redding to the nurse’s office, and searched her outer clothing. Nothing. Then they had her stretch out her bra and panties, exposing her breasts and genitals. Nothing. They shook out her underclothes, and her body was inspected by the nurse and another school official. Nothing. Then they put her in the principal’s office, and left her there alone for a few hours, without calling her mother or anyone else. No drugs of any kind were found during all this searching, and nobody else was strip searched.

Redding sued, claiming that her Fourth Amendment rights had been violated when she was subjected to this strip search.

The school district seeks a bright-line rule that permits strip searches whenever a school has reason to suspect that a student has prohibited contraband on them. At the same time, and without appearing to notice the inherent hypocrisy, they argue that the courts should not second-guess the judgement of school officials. Here, they had a reason to suspect Redding, and that should be enough to let them strip search her.

Now, if the Court is inclined to lay down a bright-line rule at all here, that surely is not going to be the rule they impose. There is no way the Court is going to let school officials make an unreviewable decision as to whether there’s reason to conduct a given strip search or not.

Instead, they’d probably impose a bright-line rule requiring first that there be sufficient credible evidence — first, that this student has drugs in the first place; and second, that the drugs are concealed in the private regions of the student’s body.

But then, in addition to an evidentiary requirement, they’d probably have to include a proportionality requirement as well. The Court is unlikely to permit extraordinarily invasive searches for contraband that poses no real threat. Strip searches for plastic toys would be within the realm of lawful possibility, otherwise.

But if your bright-line rule requires weighing evidence on a case-by-case basis, and weighing proportionality on a case-by-case basis, then it really isn’t a bright line at all, is it?

No, we’re going to go out on a limb here and predict that the Court will reject any bright-line rule, and instead impose a balancing test. A good rule will require that strip searches are only allowed when there is credible evidence that the student is concealing contraband in or on her private body parts. Not just the say-so of another student trying to direct blame onto someone else.

And a good rule will require that a strip search be proportionate to the danger. It’s more reasonable if the kid’s believed to have explosives strapped to his body (a la Christian Slater in “Heathers”), or a weapon in his underwear, or decks of heroin in his nether regions. It’s not so reasonable if the kid’s only believed to possess a toy, or harmless medicine, or even a list of kids he doesn’t like.

A good rule will be fact-specific, and will require schools to actually exercise good judgment. A rule that lets them just act without thinking would be contrary to the direction this Court seems to be taking with its Fourth Amendment cases.

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That leads us to the third Arizona case in this term’s Fourth Amendment decisions. On January 26, Justice Ginsburg wrote a unanimous decision for the Court in Arizona v. Johnson (which we wrote about here).

In Johnson, the Court clarified that a police officer can do a pat-down search, feeling someone’s outer clothing for weapons, if the officer has reason to believe that the person is armed and poses a threat to safety. The police don’t lose that ability to protect their own safety when other circumstances change.

Ginsburg pointed out that this really shouldn’t have been a point of confusion. A long line of cases, starting with Terry v. Ohio, clearly say cops can pat someone down for weapons if they have reason to believe the person’s armed and dangerous. And yet there obviously was confusion, evidenced by the Johnson case itself.

In Johnson, a female officer with gang experience was involved in a traffic stop. Before the stop, she had no reason to believe the passengers had committed any crimes. But during the stop, she saw things that led her to believe that one of the passengers was a gang member. She talked to him about things unrelated to the reason for the traffic stop, and some of the things he said led her to believe that he was armed and dangerous. So she asked him to step out of the car, to talk about things out of earshot of the other suspected gang members, then patted down his clothing and found a gun in his waistband. The passenger was later convicted of possessing the gun.

The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled that the officer lost her authority to pat him down once she started talking to him about matters unrelated to the traffic infraction. Even though she had reason to believe he was armed and posed a threat to her, the fact that she had talked to him about other things erased her ability to pat him down for her own protection.

The unanimous Supreme Court cleared that right up. The passenger was already seized, and not free to leave. The fact that he was being asked questions about other things didn’t change that. And the officer did have reason to suspect that he was armed and dangerous, and the topic of conversation didn’t change that.

Now in one respect, this is a bright-line rule. And as we pointed out in our previous post, we have problems with this bright-line rule, insofar as it has to do with whether a person involved in a traffic stop is free to leave. Under the Court’s rule, the answer is simply no, until the stop is over or the police let him go.

But the meat of the decision is not a bright-line rule. It is yet another case-by-case analysis: did the officer have reason to believe there was a weapon and that she could be in danger? The ruling simplifies the analysis by removing other considerations from the equation, as being irrlevant. The bright-line issue of whether someone is seized or not really has nothing to do with the core issue. And the Arizona court’s issue of whether the conversation has switched topics is beyond irrelevant.

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The fourth case this term was Herring v. United States, which had to do with the exclusionary rule. (We wrote about this decision here.)

In Herring, the Court ruled that the exclusionary rule doesn’t apply when a policeman acts on flawed information from law enforcement in the next county. Herring, a character who’d had several run-ins with local law enforcement in Alabama, went to get his truck out of impound. The officer ran a check to see if any warrants were outstanding for him. There was a hit for an outstanding warrant in the next county. Herring was arrested on that warrant, and drugs were found. It turned out that the neighboring county’s records were erroneous, and there wasn’t any warrant.

Writing for the narrow 5-4 majority, Chief Justice Roberts ruled that the error was too separate from the search and seizure of the drugs. The officer who conducted the search didn’t have anything to do with the error, and it would be pointless to attribute it to him. Thinking of the exclusionary rule as a rule of deterrence, Roberts said it should only apply when excluding seized evidence would deter wrongful conduct. So the police conduct would have to be sufficiently deliberate that it could be deterred. And the conduct would have to be sufficiently wrongful to be worth the loss of evidence.

It’s easy to see where the majority was going here. It’s common for people to think of the exclusionary rule as balancing, on the one hand, our concern for protecting individuals against unlawful government intrusions, against our concern against “letting people off on a technicality” on the other hand. So here, the arresting officer wasn’t being negligent. He acted totally reasonably, relying on a criminal justice database. Excluding this evidence wouldn’t deter future reliance on criminal justice databases, and we actually don’t want that kind of reliance to be deterred in the first place.

But that common way of thinking really is a misconception. The exclusionary rule is not a rule of deterrence. And thinking of it that way can lead to confusion.

The exclusionary rule is the typical remedy for police violation of Fourth Amendment rights, by suppression of the evidence that would not have been gathered but for the violation. This protects the justice system, by ensuring that the maximum lawfully-gathered evidence is available, while ensuring that defendants aren’t prosecuted with unlawfully-gathered evidence.

Police officers and departments are not punished for violations, because that would be deterrent — it would create an incentive to avoid borderline situations where evidence could have been obtained lawfully.

Rather than do that, the exclusionary rule lets officers go right up to the line of what they’re allowed to do, and only takes away what they shouldn’t have been allowed to get, the evidence they got by crossing the line. The get to keep the other evidence.

The exclusionary rule is not an individual right, but is rather a remedy that has been crafted over generations of thoughtful jurisprudence. It simultaneously maximizes protection of the individual’s rights, and society’s interest in law enforcement. It balances two powerful and competing interests, and it does the job elegantly. As such, it is a beautiful rule, but one that is nevertheless criticized — both by law-and-order types and by defendant-rights types — when its role is misunderstood. Unfortunately, it is misunderstood all the time, and the Supreme Court itself did so here.

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The last case is Pearson v. Callahan, decided on January 21. It involved Utah police officers who conducted a warrantless search of a home. There were no exigent circumstances. Instead, they thought their conduct was lawful under the “consent once removed” doctrine.

This is a legal doctrine that had been gaining traction out west (and in New Jersey) since the early 1980s. The way it worked here was, they flipped a suspect into an informant. Then they sent the informant to his drug spot, the defendant’s home. The informant was invited in, saw drugs, and went back to tell the cops what they’d seen. The defendant had consented to allow the informant into his home, and that consent was deemed transferred to the cops, as “consent once removed,” and so the defendant was deemend to have consented to the police entry into his home. Under that doctrine, he’d consented, so they didn’t need a warrant.

The cops were sued, and the issue was whether they had qualified immunity here. The Court’s unanimous decision, written by Justice Alito, mostly dealt with a procedural issue raised sua sponte. But in the end they briefly mentioned the underlying issue of whether the police acted lawfully here.

The test for qualified immunity was whether the unlawfulness of the officers’ action was clearly established at the time of their actions. If it was clearly unlawful, then they did not have qualified immunity.

As it happened, however, there was a line of cases that instead established that this kind of “consent once removed” search was fine back in 2002, at least out west. So the police were entitled to qualified immunity.

Disappointingly, the Court did not deal with the issue of whether this kind of attenuated consent is actually proper now in 2009. So there’s really no meat to this decision, which is why we saved it for last.

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All in all, it looks like the Court is shying away from any judicial activism here. Rather than creating broader interpretations of individual rights, or establishing greater police powers, the Court is focusing on clarifying existing rights and powers. And instead of expanding the existing rules, the Court is simply trying to rein in misconceptions and absurdities.

Part of that trend seems to be the relaxing of bright-line rules. Bright lines are great when you don’t want people to have discretion, when you don’t trust them to think, or they’re not trained to understand the issues. You get some efficiency that way. But in real life, facts don’t always fit within those lines, and an unthinking application of bright-line rules will sometimes result in injustice. This Court seems to be moving away from the seeming mass efficiencies, in favor of individual justice.

Well, we like that very much.