by Richard Resch
The Court of Appeal of California, Second Appellate District, held that a geofence warrant used to gather evidence in a homicide investigation that resulted in two murder convictions lacked the requisite particularity and was overbroad in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Nevertheless, the Court affirmed the convictions based on the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule due to the newness of geofence warrants as an investigative tool at the time the warrant was sought and executed.
Facts of the Case
On the morning of March 1, 2019, Adbadalla Thabet was shot and killed as he exited his car at a bank in Paramount, California. Surveillance video showed a gray sedan and red sedan following him. The driver of the gray car pulled slowly up to Thabet, fatally shot him, and sped away. The driver of the red car retrieved Thabet’s backpack and fled the scene.
Investigators learned that Thabet managed several local gas stations and had just picked up cash receipts from multiple locations prior to arriving at the bank. Upon reviewing surveillance video from those locations, the red and gray cars are seen tailing Thabet at two pick-up locations, but their license plate numbers are ...
by Richard Resch
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit joined four of its sister Circuits in holding that U.S. Sentencing Guideline § 2K2.1(b)(4)(B) does not apply in cases where the firearm in question never had a serial number.
A Houston Police Department officer conducted a traffic stop ...
by Richard Resch
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit vacated Jadnel Flores-Nater’s 30-year prison sentence containing a 20-year upward variance because the District Court failed to provide the required case-specific rationale to justify an upward variance of that magnitude.
On June 8, 2018, Flores-Nater together with four ...
by Richard Resch
In a case of first impression, the Supreme Court of Idaho held that police conducted a warrantless search of a vehicle when a drug-detection dog trespassed against personal property by placing his paws on the exterior of the vehicle and performed a free-air sniff in order to ...
by Richard Resch
The Supreme Court of Vermont held that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy under the state Constitution in their real-time cell site location information (“CSLI”), and obtaining this information by police requires a warrant, unless a recognized exception to the warrant requirement applies.
On December 28, ...
by Benjamin Tschirhart and Richard Resch
The tragic shootings of Black people by white police officers are a catalyst for national outrage. They are regular grist for the media mill across the country and rightly receive the attention of the public when they occur, as they do all too frequently. ...
by Richard Resch
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit held that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma erred by sentencing the defendant to the statutory maximum for violating the terms of his supervised release because the court based its decision, at least in ...
by Richard Resch
In a case of first impression, the Supreme Court of California announced the constitutional, ethical, and habeas procedural principles that govern postconviction proceedings in which a habeas petitioner claims that exculpatory evidence was available at the time of trial but suppressed by the government with the suppression ...
by Richard Resch
In a 5-4 decision written by Justice Sotomayor, the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Arizona Supreme Court’s holding that Lynch v. Arizona, 578 U.S. 613 (2016), was not a “significant change in the law” is one of those rare cases in which ...
by Richard Resch
The Supreme Court of New Jersey unanimously adopted a Daubert-type standard for determining the admissibility of expert evidence under New Jersey Rules of Evidence 702 (“Rule 702”) in all future criminal and quasi-criminal cases. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993). The ...
