This Article proposes a general approach to applying the Fourth Amendment to the Internet. It assumes that courts will try to apply the Fourth Amendment to the Internet so that the Fourth Amendment has the same basic function online that it has offline. The Article reaches two major conclusions. First,… Read More »
The scholarship of interrogations has taken a turn from procedure to substance. The Supreme Court’s landmark criminal procedure rulings regulating modern psychological interrogations remain static, inviting lingering decades-long debates over whether the Court correctly decided decisions such as Miranda. Meanwhile, psychologists increasingly study not the legal regulation of interrogations, but… Read More »
Imagine the following scenario: A police officer is investigating a major drug trafficking ring. She obtains a wiretap on the cell phone of the suspected kingpin of the organization. The wiretap enables her to overhear conversations between the top target of the wiretap and several other people in the drug… Read More »
The Fourth Amendment protects the “right of the people to be secure . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures . . . .” But, this amendment has long been steeped in controversy, especially when it comes to determining how to enforce it—by exclusionary rule requiring suppression of unlawfully-obtained evidence, civil… Read More »
Legal payments are in many cases probabilistic. For example, in the criminal context, a fine is levied against a criminal only after a series of sequential probabilistic events occur: He must be caught by the police, charged by the prosecution, and convicted by a court in accordance with the procedural… Read More »
It is time for Congress to end its fifty-year experiment in post hoc federal court enforcement of constitutional criminal procedure. By clinging to ineffectual federal habeas review of state criminal cases, Congress is pouring tax dollars down the drain and overlooking a more effective way to enforce the Constitution: helping… Read More »
Covert policing necessarily involves deception, which in turn often leads to participation in activity that appears to be criminal. In undercover operations, the police have introduced drugs into prison, undertaken assignments from Latin American drug cartels to launder money, established fencing businesses that paid cash for stolen goods and for… Read More »
The Supreme Court has recently declared several categories of prisoners, such as juvenile and mentally retarded offenders, to be categorically ineligible for capital punishment under the Eighth Amendment. If these “death ineligible” offenders nonetheless sit on death row with procedurally defective habeas corpus petitions, can the writ be used to… Read More »
Preventing police misconduct often requires changing the department in which it arises, but police departments have proved largely resistant to legal efforts to reform them. A promising federal law, 42 U.S.C. § 14141, permits the Justice Department to sue police departments that are engaged in a “pattern or practice” of… Read More »
In 2008 in United States v. Santos, the Supreme Court addressed the meaning of the term “proceeds” as used in 18 U.S.C. § 1956, part of the Money Laundering Control Act. Efrain Santos and a co-defendant were charged with operating an illegal lottery, which involved payments to runners, collectors, and… Read More »