Category: Landmark Cases

Supreme Court to Decide Double Jeopardy Case

Most people have a basic understanding of double jeopardy. Generally, the double jeopardy clause, which is found in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, states that a person can’t be prosecuted more than once for the same crime. However, there are several exceptions to the double jeopardy doctrine, and it’s not as straightforward as…

What Does the Supreme Court's Cell Phone Privacy Decision Mean?

Can Police Access Cell Phone Location Data Without a Warrant? In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down what digital privacy experts are hailing as a landmark case in Carpenter v. United States. If you own any kind of mobile phone, including a smartphone, you’ll want to read on to learn what Carpenter…

come back with a warrant

Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure have been upheld in two recent landmark Supreme Court rulings related to the searches of vehicles. In both rulings handed down last month, the U.S. Supreme Court defended the right to privacy even when the parties in question broke the law. The cases were reported in USA…

Duane Buck

Allegations of racism in the criminal justice system are nothing new but a high profile case in Texas has led to soul searching at a national level over allegations that a man was sentenced to death because he is black. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court conferenced a decision on whether it will again address…

police brutality

A damning report into the way crime is handled in Ferguson, MO., has confirmed that not all local criminal justice systems are equal and some are riddled with bad practices. This month the Justice Department called on Ferguson, Mo., to “overhaul its criminal justice system, declaring that the city had engaged in so many constitutional…

Just as cell phones and smart phones have become a way of life in recent years, it has become routine for police to seek to recover information from the devices as part of their investigations. However, a recent U.S. Supreme Court has drawn a line in the sand on use of information from these devices…

In Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928), the Court found the Fourth Amendment did not apply to wiretaps because “[t]he taps from house lines were made in the streets near the houses,” rather than in the houses themselves, employing a strict property bases Fourth Amendment analysis. Likewise, in Goldman v. United States, 316…

Yesterday I discussed whether the massive data mining efforts of the U.S. government presaged a Big Brother like invasion of privacy. Today I’ll consider the implications of government efforts to develop massive DNA databanks in order to solve crimes. In 2003 a man broke into a woman’s home in Maryland and raped her at gunpoint….

DNA and the question of when and under what circumstances it can be taken from suspects has occupied many hours in the U.S. Supreme Court of late. This month the Supreme Court upheld the controversial police practice of taking DNA samples from people who have been arrested but not convicted of a crime. The justices…

Police powers of “stop and frisk” have proved controversial with landmark legal cases in Texas and elsewhere. New York is the current focus of the dispute due to a rigorous implementation of the power by the city’s police department. The New York Police Department recently lost an attempt to prevent an expert witness testifying about…