Criminal Procedure : Week of 14 April 2008

17 April

• Read Chapter 968, understand police powers of arrest.
• Egon Bittner essay on screwdrivers and arrests. This comes highly recommended by Prof. Smith. Police officers have very powerful tools, and they have to use them as circumstances suggest to them: we don't want them to arrest everyone for whom they've got probable cause-- that would be awful.
• Williams, on a night with many dispatch calls, there's on that drug dealing is going on from a Bronco, and officers arrive at a parking lot. A similar car is there, with two people in it, one of whom has his arm behind the passenger seat. There's no license plate, and nothing else is going on there.

  What is the best way for the police to use their authority under these circumstances?

  Might make an arrest, just for the justification to search.

  The risk of police intervening clumsily in inner city affairs are for real, ranging from gunfire to loss of legitimacy in the law.

• Payton v. New York: didn't want to extend warrantless arrest (allowed in public, when there is probable cause) into the home. This was a murder case, but you can't cross the threshold of the home where the person lives without a warrant. If you have probable cause to believe the person is there, and an arrest warrant, you're OK. If you have a warrant to search the home for a guy, and you find him, you can arrest. Each is based on probable cause.
• Kimmel v. California: Incident to arrest, you can search the persons and the grabbable areas for weapons and for evidence of the crime, but not other areas, and not for anything else.
• Bowie: the red running suit is admitted because it's a "protective sweep:" you get to look in places where there might be a person who might ambush you. This is a pretty easily-abused thing.
• Knowles v. Iowa: if you've got the option whether to issue citations or arrest, the exception to the warrant requirement that justifies search incident to arrest doesn't apply. There is no search incident to citation. So: arrest, search, unarrest.
• Wren v. United States: a fitting end to this series of cases.