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The U.S. Constitution, via the Fourth Amendment, ensures that the people shall be secure in the persons, paper and property. This rule prevents law enforcement from breaking into your home and ransacking it, looking for evidence of any criminal activity. If they do suspect you of any crime, from drug possession to tax evasion, they…

In this case, Florida argued that they needed to test for drugs to prevent beneficiaries who were addicted to drugs to squander their TANF benefits on their drug habit. This would lead one to presume that there was a significant problem substance abuse with many TANF participants. This is because any time you add an…

Sometimes government attempts to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. This may be done to win political points. But when the attempt includes blanket searches of everyone involved, questions involving the Fourth Amendment are implicated. Florida has attempted to prevent people who use drugs to participate in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program….

When an individual has an addiction, it is often difficult for him or her to seek the help that is needed. As a result, some parties may find themselves being questioned or taken into custody by police if the authorities believe the individuals are in possession of illegal or controlled substances. This type of situation…

Many individuals may not be immensely knowledgeable on how certain legal processes are carried out. Therefore, when a party is facing drug charges, he or she may not fully understand what type of situation they are about to be thrust into. By gathering information on the criminal proceedings relating to one’s circumstances, a party may…

That is a very different notion than giving the police cellphone location data from a "stingray" that allows them to track an individual’s whereabouts 24/7 and would make most people slightly uneasy. The "stingray" device allows police to capture the communication signals from a cellphone and track it, and disturbingly, police have used the information…

Cellphones, being a new technology, have been involved in few Fourth Amendment cases, and therefore, there is little guidance as to how to interpret some of the new capabilities within the context of the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Police, of course, would prefer to claim it is not an illegal search because it is metadata…

Police have been using the metadata gleaned from cellphone tower interactions for years. And they have done it without a warrant. This issue, whether cellphone location data obtained from the telecoms requires a warrant had fallen through the cracks of Fourth Amendment law. Because it wasn’t an old fashioned phone tap, law enforcement attempted to…

You may have noticed when reading about criminal charges in news reports that they often include the seemingly mundane fact that the officer was speaking with the suspect during a traffic stop. Because they eventually were charged with a drug crime or some other criminal offense, you may forget about that part of the story….