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Unlawful Police Conduct: Court of Appeals limits law enforcement's justification for searching a suspect after a traffic stop

Posted by Dmitry Gorin | Aug 28, 2007 | 0 Comments

A new Ninth Circuit decision will assist Criminal Defense Lawyers in Los Angeles, and Attorneys specializing in Search and Seizure Criminal Law throoughout Southern California.In United States v. Grigg, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeas ruled last week that police officers may not detain and search a suspect solely to investigate whether the person has committed a minor offense such as a noise violation. The appeals panel held that defendant's Grigg's conviction for possession of an unregistered machine gun must be reversed.In contrast, the holding in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), permits an officer to stop a person briefly, based on no more than reasonable suspicion that the person has committed a crime. In some circumstances, however, the courts have held that a person Tagged as: federal law and defense, probation and sentencing laws

Comments:

Tania Bakar on November 12, 2009 at 9:35 p.m. wrote: This is an interesting post. After much discussion about whether or not it is important to have laws that protect people's rights from being violated. This ruling does make me question if laws should be overturned in order to convict people who are committing crimes. It is illegal to have an unregistered gun. However, Grigg, the defendant, did have a gun but his convictions are reversed because the evidence was obtained unlawfully. I have to ask myself what good this does, because even though he is not serving any type of punishment. The police as long as the courts do know the name, and home of this man that owns an unregistered gun. It seems strange that they are not evem really able to do anything about it. This puts a mark on the person, and may even now allow police officers to wait around for him to do somethign wrong so that they could bust him. There seems to be reasonable debate on both sides of this issue. It is true that we all want the streets to be safer, but it is also true that peopel do have rights. It was interestign to learn that in other countries there are no hypertechnical laws that prevent important evidence to be used in the court.

About the Author

Dmitry Gorin

Dmitry Gorin is a licensed attorney, who has been involved in criminal trial work and pretrial litigation since 1994. Before becoming partner in Eisner Gorin LLP, Mr. Gorin was a Senior Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles Courts for more than ten years. As a criminal tri...

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