Some Previous Cases

Some previous rulings that are worth looking at:

Muehler v. Mena - (4th Am. Detention) The Court ruled that it is lawful to forcibly detain a person during a search, by putting them in handcuffs. The Court recognized that the invasion by detention during a lawful search is minimal compared to the invasion by a search in itself, and that detention is a reasonable way to minimize the risk to officers, in itself a valid interest. The Summers rule allows for a legal search to be effectuated by force, and here the Court saw a further detention by handcuffs as justified, especially in light of the fact that the officers were searching for weapons. Furthermore, the Court addressed the officers' questioning of Mena about her immigration status. It found that there was no violation of Mena's rights because officers do not need a pretense to simply ask questions, as long as the length of detention is not prolonged by doing so (See also Illinois v. Caballes below). The dissent argues that the duration of the detention was unnecessary.

Johnson v. California - (Strict Scrutiny) The California Prison system had an unwritten policy of segregating the prisoners by race for their first 6 months in a given prison. In this case the Court indicated that they are serious about using strict scrutiny. The court wants the lower courts to apply strict scrutiny in all cases about race, the idea being that race is often used as an indicator for other factors, on which the law should be based. In this case race was used as an indicator for dangerousness. Therefore, so the ruling goes, the law must be based on dangerousness rather than race.

Roper v. Simmons - (Death Penalty) The defendant decided to kill someone before he turned 18, figuring he couldn't be punished. Here the Court looked at how our standards of decency in terms of the 18th amendment (no cruel and unusual punishment) have changed. Essentially, they decided that a majority of states' laws prohibiting capital punishment for those under 18 demonstrated that our standard of decency (collectively) prohibits such practices, and it is therefore unconstitutional. (Regularly I would include a lot of commentary on this)

Illinois v. Caballes - (Search and Seizure) A man was stopped for speeding or something, and while he was getting his ticket another cop came by with a drug dog and had his trunk sniffed. They found outrageous amounts of drugs, but the dog sniff was not premised on probable cause or reasonable suspicion. The Court held that as long as the defendant was not detained longer than was necessary to complete the detention's original purpose, the dog sniff was not unconstitutional. This reasoning was based on the fact that there is no 'reasonable expectation of privacy' for things like drugs, so the use of a dog (or device I guess) that ONLY indicates the presence or absence of drugs does not require reasonable suspicion. However to hold someone without a reason in order to do the search would amount to an unwarranted detention.

Who is Oliver Wendell Jones?

Oliver Wendell Holmes is one of the most well known Supreme Court Justices ever. (see here)

Oliver Wendell Jones is a character from an old cartoon strip called "Bloom County" (it's the one with Opus the penguin). Oliver was just about my favorite character from the strip. He is a computer hacker who likes to do things like hack into the IRS and get his dad million dollar tax returns, and 'edit' newspaper headlines.

"Oliver Wendell Jones was the most recurring black character in Bloom County a comic strip by Berkeley Breathed. The genius of the bunch, he was always hacking into forbidden files with his Banana, Jr. computer. He once framed Steve Dallas for breaking into the IRS computers. Oliver's scientific achievements didn't end with computing, he's dabbled in teleportation, genetic enginering, and once invented a machine that turns people black. He and Milo Bloom planned to use it on the South African ambassador to the U.S., but it didn't pan out. Oliver's mother always tried to get him to emulate someone normal like Michael Jackson, something Oliver did not appreciate." (wikipedia)

Below are some comic strips with Oliver in them: