Document Category: 4th Amendment

This motion argues that police reliance on a “high-crime area” designation should carry little or no weight in the reasonable suspicion analysis because the label is vague, non-particularized, and often untethered to actual crime data. Drawing on recent case law and empirical research, it contends that such designations are inconsistently applied, racially biased, and frequently used to justify stops lacking individualized suspicion.

This motion seeks to invalidate a warrant and suppress all resulting evidence where the warrant rests solely on Flock data. It explains that Flock’s machine-learning model generates conclusions based on a non-public AI model with an unknown error rate, is vulnerable to hallucinations, and is highly sensitive to weather, lighting, noise, and partial plate captures, with studies showing accuracy can fall to “near zero” under certain conditions (pp.1-6). Because Flock functions like an uncorroborated anonymous informant, the motion argues that Flock data cannot establish sufficient veracity for probable cause and lacks particularity (pp. 7-12). It further contends that omissions about Flock’s known flaws defeat the good-faith exception (pp. 12-15).

Because each stage of Facial Recognition (FR) carries a risk of error, due process and Brady require disclosure concerning every step (pp. 6–7). The five steps are: (1) the probe photo used, (2) the database selected, (3) any photo editing performed, (4) the algorithmic search, and (5) human review (pp. 6, 9–13). The brief explains that FR has particularly high error rates when applied to people of color, women, elders, and children (p. 8). Low-quality or edited probe photos increase error (pp. 10–11), and many FR databases are skewed by overrepresentation of minorities (pp. 12–13). Algorithms operate as “black boxes” with differing reliability (p. 13), while human review is subject to the same biases as eyewitness identification (p. 13). Because the risk of error varies at each stage and may be exculpatory, defense counsel is entitled to full discovery of the FR process, including the algorithm and analyst, both of whom function as impeachable “witnesses” (pp. 26–27). Defenders can use this brief to argue for comprehensive discovery of FR methods and to frame challenges to the admissibility or reliability of FR-based identifications.

Relying on empirical studies from New York City, Chicago, Houston, and Dayton, Ohio, this motion explains that ShotSpotter alerts are unreliable because they rarely lead to discovery of gun-related crime or weapon use. It further argues that ShotSpotter alerts are unparticularized because they improperly equate assessments about a place with assessments about individuals in that place. Finally,  it contends that police should not be permitted to combine a ShotSpotter alert with other vague and unparticularized hunches—like the high-crime-area label—to establish reasonable suspicion, particularly given cited research about how ShotSpotter sensors are predominantly placed in communities of color and police are more likely to describe these same communities as high-crime areas regardless of actual crime rates.

This motion relies on new social science research showing that there is no serious risk of violence to police who conduct routine traffic stops to argue that courts should revisit the holding in Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106 (1977) (permitting officers to automatically order drivers out of the car during traffic stops) both under federal and state constitutional law. Instead of permitting officers to automatically order drivers out of cars during traffic stops, the motion argues that police should only be permitted to order drivers out of cars when they have reasonable suspicion that the driver poses a danger or is engaged in independent criminal activity – a standard that Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Vermont already use.  This motion can also be adapted to address cases in which police order passengers out of cars under Maryland v. Wilson, 519 U.S. 408 (1997).

This draft motion argues that courts should discount officer observations of “blading” when conducting reasonable suspicion analyses, because research shows that blading is a conclusory term that describes amorphous, innocuous, and contradictory behavior. This is particularly true when the term is applied to Black and brown community members who are trained to fear and avoid police. The motion asks the court to join others across the county in holding that “blading” is a generic label based on police hunches and is insufficient to establish reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.  These same arguments could be applied to reliance on “blading” as indicative of criminal activity for probable cause analyses.

This draft section of a motion to suppress details how judges’ and jurors’ assessments of the voluntariness of consent are likely to be impaired by a systematic psychosocial bias that makes them underappreciate the degree to which suspects feel pressure to comply with police search requests and overestimate the likelihood of freely-given consent. These tendencies persist even if police inform individuals that they have the right to refuse consent [p. 8]. This motion ultimately encourages courts to require reasonable suspicion before permitting requests for consent as NJ, RI, and CT already do [p. 8-10] or – at the very least – to take into account these psychosocial realities when analyzing the totality of the circumstances to determine whether consent was voluntarily given.  The research in this motion and the arguments raised could also be used to address the voluntariness of a decision to waive Miranda rights and give a statement to police.

This draft motion should be used to combat a probable cause finding predicated on a dog sniff if there is any indication that the dog’s handler prompted the dog (intentionally or unintentionally) to alert through a head nod, verbal command, repeated searches, etc. The motion relies on social science research about how readily dogs respond to subtle handler prompts.

This motion relies on the Federal Rules of Evidence to argue for exclusion of police testimony about the behavior of drug traffickers. Pages 13-14 rely on social science to argue that users of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and cocaine consume large quantities of each of those drugs daily to support their habit such that courts cannot infer distribution from larger amounts. Pages 15-16 collect national data to refute the suggestion that drug traffickers typically possess firearms.

This brief argues that law enforcement’s warrantless upload of a suspect’s SNP profile to GEDmatch and subsequent genealogical investigation violated the Alaska and federal constitutions. The brief explains how SNP-based genetic genealogy reveals highly information-rich data—including intimate familial associations and biological characteristics—far beyond traditional STR identity testing. It contends that both the suspect and his relatives retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their shared genetic segments and that the third-party doctrine does not permit unregulated access to such sensitive data. Relying on Katz, Carpenter, and Alaska’s broader constitutional privacy protections, the brief argues that this novel surveillance technique constitutes a search requiring a warrant.

This ten-page sample motion argues that judges should not consider a client’s record of prior police contacts, including arrests, that did not result in criminal convictions for purposes of sentencing because such records are (1) inherently unreliable/ambiguous and (2) likely to exacerbate existing racial disparities in the criminal legal system. The motion draws on national data and jurisdiction-specific case studies to show that people of color, particularly Black Americans, are stopped, searched, arrested, and charged at disproportionately high rates, not because of higher rates of crime commission but because of implicit bias in law enforcement. This sample motion also uses local data from Washtenaw County, Michigan, that defenders should replace with their own jurisdiction’s data when available, to demonstrate that these national trends are reflected in the defendant’s jurisdiction as well.  Data from this motion could also be useful to defenders drafting 4th Amendment suppression motions or making evidentiary arguments at trial to exclude evidence of prior police contacts.  To the extent that the court or the prosecutor bring up prior police contacts at pre-trial release hearings, this data could also be useful to argue for exclusion of prior contacts during bail/pretrial release assessments.

In this amicus brief, Fourth Amendment scholars draw on empirical research about the application of the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule to explain how overreliance on it has created perverse incentives for law enforcement and stunted the development of Fourth Amendment law – particularly in the context of digital data searches. Pages 4-5 explain the empirical study and its results.  Relying on this data, the brief argues for narrower interpretations of the scope of the good faith exception going forward.

Draft motion arguing that finding many grams of methamphetamines does not necessarily support a conviction for possession with intent to distribute. Bottom of p. 1 through p. 3 explains that people addicted to methamphetamines use more frequently and in higher dosages than first-time users, using as much as one gram per day and rarely (but at least once) up to 15g in one day. Thus a person found with many grams of meth may only be a user rather than a dealer.  This data could also be used in other arguments, including: (1) a suppression argument that there is no probable cause to search a location for evidence of distribution when the quantity recovered or known about only suggests personal use; (2) a Rule of Evidence 403 argument limiting the testimony of a witness who wants to characterize a given quantity of meth as “a lot of drugs” or who wants to describe the client as a drug dealer or distributor; (3) a sentencing argument that a client is not as much of a danger to their community as someone actively selling drugs, despite the amount of drugs found.

p. 13-59 overview studies of Shotspotter accuracy and racially biased implementation

Cites studies demonstrating racial disparities in incidents of police violence, being stopped by police, and resulting perception of police

Based on six years of data of police stops in Philadelphia based on the smell of marijuana, this brief overviews how its use as a justification for a search has vastly increased the number of searches conducted, but less than 20% of the searches relying on the presence of marijuana actually discovered contraband. The brief argues that such discretionary opinions perpetuate implicit bias and result in racially biased outcomes.

This document was filed in support of a motion to compel discovery of the underlying source code, parameters, error rates, input data, results, reports, analyst, and confidence scores of the Facial Recognition program used in a criminal case. The expert explains the steps involved in a facial recognition search and areas where subjective human decisions — and cognitive bias — are likely to impact the outcome of the search.

Civil rights complaint about problems with facial recognition technology – pgs. 9-12 collect research about errors with when images are of low quality, angles are different, resolution is bad; pgs. 12-15 collect research showing facial recognition algorithms are racially biased; pgs. 15-16 collect data about jurisdictions that have banned use of facial recognition technology because of its flaws

Incorporating statistical evidence of racial disparities in police stops and police violence, this brief argues that “what constitutes “suspicious” or “abnormal” behavior for Fourth Amendment purposes must take into account the realities of racism and police violence experienced by communities of color” and that any totality of the circumstances analysis must consider “the fraught, frightening, and sometimes fatal treatment some communities receive from police.”

p. 10-12 discuss a study that found that people with normal smell identification abilities could only smell a 5-pound bag of marijuana in a trunk 13% of the time, and that 10% of the time people thought they smelled marijuana when there was none. p. 12-13 argues that an officer can impermissibly taint a search by suggesting that he smells marijuana, similar to tainting a lineup by suggesting the suspect to the witness.