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Article: Criminal law - Fourth Amendment - Ninth Circuit upholds car seizure through staged accident and theft. - United States v. Alverez-Tejeda.
- Article from:
- Harvard Law Review
- Article date:
- May 1, 2008
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Harvard Law Review Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Constitutional and statutory law have riddled the Fourth Amendment's search and seizure protections with significant exceptions. Last June, in United States v. Alverez-Tejeda, (1) the Ninth Circuit held that an elaborate ruse to seize a car transporting drugs was not unreasonable, thereby correctly denying the defendant's request for suppression of the subsequently discovered contraband. However, the court appeared to apply an ex post reasonableness analysis to the method of the seizure, thus unnecessarily obscuring limits on appropriate police behavior. The court could instead have denied suppression by applying the Supreme Court's holding in Hudson v. Michigan (2) ...