Illegal Search And Seizure

The 4th Amendment protects you from "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the government. Generally, this means police must have a warrant or probable cause to search you or your property. Many people likely know that police need a warrant in most situations to...

Would you let a stranger in a lab coat search through your phone? What about a police officer? How about if you had a good reason to refuse, such as evidence of a crime?Questions like these come up all the time in criminal defense. That's because both the U.S. and...

"Driving while black" isn't a real crime, but it might as well be. African-Americans and people of color persistently report being stopped, searched, cited and even arrested for traffic offenses in situations where white people probably wouldn't be. Yet people of...

Imagine you're headed down the highway and are signaled to pull over by an official state vehicle. It's the Iowa Department of Transportation, and they say they spotted a traffic violation you committed a couple of miles back. They issue you a $150 ticket.That...

When an African-American woman from Waterloo named Scottize Brown was pulled over in 2015, it had little to do with her behavior. The officer who pulled her over had run the license plate on the vehicle she was driving and learned that the owner had alleged gang...

Heading back to school brings a few familiar rituals, which can include shopping for school clothes, school supplies and getting a new school locker and combination. But unlike clothing and school supplies, lockers are not personal property. Therefore, once students...

The dashcam video of a Des Moines police stop involving two African-American men, Montray Little and Jared Clinton, has been viewed over 9 million times."My heart sank into my feet," said Clinton's mother. "I apologized to him because I brought him to this city."...

"This empowerment of local law enforcement to determine the substance of Fourth Amendment protections in the context of warrantless inventory searches and seizures of automobiles is rich with irony," Justice Brent R. Appel of the Iowa Supreme Court wrote recently, "as...

The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of criminal defendants to fully confront the witnesses and evidence against them. That includes DNA evidence, but it can be difficult to apply that right to the forensic software used to match genetic...