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CHARDON, Ohio (AP) — A judge in northeast Ohio said Wednesday that a 17-year-old boy charged in a school shooting is mentally competent to stand trial in the deaths of three students.

The ruling by Judge Timothy Grendell in Geauga County Juvenile Court means suspect T.J. Lane can be tried ...

SAN DIEGO (AP) — The Drug Enforcement Administration issued an apology Wednesday to a California student who was picked up during a drug raid and left in a holding cell for several days without food, water or access to a toilet.

DEA San Diego Acting Special Agent-in-Charge William R. Sherman ...

WASHINGTON — The government plans to speed up the process for tracking E. coli in meat, a move that will help authorities more quickly find the source of bacteria outbreaks and hasten food recalls.

The new Agriculture Department program announced Wednesday would begin tracing the source of potentially contaminated ground ...

NEWARK, N.J. — A woman whose own skin is deeply bronze-colored from regular visits to a tanning salon has been accused of taking her 5-year-old daughter into a tanning booth in violation of state law, burning the girl's skin.

Through her attorney, Patricia Krentcil, 44, of Nutley, entered a plea ...

ORLANDO, Fla. — Thirteen people were charged Wednesday in one of the biggest college hazing cases ever prosecuted in the U.S., accused in the death of a Florida A&M University drum major who authorities say was mercilessly pummeled by fellow members of the marching band.

The charges came more than ...

ATLANTA — While a black preacher told about 100 immigration protesters that incarcerated blacks and detained immigrants faced similar challenges, Jesse Morgan stood to one side of the May Day demonstrators, holding a large sign that read "Radical Queers Resist."

Although the rally was geared toward illegal immigrants, the 24-year-old ...

CLEVELAND — Five men charged with plotting to bomb a bridge linking two wealthy Cleveland suburbs placed what they thought were real explosives at the site and repeatedly tried to detonate them using text messages from cellphones, according to an FBI affidavit filed in court.

Federal authorities on Tuesday described ...

Defendant was found to have consented to a search of his car after the stop was based on knowledge of a warrant. He was at least twice told he could refuse consent. And “[h]e did not interview with the Pretrial Services Officer so the amount of his education is not available; he appears intelligent enough making a practice of not consenting to a search or refusing to speak to the Pretrial Services Officer; there was no problem with his language ability.” United States v. Capps, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 60054 (E.D. Mo. February 24, 2012).*

Defendant was found to have consented. Even if he hadn’t, the drugs would inevitably have been found by an inventory search on impoundment because the officers already knew that the LPN didn’t belong with the car. United States v. Capps, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 60055 (E.D. Mo. April 30, 2012).*

Defendant’s statutory argument that a city could not impose its city speed limit on unimproved land near the border is rejected. Peck v. State, 2012 Ida. App. LEXIS 31 (April 30, 2012).*

Defendant was detained for Miranda and Fourth Amendment purposes when he was found nearly dying in the desert and Border Patrol EMT’s questioned him. United States v. Vasquez-Corrales, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 59818 (D. Ariz. April 5, 2012).*

Second frisk by another officer was still reasonable because the first was “was hardly comprehensive,” and defendant’s actions strongly indicated he was hiding something. United States v. Roach, 2012 U.S. App. LEXIS 8768 (4th Cir. April 30, 2012):

Roach's conduct during the stop only heightened the officers' suspicion that he possessed a weapon. Roach was seen contorting his body, sitting "upright" and "half off the [front passenger's] seat." J.A. 74-75. While in that strange posture, he repeatedly thrust both hands behind him toward his pants and waistband area, all the while watching Officer Burnem, who was at the time preoccupied with the driver. Roach persisted in these movements, moreover, even after Officer Kruger opened the back door of the car and ordered Roach to put his hands up. Those movements, consistent with concealing or retrieving a weapon, would have led a reasonably prudent officer to fear for his or her safety. See United States v. Hamlin, 319 F.3d 666, 671-672 (4th Cir. 2003) (defendant's "repeated attempts to reach toward his groin area gave [the officer] reason to believe that [the defendant] was armed and dangerous"). Meanwhile, the driver's odd behavior upon being stopped — namely, exiting the vehicle rapidly while leaving the car door ajar — reinforced the officers' apprehension.

Given these circumstances, Roach appears to concede that Officer Kruger had sufficient justification to perform an initial Terry frisk for the presence of weapons. See Brief of Appellant at 13 ("Officer Kruger may have developed a reasonable suspicion to search Roach"). Roach argues, however, that any authority to frisk him under Terry vanished as soon as Officer Kruger's patdown uncovered no weapon. In Roach's view, any subsequent patdown was unlawful because Officer Kruger's failure to detect a weapon on him allayed any reasonable suspicion.

The perception of danger, however, did not dissipate with Officer Kruger's frisk. As an initial matter, Roach impeded Officer Kruger's patdown by defying his instructions. He repeatedly brought his hands and elbows down to his waistband area, sought to remain close to the car, and resisted spreading his feet apart. Those movements indicated that Roach was concerned about something Officer Kruger might find. Indeed, Officer Kruger testified that he was compelled to handcuff Roach during the frisk because Roach's movements caused him to be concerned "for officer safety." J.A. 82.

The state had jurisdiction to try an offense against state law that occurred on fee land located on an Indian reservation, and state officers could execute a search warrant there. Nevada v. Hicks recognizes that states can prosecute state crimes on fee land. State v. Clark, 2012 Wash. App. LEXIS 861 (April 12, 2012)*:

¶14 This case is neither Baker nor Mathews. Unlike Colorado in the Baker case, Washington had jurisdiction over the crime it was prosecuting. Mathews is a little closer factually, but even if the quoted observation is treated as a rule of law, it has been superseded by Nevada v. Hicks, 533 U.S. 353, 121 S. Ct. 2304, 150 L. Ed. 2d 398 (2001).

¶15 In Hicks, the court faced the question of whether a tribe could assert jurisdiction over state officers serving a state warrant on reservation trust land. The court answered the question in the negative, noting that states typically have jurisdiction over reservation lands unless a competing policy interest prohibited it. 533 U.S. at 361-65. The court specifically ruled that state officers could enter the reservation and serve a search warrant for a crime committed within the state's jurisdiction. Id. at 363-64.

L. Song Richardson, Police Efficiency and the Fourth Amendment, 87 Indiana Law Journal 1143 (Summer, 2012):

This Article argues that provocative new research in the mind and behavioral sciences can transform our understanding of core Fourth Amendment principles. Recent research in the field of implicit social cognition-a combination of social psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience -demonstrates that individuals have implicit (nonconscious) biases that can perniciously affect the perceptions, judgments, and behaviors that are integral to core Fourth Amendment principles. Drawing from recent implicit social cognition research and prior work, this Article attempts to solve a conceptual puzzle that continues to stymie courts and Fourth Amendment scholars. How can the reasonable suspicion standard promote efficient policing-policing that protects liberty against arbitrary intrusion while simultaneously promoting effective law enforcement?

The reasonable suspicion standard attempts to strike a delicate balance between individual privacy rights and law enforcement needs. This standard serves law enforcement interests by permitting officers to act on their suspicions of criminal activity even in the absence of probable cause. However, in order to prevent arbitrary police actions, courts impose an articulation requirement that obliges officers to justify the intrusion by stating the facts-not mere hunches-that led them to feel suspicious of the individual's ambiguous behaviors. Courts then review these facts to determine whether they give rise to a reasonable inference of criminality.

Ultimately, the standard fails to protect against unjustified encroachments upon individual liberty because it treats suspicion as an objective concept. Courts assume that it is possible to objectively determine whether people are acting suspiciously. They also assume that only people who are behaving suspiciously will be accosted by the police and restrained in their freedom to walk away. This assumption is crucial to the efficacy of the safeguards against arbitrary policing offered by the reasonable suspicion standard.

This Article makes the case, however, that the assumptions driving Fourth Amendment stop-and-frisk jurisprudence are flawed; they are based upon a critical misunderstanding of the nature of suspicion. Implicit social cognition research demonstrates that implicit biases can affect whether police interpret an individual's ambiguous behaviors as suspicious. For instance, studies repeatedly reveal that people evaluate ambiguous actions performed by non-Whites as suspicious and criminal while identical actions performed by Whites go unnoticed. The current operation of the articulation requirement does not ameliorate the problem because an officer will likely be unaware that nonconscious biases affected his or her interpretation of ambiguous behavior. Thus, an officer who acts on his suspicions can easily point to the specific facts that he believes made him feel suspicious without even realizing that implicit biases affected how he interpreted the behavior.

. . .

My argument unfolds in three parts. Part I introduces the science of implicit social cognition and examines its relevance to core Fourth Amendment principles. Part II scrutinizes the reasonable suspicion standard and exposes its weaknesses. Part III draws from implicit social cognition research to reconceptualize the reasonable suspicion standard. It ends by considering some of the benefits and shortcomings of this new approach.

Via Race, Racism, and the Law.

More American teens are smoking marijuana, with nearly 1 in 10 lighting up at least 20 or more times a month, according to a new survey of young people.

The report by the Partnership at DrugFree.org, being released Wednesday, also said abuse of prescription medicine may be easing a bit ...

Global demand for American natural gas and coal is booming, but recent clashes on both U.S. coasts underscore that getting American supplies to eager foreign buyers will be anything but easy.

Last week, the Sierra Club announced that it would use a unique 1970s environmental agreement to halt the construction ...

NEW YORK | A New York man was convicted Tuesday of plotting an aborted suicide mission against New York City subways in 2009 a case that featured the first-time testimony from admitted homegrown terrorists about al Qaeda's fixation with pulling off another attack on American soil.

A jury found Adis ...

NEW YORK — Facebook users in the United States and the United Kingdom can enroll as organ donors via links to official registries on the world's biggest social networking site, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The links should make it easier for people who want to donate their organs to sign ...