Articles

On October 1, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to hear Navarette v. California. The Court will answer the question: “Does the Fourth Amendment require an officer who receives an anonymous tip regarding a drunken or reckless driver to corroborate dangerous driving before stopping the vehicle?” In August of 2008, police in Mendocino County, California received […]

In television and movies, we have all seen someone’s guilt or innocence definitively proven during the course of a polygraph examination. It seems so believable, with all of the sensors and measurements and lines and graphs. Surely these machines work just as well in real life, right? In reality, polygraph results are wholly unreliable and […]

Pennsylvania’s appeals courts Like every other state in the country, Pennsylvania’s court system has multiple tiers: Magisterial District Courts, for minor crimes; Common Pleas Courts for more serious crimes; Intermediate Appellate Courts; and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The Commonwealth and Superior Courts of Pennsylvania are the two intermediate appellate courts. Most criminal appeals from a […]

Earlier this week, the Superior Court decided Commonwealth v. Gatlos, which dealt with the admissibility of drug evidence found incidental to a non-investigatory warrantless inventory search of a vehicle. An inventory search is one where the police are conducting a search not to investigate, but rather to find or take inventory of certain items. In its […]

Across the United States, it is becoming increasingly common for police officers to wear body-mounted cameras in order to record their stops, calls and encounters. The usefulness of these cameras cuts both ways: The officer can use it to prove his innocence in case of an allegation of police brutality, collect evidence of a defendant’s […]