Thursday, June 10, 2010

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

(You Can't Make This Stuff Up is a series of articles detailing the "human" side of my legal experience.  These will be stories that have a strong personal element, be it funny, touching, or just plain bizarre.  You can read more of them by using the label "YCMTSU")

For the law journal write on, the lead case dealt primarily with Fourth Amendment issues, including the police's ability to obtain a DNA sample from anyone taken into police custody.  It was a Maryland case, and the UB write on rules state that you can cite to any case that the lead case cites.

One of the cases cited by the lead case involved the seizure of illegal drugs during an arrest.  The police indicated that an informant had told them the suspect kept the drugs "between his cheeks," clearly indicating his backside.  The police followed the suspect and the informant to an abandoned car wash, where an illegal transaction occurred.  While effectuating the arrest, an officer seized evidence from, well, "between the suspect's cheeks." Later, the suspect argued that these were "not in plain sight" and therefore, required a warrant.

While I am not fully versed in the relative merits of this argument, the discussion never got very deep.  On direct examination, the lead detective in the case testified that the baggie the drugs were contained in was visible to the naked eye due to the suspect wearing his pants very low. This alone is comedy gold, now you know why your mother always tells you to pick up your pants!  Not only is it classy dressing, but it also can protect you from warrant-less search and seizure.



The key laugh out loud moment, however, came in the last paragraph of the opinion, in which the judge noted, "Perhaps if he didn't want these private areas of his body subjected to police search, he shouldn't have displayed them to the general public."

And that, my friends, is valid Maryland case law.

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