Although Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agents are civilians, they work for the military and further military goals.  Thus, they are prohibited from enforcing purely civilian laws under the Posse Comitatus Act, according to an en banc panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and should not have investigated a civilian for downloading child pornography.

A “cadre of armed state and federal agents” and a helicopter “orbiting above” was insufficient to establish involuntary coercion of a defendant’s consent to his home, according to the Fifth Circuit.

Mr. Amir Meshal a United States citizen and resident of New Jersey, traveled to Mogadishu, Somalia in 2006 to further his study of Islam.  In early 2007, Somalia experienced an outbreak of violence causing many civilians to flee the country for neighboring Kenya.

Suppression of evidence in a state court does not, by itself, raise a factual issue about whether law enforcement officers violated the defendant’s clearly established rights, the Fifth Circuit recently held.

The United States Government investigated Mr. David Levy for his role in a stock manipulation scheme.  Mr. Levy was aware that he faced potential criminal charges; his wife had been indicted in a related matter nearly a year earlier, and his attorney held a telephone conversation with federal prosecutors to discuss potential charges against Mr. Levy.

The government may retain computer evidence obtained outside the scope of an original, probable-cause search warrant and prosecute people for crimes based on that evidence, the Justice Department argued this week before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, sitting en banc.

On September 4, 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans police officers were dispatched to the Danziger Bridge.  In the chaotic atmosphere, two unarmed men were shot and killed.

The government may not conduct the equivalent of a Terry stop inside a person’s home without exigent circumstances, the Eleventh Circuit held this week.

Special Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives began investigating Mr. Michael Weaver in 2008. Agents searched through trash outside his home and found marijuana.

Court orders for collection of DNA evidence from police officers for the sole purpose of excluding those officers as sources of DNA found at a crime scene is constitutionally permissible, according to the Ninth Circuit.

In early 2011, Mr. Aaron Graham committed a string of robberies in the Baltimore, MD area.  After robbing a Dollar Tree store, a jewelry store, a 7-Eleven, and a gas station, on February 5, 2011, at approximately 3:29 p.m., Mr. Graham entered a Burger King restaurant in Baltimore.

On March 5, 2009, Mr. Sabil Mumin Mujahid was arrested in Anchorage, Alaska, on Federal firearms charges, specifically for being a felon in possession of a firearm.  A firearm was discovered in his vehicle when he appeared at a local courthouse for a bail hearing on a state drug charge.

A warrantless search of a basement for her live-in grandson’s explosives did not violate the grandson’s Fourth Amendment rights, where he was not an active participant in the request for the grandmother’s consent, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

On October 14, 2010, Officer Aaron Veerman of the Bloomington, Illinois Police Department ran a license check on a vehicle registered to Tonya Smith of Kankakee, Illinois, but Ms. Smith’s driver’s license had expired eighteen years earlier.