The VLW Blog

A man who unsuccessfully challenged police use of GPS tracking technology to gather evidence against him has failed to avoid a 61-year prison sentence for a Campbell County grocery store burglary. Things could get even worse for Keith Lamont Hill, formerly of Bedford. He faces sentencing on similar convictions in Lynchburg Friday. Hill claimed police [...]

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It’s a tale of two traffic stops. On June 26, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a traffic stop based on an officer’s eyeballs-only estimate of a driver’s speed in the case of U.S. v. Sowards. But last Friday, the appellate court upheld a search – same North Carolina district court, same [...]

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Police use of a GPS system to track a sex offender in an Arlington County abduction case has survived a rehearing en banc in the Virginia Court of Appeals. But the appellate court refused to endorse the investigative technique. Instead, it held that police already had good reason to tail David L. Foltz Jr. as [...]

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Voyeuristic police officers who passed around revealing photographs discovered on a defendant’s cellphone are not subject to a civil rights suit by the defendant’s girlfriend, pictured in the photos. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday rejected the appeal by Jessie Casella, who sought damages for her humiliation from Culpeper police under section 1983. [...]

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Is that a gun in your purse or are you just happy to see me? No, that’s not what a police officer said when he approached a woman near a Montgomery County, Md., high school the day after a gang-related stabbing in a supermarket parking lot a couple of miles away. A police gang unit [...]

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On its own motion, the Virginia Court of Appeals has decided to hear en banc its Sept. 7 decision upholding use of a warrantless GPS device on a man suspected of multiple sexual assaults in the Arlington area. Judge Randolph A. Beales said in the earlier panel opinion that neither installation of the device nor [...]

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A drug defendant’s statements to a private security guard need not be suppressed, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court said last Friday, reversing a Richmond federal district court’s suppression order. Virginia’s system of state regulation of private security guards through Virginia Code § 9.1-146 does not necessarily mean the guards were acting as state agents when [...]

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A persistent police officer who decided to enter a darkened house to investigate suspicious circumstances is vindicated as an appeals court accords him immunity from a lawsuit by homeowners who claimed they were startled by the officer’s intrusion. The decision by a panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses the ruling of [...]

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An 8-to-1 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court today held it was an unconstitutional intrusion for school officials to search a 13-year-old girl’s bra and underpants for a suspected prescription drug.  “[T]he content of the suspicion failed to match the degree of intrusion,” wrote retiring Justice David Souter for the majority. By a 7-to-2 vote, [...]

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How fast is the turnaround in car-search law? Just this fast, as the 4th Circuit yesterday made a U-turn and vacated a cocaine conviction out of Roanoke federal court. In an unpublished opinion in U.S. v. Majette, the 4th Circuit said an “evidence-producing automobile search incident to the arrest of Tony Majette for a driving [...]

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