(Apologies to readers. On occasion, I run across a news story, save the link on Movable Type, and then finish writing a post later after I’ve proofed it. On February 17, I accidentally published a draft squib instead of a finished post. The published draft (1) failed to reference relevant federal precedent as I had intended; (2) incorrectly identified the Washington Supreme Court as the authors of the opinion in the news story; (3) incorrectly stated that a conviction was reversed; and (4) had a subject-verb disagreement. Fortunately, Overlawyered has a full-time proofreader, an anonymous law student at the Appellate Law & Practice blog, who prefers fact-checking Overlawyered to his/her own posts. He/she caught two out of the four errors, and defends the appellate court’s decision.)
A Washington court holds that police can’t arrange to search dumped garbage without a warrant, and invalidates a meth-dealer’s indictment. (Michael Ko, “Court: Meth maker’s privacy was invaded”, Seattle Times, Feb. 16).
This seemed to be straight out of a “Law and Order” episode I would scoff at, but the hair-splitting judges are forced to engage in to determine the stage at which trash becomes searchable is phenomenal. See, e.g., the seven separate opinions in the 8-5 en banc decision United States v. Redmon, 138 F.3d 1109 (7th Cir. 1998) (garbage can in shared driveway searchable without warrant); Clinton administration brief. The landmark Supreme Court opinion on garbage is the 6-2 decision in California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35 (1988) (trash bag at curb searchable without warrant).
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