****the paper should be no more and no less than 300 words only******
Assignment/Scenario:
You land a job as a research assistant at the local public defenders’ office.
Recently, the newspapers have focused on a pattern of illegal stops carried out by officers employed by your city. As the newspapers have noted, police officers have stopped dozens of suspects on less than reasonable suspicion, asked for identification, inquired by walkie-talkie as to whether there are outstanding warrants on the suspects, and (on finding that there are warrants) have arrested the suspects, and then searched for weapons and drugs. When the suspects, on becoming defendants, have protested that the weapons or drugs obtained through these arrests should be suppressed, prosecutors have argued that the items discovered through the illegal stops should be admitted given the Supreme Court’s ruling in Utah v. Strieff. So far, trial courts have admitted the evidence obtained and have cited Strieff as the case that justifies their decision.
Your boss, the head of the public defenders’ office, wonders whether the arrests might be challenged under the framework established in Herring v. United States. In particular, he wonders whether the frequency of the stops rises to the level of recurring, systemic negligence, a standard mentioned in Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion for the Herring Court. The key to this analysis, your boss suggests, is to be found in a remark contained in Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in Strieff. “I do not doubt that most officers act in ‘good faith’ and do not set out to break the law,” Sotomayor writes. “That does not mean these stops are ‘isolated instance[s] of negligence,’ however. Many are the product of institutionalized training procedures.”
PROMPT/QUESTION————-
Write a 300-word position paper for your boss that assesses the merits of your boss’s line of thought. *****Don’t waste space summarizing the facts just outlined. Instead, concentrate on the following: (1) identify the issue at stake and (2) apply the Herring framework to the pertinent facts.********
SOURCE –
Utah v. Strieff
Herring v. United States
(you may find these cases on the internet)
