Jon Katz brings us a decision from the glorious DC Court of Appeals that should give law students (and others) reason to be concerned about something other than what Tier their school is. In Limpuangthip v. United States, (Sept. 27, 2007), a search of a dorm at George Washington University by a dorm supervisor at the behest of campus police was approved.
My first guess (before reading the decision) would have been that the court held that the dorm supervisor was not acting as the agent of the police, and hence the search would have been by private actors. I would have been wrong. Instead, the court held that the University Police (special police officers, as the court preferred to call them), who were employed by the University but deputized by the metropolitan police department, were not acting in their capacity as police officers but in their capacity as University employees.
This is one of the silliest decisions I’ve seen in a while. Mind you not THE silliest, but one of them. So the police notify the dorm supervisor that they received a tip that a dorm room contained drugs, requested that the super search the room, were present outside the room during the search, assisted in the collection of the evidence (with the dorm super putting the drugs into bags held by the cops), and then took over from there.
What part of this doesn’t sound like regular, garden-variety police work? The decision is worth a read for the gymnastics that the court goes through to legalize a basic warrantless search of a dorm room. And you thought it wasn’t hard to be an appellate judge.
My first guess (before reading the decision) would have been that the court held that the dorm supervisor was not acting as the agent of the police, and hence the search would have been by private actors. I would have been wrong. Instead, the court held that the University Police (special police officers, as the court preferred to call them), who were employed by the University but deputized by the metropolitan police department, were not acting in their capacity as police officers but in their capacity as University employees.
This is one of the silliest decisions I’ve seen in a while. Mind you not THE silliest, but one of them. So the police notify the dorm supervisor that they received a tip that a dorm room contained drugs, requested that the super search the room, were present outside the room during the search, assisted in the collection of the evidence (with the dorm super putting the drugs into bags held by the cops), and then took over from there.
What part of this doesn’t sound like regular, garden-variety police work? The decision is worth a read for the gymnastics that the court goes through to legalize a basic warrantless search of a dorm room. And you thought it wasn’t hard to be an appellate judge.
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Looks like GW’s student newspaper, the GW Hatchet, wrote about the case.
It quotes GW Law Professor and 4th Amendment scholar Orin Kerr as saying, “I’m not sure the Court got it right…” Professor Kerr’s GW Faculty bio mentions that he was “an Honors Program trial attorney in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Criminal Division at the U.S. Department of Justice as well as a special assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.” If even a former prosecutor won’t endorse the decision…
The article can be found at http://media.www.gwhatchet.com/media/storage/paper332/news/2007/10/08/News/Former.Gw.Student.Fights.Drug.Charges-3017649.shtml
Thanks for the link OS. Given Orin’s background, that’s about as damning a comment as possible. The decision was absurd, but consistent with a fourth amendment jurisprudence designed to make certain that there is neither nook nor cranny that the government cannot search at will. After all, they’re the government, and they’re here to help.