USA V. JUAN PINEDA-MORENO

[Jester]

In the example I gave, any competent attorney would argue:
Since the cops were waiting for a warrant, they had not searched the premises.
Since the cops had not searched the premises, they did not have probable cause that evidence was being destroyed. The papers being shredded could as easily have been old receipts or proprietary notes.
The cops cannot use evidence gathered after an action to justify that action.

But that's a closed circle. If there is an exception to needing a warrant for potential destruction of evidence that cannot be invoked until you've conducted a search with a warrant, then you have a useless exception.

The police require probable cause to conduct searches, they can't just do it randomly. It is that threshold that must be passed, and it appears obvious it was. Now, the question then is whether they require a warrant or not. The strongest arguments for seem to be: that they went onto his property to plant the tracker, and possibly violated his privacy in doing so; and that the investigation was over a long enough period that it would have been easy to obtain a warrant in any case. (I believe the second argument at least would have convinced me, but then, I'm not a judge.)

The strongest argument against appears to be that obtaining a warrant would potentially take months, and that the operation (and the evidence) would have been destroyed or disappeared by then. This strikes me as excessive, but it's not obviously incorrect.

And in the case that started this thread, you are ignoring the earlier part of the definition: "Exigent Circumstances refer to situations that demands unusual or immediate action and this allows people to circumvent usual procedures. In other words emergency conditions. The circumstances are such that it would cause a reasonable person to believe that prompt action is necessary to prevent physical harm to the officers". {Emphasis mine}.

Was evidence about to be destroyed? I don't know. But if it was, then it fits the definition: you can't use one half of the definition to invalidate a clearly-stated exception from the other half, unless your argument is that the definition itself is meaningless or contradictory. Destruction of evidence is almost never going to endanger the life of an officer, but yet is listed separately. So long as probable cause exists, and there is a demonstrable danger of evidence being destroyed in the time it would take to get a warrant, then there is at least a plausible argument that exigent circumstances apply.

I'd hardly consider the repeated tagging of his car over a relatively long period of time an emergency condition. If they had reason to think that he was about to try to escape by driving off into the great California (or whatever) wilderness, they might have had some small sliver of justification.

The question of plausibility relies on the relative timelines of obtaining a warrant, vs. the time required to destroy the relevant evidence, combined with the chance of discovery. I think this is a circumstance where a warrant probably should have been required, but again, this is not my call to make. There is ample legal precedent here, cited in the original decision, and now upheld. We can disagree, but we can't overcome stare decisis with sheer force of will.

-Jester