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Recent cases affecting criminal law:

Arizona v. Gan

Under both U.S and California criminal law, the courts have allowed a search of the residence, automobile, or personal effects of an arestee if that search was made at the same time as the arrest. This is called the “contemporaneous-to-arrest” exception to the 4th Amendment rule against warrantless searches and seizures. The Gant case clarified and modified the rule stating that all searches that are made when a person is arrested, are not automatically legal. If the police arrest a person and have already removed him or her from his house or his car and place him/her in police custody, they are no longer able to automatically search the house or vehicle based simply on the fact of that arrest. This decision is not retroactive in California

Samson v. California

Parolees and probationers in California may be searched at any time. Samson v. California is a recent U.S. Supreme Court case involving a young man who was stopped by police when he was on parole or searchable probation. Police knew his parole/probation status (otherwise this rule would not apply, due to previous case law). He was not suspected of breaking any laws. California defense attorneys believed this would be a good test case for the U.S. Supreme court to potentially overrule the California Supreme court decision that parolees and probationers can be stopped without any probable cause. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court left the California rule just as it was. As long as the police know a suspect is on parole or probation, officers do not need any reasonable suspicion of criminal activity to search the person, as long as searches are not arbitrary, capricious, or harassing.

Hudson v. Michigan

Changes to Knock/Notice rule. In California, statutes have long required that police officers conducting a search of a home with or without a warrant must first knock on the door, announce they are police officers who will be conducting a search, and give the occupants a reasonable time to open the door. Failure to comply with this rule, unless there were "exigent circumstances", resulted in the search being declared illegal, and any evidence obtained as a result of that illegal search being inadmissible in court. Recently, In Hudson v. Michigan, the U.S. Supreme court ruled that when police had a warrant, but did not comply with knock/notice rules, the defendant did not have a right to the suppression of evidence (having the evidence thrown out). The Supreme court based this ruling on the fact that since the police had a warrant, they were inevitably going to discover the evidence in the house. It is difficult to determine at this early stage what effect this case will have on California violations of the knock/notice rule when there is no search warrant.

Hearsay evidence exception

About 2 years ago, the U.S. Supreme court decided that many previous allowable hearsay evidence exceptions were a violation of the 6th Amendment, if they involved "testimonial hearsay". Hearsay evidence is basically just what it sounds like, that someone is not permitted to come into court and tell the court that someone else told them that certain facts were the truth, and that this is to be accepted as the truth. There have traditionally been numerous exceptions to the "hearsay rule", such as statements of a dying person, a confession, an excited statement made under certain types of stress, and many business or official records. The original decision, Crawford, never explained the difference between "testimonial hearsay" and other types of hearsay. Recently, the U. S. Supreme Court has defined parts of 911 calls as "testimonial hearsay" and therefore not admissible. The court stated that the parts of a 911 call where the caller gives the type of basic information that enables police emergency response is admissible in court. However, beyond this information, when the questions and answers become more investigatory in nature, the call recording is not admissible in court, since it is "testimonial hearsay".