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4th Amendment

By: Derek Hawkins//June 5, 2017//

4th Amendment

By: Derek Hawkins//June 5, 2017//

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Mohamed Fadiga

Case No.: 16-3870

Officials: BAUER, EASTERBROOK, and SYKES, Circuit Judges.

Focus: 4th Amendment

A jury found Mohamed Fadiga guilty of possessing more than 15 unauthorized “access devices”—gift cards that had been fraudulently reencoded—and a judge sentenced him to 30 months’ imprisonment. See 18 U.S.C. §1029(a)(3). He contends that police learned about the crime by violating the Fourth Amendment and that the jury pool was the result of racial discrimination A police officer stopped a car that had an expired license plate. He asked Mamadu Barry, the driver, for registration papers, which he did not have; Barry also professed not to know who owned the car or where he was driving to. So the officer asked Fadiga, who was in the passenger’s seat. Fadiga replied that “a friend” owned the car and produced, not a registration document, but a rental agreement. The car’s return was past due under that agreement, which did not authorize either Barry or Fadiga to drive the car. When Fadiga opened his wallet to extract his driver’s license, the officer saw oodles of plastic cards in lieu of money. Now suspicious, he asked Barry and Fadiga for permission to search the car; both consented. The search turned up a bag full of gift cards, and the officer asked his dispatcher to send someone with a card reader to determine whether the cards were legitimate. About half an hour later the card reader arrived and detected that the cards had been tampered with. Fadiga’s motion to suppress the evidence rests on the delay between the officer’s call and the card reader’s arrival. Rodriguez v. United States, 135 S. Ct. 1609 (2015), holds that police violate the Fourth Amendment by extending a traffic stop to allow time for a drug-detection dog to arrive, unless reasonable suspicion justifies an investigation. District Judge Lozano concluded that the unless clause of Rodriguez has been satisfied: the police reasonably suspected that the car’s occupants possessed doctored gift cards. 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 91006 (N.D. Ind. July 14, 2015). Later the case was transferred to Judge Simon, who agreed with Judge Lozano and denied a motion for reconsideration. 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 65316 (N.D. Ind. May 18, 2016).

Affirmed

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Attorney Derek A. Hawkins is the managing partner at Hawkins Law Offices LLC, where he heads up the firm’s startup law practice. He specializes in business formation, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, private equity and venture capital funding and mergers & acquisitions. Check out the website at www.hawkins-lawoffices.com or contact them at 262-737-8825.

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