SCOTUS sustains standard for emergency entry of a home without a warrant

The Supreme Court has ruled that law enforcement officials had flexibility to enter a home without a warrant based on reports that someone inside might need emergency help, a decision with implications for police tactics and the expectation of privacy in one’s home, reported The New York Times.

In a unanimous decision, the justices said that the police in Montana had acted appropriately when they entered an Army veteran’s home without a warrant because they had an “‘objectively reasonable basis for believing’ that a homeowner intended to take his own life and, indeed, may already have shot himself,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the court.

The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and provides protections for a person’s home by generally prohibiting law enforcement from entering without a warrant.

The Supreme Court has carved out several exceptions, including for when police believe an occupant is seriously injured or facing an imminent threat of injury.

The question in the Montana case was what level of certainty police must have that an emergency is underway before they can enter a home without a warrant.

Police were called to the home of William Trevor Case in September 2021 by his ex-girlfriend, who feared he was suicidal. The Army veteran had a loaded handgun, she told police, and he had previously threatened to kill himself.

Mr. Case was well known to law enforcement officers who went to check on him at his home near Butte, Mont. Mr. Case had “tried this suicide by cop” stuff before, one of the officers said, using profanity, according to a body-cam recording of the police response.

The officers knocked on Mr. Case’s door, yelled and shined flashlights through the windows. They could see empty beer cans, an empty handgun holster and a notepad with handwriting, which the officers thought was a possible suicide note, court records show. After about 40 minutes, they entered through the unlocked front door without a warrant.

When Mr. Case suddenly emerged from a closet, he stretched out his arm with what appeared to be a gun, and an officer shot him in the abdomen. The veteran, who survived, was convicted of assaulting the officer.

He appealed that conviction, arguing that a gun and other evidence from his home should not have been allowed to be presented at trial because the officers had violated the Fourth Amendment by coming into his home without a warrant.

Mr. Case’s lawyer told the court that police should have met a high bar of “probable cause” for the intrusion — a standard his lawyer said would provide “a level of certainty that avoids needless and dangerous confrontations, and enables police and emergency medical workers to provide aid when occupants urgently need it.”

But the court on Wednesday declined to adopt that higher standard, which would have been borrowed from the criminal context. Instead, it reaffirmed a 2006 decision: that it is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment when the police make a warrantless entry, if officers have an “objectively reasonable” basis to believe that an occupant is “seriously injured or threatened with such injury.”

The court said it was reasonable for the police to believe Mr. Case needed emergency aid, based on the phone call with Mr. Case’s ex-girlfriend and what the officers could observe at the Army veteran’s home.

“If Case had already shot himself, he could have been severely injured and in need of immediate medical care. And if he had not, the risk of suicide remained acute, given all the facts then known to the officers,” Justice Kagan wrote.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil M. Gorsuch joined the majority but wrote separately, with Justice Sotomayor cautioning that it may not always be “objectively reasonable” for police responding to a mental health crisis to make a warrantless entry.

She cited studies showing that people with serious mental health conditions were disproportionately likely to be injured and killed during police interactions compared to the general population. The justice also warned that the presence of law enforcement could escalate such situations, “putting both the occupant and the officers in danger.”

The “objectively reasonable basis” test affirmed by the court, Justice Sotomayor wrote, “demands careful attention to the case-specific risks that attend mental health crises, and requires officers to act reasonably in response.”

In response to the ruling, the Constitutional Accountability Center, which had filed a brief in support of Mr. Case’s position, expressed concern that the court’s decision would do nothing to prevent officers from using emergency aid as a pretext for home intrusions.

Austin Knudsen, Montana’s attorney general, praised the court’s ruling, saying in a statement that it would give law enforcement the ability to respond to life-threatening emergencies and “allow officers to continue to keep their communities and citizens safe to the best of their abilities.”

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F.B.I. flouts Privacy Protection Act and searches reporter's home

F.B.I. agents searched the home of a Washington Post reporter as part of a leak investigation, a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s tactics in seeking information from the news media, reported Slate.

It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home. A 1980 law called the Privacy Protection Act generally bars search warrants for reporters’ work materials, unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime related to the materials.

The Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, had spent the past year covering the Trump administration’s effort to fire federal workers and redirect much of the work force toward enforcing his agenda. Many of those employees shared with her their anger, frustration and fear with the administration’s changes.

A spokesperson for The Washington Post said on Wednesday that the publication was reviewing and monitoring the situation. The law enforcement agents seized laptops, a phone and a smartwatch during their search.

In a message to staff, Matt Murray, the executive editor of The Post, said neither Ms. Natanson nor the paper was a focus of the investigation.

“Nonetheless, this extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” he wrote.

Court documents indicate that law enforcement officials were investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance and has been accused of gaining access to and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and basement.

It is unclear whether the F.B.I. sought other means of obtaining the information it was seeking from The Post.

According to the F.B.I. affidavit, Mr. Perez-Lugones’s job meant he had access to sensitive information. It said he had printed confidential documents that he was not authorized to search for and took notes this year on a classified report related to government activity.

The court papers show investigators suspected Mr. Perez-Lugones in recent months of illegally mishandling classified information about an unidentified country.

In a statement on social media, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the search was executed at the request of the Pentagon to look for evidence at the home of a journalist “who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”

Free speech experts condemned the move as an aggressive escalation that could undercut press freedom.

Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, pointed to the chilling effect it could have “on legitimate journalistic activity.”

Bruce D. Brown, the president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called the search one of the most invasive steps law enforcement could take. He said federal laws and policies limited searches to the most extreme cases, lest such a step chill the public interest in a free flow of information to the news media beyond the case in question.

“While we won’t know the government’s arguments about overcoming these very steep hurdles until the affidavit is made public,” Mr. Brown said, “this is a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”

In a first-person account of her experience talking to federal employees, Ms. Natanson quoted some of the messages she would receive.

“I understand the risks,” one Defense Department worker told her. “But getting the truth and facts out is so much more important.”

Another message, by a Justice Department staff member, read, “I’d never thought I’d be leaking info like this.”

The Justice Department’s use of a search warrant to obtain a reporter’s material was treated across party lines as a scandal in 2013. It was revealed that investigators in a leak case had portrayed a Fox News reporter as a criminal in applying for a court order to obtain the contents of the reporter’s email account.

Because Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had recently testified to Congress that he knew of no effort to prosecute reporters in leak investigations, Republicans accused him of perjury. In response, the Justice Department explained that it never intended to charge the Fox reporter and had portrayed the reporter as a criminal to get around the 1980 law.

In the aftermath, Mr. Holder issued a policy forbidding the Justice Department from portraying reporters as criminals to get search warrants for their notes and work materials unless it truly intended to prosecute them.

In 2021, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland bolstered that policy after it came to light that late in President Trump’s first term, the Justice Department sought the phone and email records of reporters at The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN as part of leak investigations. He flatly barred the use of search warrants and subpoenas to seize reporting materials or to require reporters to testify about their sources.

Last year, however, Ms. Bondi rolled back the Garland policy, restoring the ability of investigators to use search warrants and subpoenas to obtain reporters’ information. She largely restored the Holder-era policy, including a requirement to exhaust other means of obtaining evidence first before targeting reporters’ information.

But Ms. Bondi made a crucial change: She dropped the constraint Mr. Holder added that barred circumventing the 1980 law by portraying a reporter as a criminal suspect in bad faith.

While Mr. Holder insisted that he would never allow the Justice Department to prosecute a reporter for doing his or her job, however, it is not clear whether the Justice Department under Ms. Bondi has the same view.

A World War I law called the Espionage Act says it is a crime to disseminate sensitive information about the national defense without authorization, and on its face it would seem to apply to journalists who write about matters the government has deemed classified. But it has been widely considered to be a violation of the First Amendment to try to apply that law to journalists, and for generations, the Justice Department did not attempt to do so.

During the first Trump administration, however, the department breached that barrier by bringing Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, for publishing classified documents leaked to the organization by Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst.

While Mr. Assange is not a traditional journalist, the charges treated journalistic-style activities — receiving and disseminating classified information — as something that could be treated as a crime. In 2024, the Biden administration reached a plea deal with Mr. Assange on that charge to resolve his case, so its constitutionality was never tested on appeal.

Mr. Trump himself was charged under the Espionage Act in 2023 and accused of keeping classified documents without authorization after he left office and obstructing government efforts to get them back. Prosecutors had to abandon that case, along with a separate indictment for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, after he was re-elected president in 2024.

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CREATORS: When Can an ICE Agent Shoot Into A Moving Vehicle?

 Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
January 13, 2026

On Jan. 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, Minn. The shooting occurred during an ICE enforcement operation and has sparked nationwide protests.

In the moments before the shooting, Good is heard telling the agent that she wasn't mad at him, and the agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, began to circle her vehicle. She backs up her vehicle as Ross crosses in front of her, then she slowly begins to move forward and turns to the right. Ross is near her left headlight when he fires three shots into the vehicle, killing Good.

According to The New York Times, in the last four months, immigration officers have fired on at least nine people in five states and Washington, D.C. All of the individuals targeted in those shootings were, like Good, fired on while in their vehicles.

The pattern raises serious concerns. According to Reason Magazine, for decades, police officers have been trained not to shoot at moving vehicles. New York City's police department banned firing at unarmed drivers in 1972. After it did so, police shootings plummeted in the city. The country's 25 largest police departments generally prohibit firing at vehicles, according to the Times.

Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and current professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, told Reason, "First, we need to keep in mind the legal rules that justify shooting at all ... officers can use deadly force when the subject is reasonably perceived as presenting an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm."

"So, at a very big picture level, we have to answer the question of: Did the officer reasonably perceive an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm? If the answer is no, there shouldn't be a shooting," continued Stoughton.

According to Reuters, there is no universal law enforcement training standard for firing into vehicles. But most police departments and federal policy bar shooting at a moving vehicle unless the driver poses an imminent threat of deadly force beyond the car itself.

Experts say firing at a moving car is one of the riskiest forms of lethal force, increasing the chance of stray gunfire or a loss of vehicle control that can endanger innocent bystanders. Why not just move away from the vehicle? Justice Department policy says deadly force is allowed only when no reasonable alternative exists, including stepping out of the vehicle's path.

The law has long been that police officers cannot use deadly force solely to arrest someone or to disable a fleeing vehicle if the person does not pose an immediate threat. According to The Associated Press, federal law enforcement officers operate under similar guidance.

The operating manual of the Department of Justice mandates that firearms should not be used simply to disable a moving vehicle. The policy allows deadly force only in limited circumstances, such as when someone in the vehicle is threatening another person with deadly force or when the vehicle itself is being used in a way that poses an imminent risk and no reasonable alternative exists but deadly force.

In the wake of Good's killing, President Donald Trump was asked if he believed deadly force was necessary in this case. His response: "It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement."

Vanita Gupta, a former associate attorney general who oversaw both the civil rights division that can prosecute federal agents and the civil division that defends them, told The New York Times, "Being 'disrespectful' does not warrant the use of deadly force."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

On Jan. 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, Minn. The shooting occurred during an ICE enforcement operation and has sparked nationwide protests.

In the moments before the shooting, Good is heard telling the agent that she wasn't mad at him, and the agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, began to circle her vehicle. She backs up her vehicle as Ross crosses in front of her, then she slowly begins to move forward and turns to the right. Ross is near her left headlight when he fires three shots into the vehicle, killing Good.

According to The New York Times, in the last four months, immigration officers have fired on at least nine people in five states and Washington, D.C. All of the individuals targeted in those shootings were, like Good, fired on while in their vehicles.

The pattern raises serious concerns. According to Reason Magazine, for decades, police officers have been trained not to shoot at moving vehicles. New York City's police department banned firing at unarmed drivers in 1972. After it did so, police shootings plummeted in the city. The country's 25 largest police departments generally prohibit firing at vehicles, according to the Times.

Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and current professor of criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, told Reason, "First, we need to keep in mind the legal rules that justify shooting at all ... officers can use deadly force when the subject is reasonably perceived as presenting an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm."

"So, at a very big picture level, we have to answer the question of: Did the officer reasonably perceive an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm? If the answer is no, there shouldn't be a shooting," continued Stoughton.

According to Reuters, there is no universal law enforcement training standard for firing into vehicles. But most police departments and federal policy bar shooting at a moving vehicle unless the driver poses an imminent threat of deadly force beyond the car itself.

Experts say firing at a moving car is one of the riskiest forms of lethal force, increasing the chance of stray gunfire or a loss of vehicle control that can endanger innocent bystanders. Why not just move away from the vehicle? Justice Department policy says deadly force is allowed only when no reasonable alternative exists, including stepping out of the vehicle's path.

The law has long been that police officers cannot use deadly force solely to arrest someone or to disable a fleeing vehicle if the person does not pose an immediate threat. According to The Associated Press, federal law enforcement officers operate under similar guidance.

The operating manual of the Department of Justice mandates that firearms should not be used simply to disable a moving vehicle. The policy allows deadly force only in limited circumstances, such as when someone in the vehicle is threatening another person with deadly force or when the vehicle itself is being used in a way that poses an imminent risk and no reasonable alternative exists but deadly force.

In the wake of Good's killing, President Donald Trump was asked if he believed deadly force was necessary in this case. His response: "It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement."

Vanita Gupta, a former associate attorney general who oversaw both the civil rights division that can prosecute federal agents and the civil division that defends them, told The New York Times, "Being 'disrespectful' does not warrant the use of deadly force."

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Mangino discusses Tepe murders on WFMJ-TV21

Watch my interview with Lindsay McCoy on WFMJ-TV21 about the Tepe murders in Columbus, Ohio.

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Federal immigration agents have shot into vehicles at least 13 times in the last six months

Here is a block of news worth reading from The Marshall Project:

When is deadly police force justified? Police officers are taught not to fire their weapons into vehicles. ICE agents haven’t had the same training. Mother Jones Federal immigration agents have shot into vehicles at least 13 times since July. The Wall Street Journal As protests against ICE agents grow, ICE officials tell agents to take “appropriate and decisive” action against perceived threats. The New York Times Even before Renee Good was named, the Trump administration began re-writing the history of her killing. Wired This isn’t a new problem. In the past, federal immigration agents have intentionally stepped in front of moving vehicles to justify shooting at drivers. The Nation TMP Context: Use of force by ICE agents. The Marshall Project

CREATORS: A Breakthrough in Fingerprint Analysis

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
December 30, 2025

Fingerprints have long been considered the gold standard of crime investigation techniques. As early as 1903, America — with its new young president and former New York City police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt — began using fingerprints in criminal investigations. Fingerprint analysis became a "thing" back in the mid-18th century in India.

Within a couple of decades, the FBI began cataloging fingerprints. Today, the bureau is storing more than 200 million fingerprints.

Until recently, the FBI described fingerprint identification as 100% infallible. That is no longer the case. In the last twenty years, there hasn't been a lot of good news when it comes to forensic analysis, including fingerprint analysis.

What do we know about fingerprints? Impressions of fingerprints are left behind on various surfaces by the natural secretions of sweat. The friction ridges, the raised portion of the epidermis on fingers consisting of one or more connected ridges, are often the point of comparison.

First, an intentional recording of the fingerprint is made with black ink on a white card or recorded digitally. These are often collected after arrest and secured in a database. At a crime scene a "latent print," the chance recording of a fingerprint deposited on a surface, is captured through chemical methods and brought into a lab for expert analysis.

Fingerprint identification came under scrutiny in 2004. The FBI publicly acknowledged the fingerprint misidentification of an Oregon lawyer wrongfully implicated in a terrorist bombing in Madrid — a place he had never visited.

Through a study conducted in 2004, cognitive neuroscientist Itiel Dror found that otherwise competent and well-meaning experts were swayed by what they knew about a case submitted for analysis. Dror's study demonstrated that if an analyst knew that the suspect confessed or was arrested, the analyst's findings could be influenced. According to Frontline, cognitive bias seeped into the process even with the best-trained experts.

In steps deep learning, the use of multi-layered artificial intelligence to automatically learn complex patterns from vast amounts of data.

A recent study published in Science Advances entitled "Unveiling intra-person fingerprint similarity via deep contrastive learning" revealed a breakthrough in fingerprint analysis.

Law enforcement agencies worldwide have operated under the long-standing belief that no two fingerprints are alike, even across the ten fingers of a single individual.

The authors suggest that an investigator can sidestep the same-finger limitation by exploiting nontraditional fingerprint features. "Past studies provided evidence that fingerprint patterns may be partially genetically determined which implies that there could be similarities among fingerprints from the same person," the authors found.

In addition, "recent research shows that partial fingerprints from different users have common features that can be exploited to fool authentication systems."

The study concluded, "the ability to process and match distinct fingerprint samples from the same individual opens new investigative possibilities, particularly in cases where fingerprints are partial or collected under suboptimal conditions."

This breakthrough moves investigators away from matching the best print with the exact finger of a suspect. The study found, "The new AI model reduces this dependency by identifying shared features that remain stable across different fingers."

How does fingerprint evidence get in front of a jury?

Specialized rules of evidence allow expert testimony if the conclusions are based on knowledge, skill, experience, training or education in the techniques involved and the specialized knowledge will assist the judge or jury to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue. The testimony must be based on reliable principles and methods, consistently applied.

Here is the new dilemma. If Artificial Intelligence is used to determine a fingerprint match, how does the expert witness convey the process of using AI to evaluate the evidence? This information is crucial to whether a judge allows the expert's opinion and whether the opinion helps jurors understand the reliability of evidence.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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FBI refuses local Minnesota authorities access to ICE homicide investigation

Minnesota state officials have urged the FBI to bring them back into the fold on an investigation into the shooting by an ICE agent of Renee Good, reported Minnesota Public Radio.

Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was initially working in tandem with the FBI after an ICE officer killed the 37-year-old Good. But reversed course, saying it has sole authority.

Minnesota Department of Public Safety Commissioner Bob Jacobson said that could hamper a state investigation and possible prosecution.

“Unless we do that thorough investigation, unless we have access to all of that evidence, unless we have access to the agents that were involved in that, to any witnesses, without any of that, we would not be able to put together a quality investigation for any prosecutor to be able to make a determination as to whether or not someone should be charged with a crime,” he said.

Jacobson and Gov. Tim Walz urged the Trump administration to allow state and local law enforcement officers to participate in the investigation to ensure public trust in its results.

“Use our professional folks. They will gain you the credibility and the trust of Minnesotans to believe the work that you're doing is honest and it's not just a whitewashed to back fill a preconceived notion,” Walz said.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said Thursday that her office began exploring options available to ensure a state-level investigation could move forward.

“If the FBI is the sole investigative agency, the State will not receive the investigative findings, and our community may never learn about its contents,” Moriarty said in a statement. “We are speaking to our local partners on paths forward that will allow us to review the investigation and be transparent in our decision making."

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