Last year recorded the lowest homicide rate in over a century

Last year will likely register the lowest national homicide rate in 125 years and the largest single-year drop on record, according to a new analysis of 2025 crime data, reported The New York Times.

Violence has been falling for several years. But last year for the first time, all seven categories of violent crime tracked by the analysis fell below prepandemic levels. The numbers provide further evidence that the surge in violence in the early 2020s was a departure during a time of massive social upheaval, not a new normal.

The analysis of data from 40 cities, by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, found across-the-board decreases in crime last year compared to 2019: 25 percent fewer homicides, 13 percent fewer shootings and 29 percent fewer carjackings. Between 2024 and 2025, only drug crimes went in the wrong direction, but they were still lower than in 2019.

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CREATORS: Tinkering With The Criminal Justice System

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
January 20, 2026

The U.S. Supreme Court has been busy this month tinkering with the criminal justice system. The Court rendered three decisions in five days that have implications for the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments.

Initially, the Court, in a 5-4 ruling, rejected the government's limitations on the number of times federal inmates can challenge the legality of their sentence.

Federal habeas corpus law allows inmates to challenge, in federal court, the grounds for their detention. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) created separate procedures for state inmates seeking relief from their state convictions in federal court and for federal inmates challenging their federal convictions.

Enacted after the Oklahoma City bombing, AEDPA created strict deadlines and deference to state courts in federal reviews, making it harder for inmates to overturn convictions while empowering federal efforts against terrorism. The AEDPA implicates the Fifth Amendment — due process for federal habeas corpus limitations; and the Sixth Amendment — fair trial rights, especially regarding counsel and evidence; and the Eighth Amendment — cruel and unusual punishment.

An unlikely majority of Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, joined Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh found that the AEDPA could limit opportunities for state inmates to challenge their convictions, but could not limit federal inmates from having their convictions reviewed by the court.

Five days later, the Supreme Court entertained a double jeopardy question.

The Fifth Amendment's Double Jeopardy Clause provides that no person shall "be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb." The Double Jeopardy Clause can be invoked to prevent a person from being tried twice for the same offense or, as in the case before the Supreme Court, being punished more than once for the same crime.

A New York man was charged in federal court with using a firearm during a robbery, a crime of violence, and causing death.

All the justices were satisfied that a century-old decision determined that the two charges counted as the same offense. The longtime test for double jeopardy was clear: "whether each provision requires proof of an additional fact which the other does not."

The unanimous decision, written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, found that because using a firearm during a crime of violence does not have any elements not shared by causing death, the double jeopardy clause applies and the defendant cannot be punished for both offenses.

Finally, on the same day, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Montana man who was convicted of assaulting a police officer. In another unanimous decision written this time by Justice Elena Kagan, the court ruled that police officers did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they entered the home of a man without a warrant due to an emergency in the home.

The Court rejected the man's contention that the police officers needed "probable cause" to go into his house. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and protects a person's home by generally prohibiting law enforcement from entering without a warrant.

Under the Supreme Court's earlier cases, it was enough that the police officers reasonably believed that someone inside a home needed emergency assistance. The court rejected the need for probable cause to enter a home without a warrant and sustained an "objectively reasonable" standard.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the police in Montana had acted appropriately when they entered a 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."

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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Justice Kavanaugh sends a signal on Insurrection Act

Adam Liptak writing for The New York Times:

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh sometimes says the quiet part out loud. He did that last month when the Supreme Court refused to let President Trump deploy National Guard troops in Illinois.

The decision was a rare loss for the administration at the court, and it seemed to prompt Mr. Trump to abandon his efforts to deploy troops in Illinois, Oregon and California.

But Justice Kavanaugh, in a footnote in a concurring opinion, suggested that the ruling could be a speed bump on the road to greater presidential power. He pointed to the possibility of Mr. Trump invoking a different law, the Insurrection Act, to send more conventional military troops to American cities.

Less than a month later, Mr. Trump suggested he might do exactly that in response to violence and protests in Minneapolis.

“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me,” he wrote on Thursday on social media.

In his own social media post hours earlier, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, had called the opposition to immigration raids in the state a “Minnesota insurrection.”

Mr. Trump has long floated the possibility of invoking the act, and he did not need a sentence in a footnote to give him any ideas. But Justice Kavanaugh’s statement did make plain that the Supreme Court’s action in blocking one kind of deployment could set the stage for other, more aggressive ones.

Mr. Trump relied on a different law to order National Guard troops to cities last summer, an obscure measure adopted in 1903 and 1908 that said deployments were allowed for three reasons.

One, concerning foreign invasions, plainly did not apply to the events in Illinois. The second permissible reason for deploying the Guard was if a rebellion was underway, or if there was danger of one. That is a stretch, and the majority did not cite it, much less discuss it. The court’s order focused on the third reason: the president’s right to deploy the National Guard if he is unable to execute laws “with regular forces.”

Five justices joined the unsigned majority opinion, which rejected the Trump administration’s position that “regular forces” referred to civilian law enforcement like Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Instead, the majority said, the term referred to the military. Since there had been no showing that those forces would be unable to execute the laws, the administration lost — at least for the time being.

Justice Kavanaugh voted with the majority but did not sign its opinion, and accepted only part of its reasoning. Such a “concurrence in the judgment” is unusual in cases decided on the court’s emergency docket.

Speaking for himself, Justice Kavanaugh surveyed the legal landscape and said what the majority had left unstated.

“As I read it,” he wrote, “the court’s opinion does not address the president’s authority under the Insurrection Act.”

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Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Do ICE agents have absolute immunity? Absolutely Not

Absolute immunity is a legal doctrine protecting certain high-level government officials -- judges, prosecutors, and legislators -- from lawsuits for actions taken within their official duties, shielding them from liability even for malicious or unconstitutional acts to ensure they can make difficult decisions freely. It's a near-total shield, contrasting with qualified immunity, which applies to state actors like police officers.

“The idea that a federal agent has absolute immunity for crimes they commit on the job is absolutely ridiculous,” Michael J.Z. Mannheimer, a constitutional law expert at Northern Kentucky University’s Salmon P. Chase College of Law, told CNN.

Mannheimer said that more than 120 years of case law on the issue of so-called supremacy clause immunity has shown that federal officials can be criminally pursued by state prosecutors for conduct taken in the course of their official duties but that it’s up to courts to ultimately determine whether they can be shielded from the charges.

“Officers are not entitled to absolute immunity as a matter of law,” said Timothy Sini, a former federal prosecutor in New York.

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PLW: Pa. Supreme Court Tackles Internet Privacy in 'Kurtz'

Matthew T. Mangino
The Legal Intelligencer
January 15, 2026

In summer 2016, a woman in Northumberland County went to bed after her husband, a corrections officer, left to work the midnight shift at Coal Township State Correctional Institution.

After he left an intruder entered the home. The intruder bound and gagged the woman, removed her from her home, and raped her in a nearby trailer. The Pennsylvania state police (PSP) investigated the crime.

Although foreign DNA was found on the victim’s body, the PSP could not match the DNA to any known person. Investigators surmised, through their preliminary investigation, that the perpetrator was familiar with the victim. The PSP obtained a “reverse keyword search warrant” requiring Google to provide any search of the victim’s name or address by anyone in the world for a week prior to the attack.

The warrant was not directed at a specific person’s activity, but instead any activity that was directed toward information about the victim. After about a year, Google found that two searches for the victim’s address occurred only hours before the attack.

The information provided by Google included the person’s IP address. As aresult, the PSP focused on John Edward Kurtz who was a corrections officer at the same facility as the victim’s husband. After grabbing a cigarette butt discarded by Kurtz and retrieving his DNA, the PSP found it matched the DNA retrieved from the victim.

Kurtz was arrested and subsequently filed a motion to suppress the Google warrant. Kurtz argued that the PSP failed to establish probable cause individualized to him, as constitutionally required to support the issuance of a search warrant.

However, before Kurtz could challenge the validity of the search warrant, he first had to demonstrate a reasonable expectation of privacy in the area searched. What is a reasonable expectation of privacy triggering the protection of the Fourth Amendment?

In Katz v. United States, 389 US 347 (1967), the U.S. Supreme Court found that a bookie using a telephone booth to place bets was protected by the Fourth Amendment and if police wanted to listen to his end of the conversation outside a telephone booth, they needed to get a search warrant.
The majority opinion was not as newsworthy as the concurring opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan. As the Pennsylvania Supreme Court noted, Harlan’s often quoted concurrence bears repeating,“Justice Harlan explained that, for a person to demonstrate an expectation of privacy,‘there is a twofold requirement. ’First, that person must‘ have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, ... the expectation must be one that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable.’”

After Kurtz’s suppression motion was denied,he was convicted at trial of multiple rapes. The Superior Court affirmed his conviction and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ultimately granted Kurtz’s allowance of appeal at Commonwealth v. Kurtz, 98, 99, and 100 MAP 2023.

Initially, the Supreme Court determined, “In this case, we must decide whether a person who conducts general, unprotected internet searches has an expectation of privacy in the records generated by those searches.”

The court continued, “The internet is now commingled with most, if not all, of our personal and professional activities that does not mean that a person automatically has a constitutionally reasonable expectation of privacy in its general usage.”

The court suggested that an individual’s use of the internet in her own home—a place often viewed by the U.S. Constitution as an individual’s most sacred and protected refuge, is not automatically protected. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court acknowledged, “At the heart of the Fourth Amendment‘ stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.’”

The majority opinion in Kurtz, written by Justice David Wecht and issued on Dec. 16, 2025, took care to examine a number of well-known U.S. Supreme Court decisions establishing, and later restraining the “third-party doctrine.” The doctrine stands for the premise that if an individual makes personal matters accessible to a third party, that person cannot then invoke the protections of the Fourth Amendment.

The U.S. Supreme Court began to narrow the third-party doctrine in United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), in which the court held that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle and using satellite technology to track the operator’s movements in that vehicle constituted a “search” under the Fourth Amendment and requires a search warrant..

The Kurtz opinion then focused on Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. __(2018). Police had retrieved cellphone numbers from a member of a burglary ring. Investigators then obtained the cellphone site location information (CSLI) without a search warrant. The U.S. Supreme Court held a person does not make a voluntary choice to place CSLI generated by cellphone use into the hands of third parties. Rather, such transmission happens automatically.
Based on the analysis of the third-party doctrine and its subsequent treatment, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reasoned that the resolution of Kurtz’s claim hung“upon whether such actions are governed by Carpenter’s “narrow” rejection of the third-party doctrine, or fall instead under the traditional third-party doctrine.”

Wecht wrote, “the pedestal upon which the Fourth Amendment places the home crumbles when “a person knowingly exposes [private material] to the public. ”While “a man’s home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy,” that privacy does not extend to those “objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the plain view of outsiders.”

The court continued, “The point is that the data trail created by using the internet is not involuntary in the same way that the trail created by carrying a cellphone is.” An individual should not be surprised that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in Google searches, “It is common knowledge that websites, internet-based applications, and internet service providers collect, and then sell, user data.”

The court ruled in Kurtz that an individual does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to internet searches, in this case the simple, and prolific decision to “Google it.”

The court did not make access to internet searches unlimited. The court made clear that internet users who take efforts “to secure some degree of privacy” may be afforded greater constitutional privacy protections. The court pointed to use of virtual private networks, internet browsers that do not collect or share data, and websites that are password-protected as examples of internet use that may permit users to “retain a constitutionally recognizable expectation of privacy.”

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly and George and the former district attorney of Lawrence County, Pennsylvania.He is the author of "The Executioner’s Toll." You can follow him on Bluesky @matthewmangino.bsky.social or contact him at mmangino@lgkg.com.

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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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