The Emergency Aid Doctrine and 911 Hang-ups: The Modern General Warrant

The phone rings. A 911 dispatcher starts to answer, but the line goes dead. The dispatcher calls back. No one answers. Was it a misdial or a cry for help cut short? Because callers often expect help to arrive when intentionally calling 911, the police respond to the address from which the call likely originated.\u27 Police approach the house and knock on the door. Again, no one answers. There may be an emergency inside, so the police enter the house without a warrant and without consent. If they find a heart attack victim lying on the floor, they might save a life. If they find sleeping parents and a tech-savvy toddler, they might educate and leave. But if they find evidence of a crime-say, cocaine or illegal firearms-they might make an arrest based on evidence found during their warrantless entry and search of the home. Americans call 911 nearly 240 million times a year. Nearly eighty million are hang-ups or inadvertent calls, conveying no information. Police officers responding to such calls face a confounding dilemma: society expects them to promptly prevent harm and render aid, but the Fourth Amendment guarantees protection from unreasonable searches. In an attempt to balance these interests, courts rely on the emergency aid doctrine. Historically, the doctrine permitted the police to respond, without a warrant, to situations where there was an imminent risk to people and property. Recent expansions of the emergency aid doctrine, however, may tacitly allow the government to enter a home based merely on receiving a 911 hang-up-a type of call conveying no information, initiated by an unknown party, and placed for unknown reasons. Thus, the question arises whether these expansions extend the emergency aid doctrine too far. The emergency aid doctrine requires the police to have an objectively reasonable basis to believe an emergency threatens imminent harm to people and property. Yet, the Supreme Court has not clearly defined what constitutes imminent harm, leading to the widespread policy of conducting warrantless searches following 911 hang-ups. Some courts uphold these searches based on a generalized presumption that 911 hang-ups are de facto emergencies involving imminent harm, even though officers have no articulable facts to believe an emergency exists. Such a presumption shifts the burden of proof from the government to the homeowner. Instead of requiring the government to demonstrate why a warrantless search was reasonable or necessary based on apparent imminent harm, a court\u27s de facto presumption forces individuals to justify why the police should not invade their homes after receiving a mere 911 hang-up. This Note seeks to aid practitioners by highlighting common errors that occur when analyzing 911 hang-up emergency aid responses. It therefore considers what evidentiary weight should be attributable to 911 hang-ups when analyzing the reasonableness of a warrantless search in emergency aid situations. Part II explains why the Supreme Court\u27s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence applies to searches incident to 911 hang-ups, and it examines the Court\u27s most recent articulations of the emergency aid doctrine. These articulations are then contrasted with several lower-court interpretations of the emergency aid doctrine in the context of 911 hang-ups. Given disparate outcomes, Part III examines what information 911 hang-ups actually convey, how police use that information, and how they respond to hang- up situations where information is limited. The stark reality is that 911 hang-ups convey little or no information, yet the emergency aid doctrine requires the police to have an objectively reasonable basis to believe that an emergency exists before entering a home without a warrant. Courts struggle with determining what quantum of evidence is sufficient to meet this standard. To that end, Part III concludes by exploring common judicial interpretations of what amounts to an objectively reasonable basis in the context of 911 hang-ups. Ultimately, this Note attempts to clarify the Supreme Court\u27s analysis of emergency aid situations. Such clarification is essential to maintaining the balance between police power and individual liberty. Thus, Part IV suggests interpreting 911 hang-ups as mere efforts to communicate rather than as de facto cries for help. By focusing on the quality and quantity of the information conveyed in 911 calls rather than presuming an emergency exists, the burden to justify warrantless entries remains with the government by requiring it to prove there was an extant and apparent emergency. This Part further argues that 911 hang-ups are tantamount to anonymous tips, in that the police need to corroborate anonymous information and any subsequent search must be based on particularized evidence. Nonetheless, limited incursions into the curtilage of a home may be reasonable when investigating 911 hang-ups. But absent any additional indices of an extant or apparent emergency, or corroboration of a call\u27s information, the emergency aid doctrine does not permit the warrantless entry of a home. Consequently, this framework aims to uphold constitutional protections of the home while accommodating community expectations regarding police responses to 911 calls

Child support judgments: comparing public policy to the public's policy

Any child support regime necessarily makes policy choices about how parental income should be shared between the two parental households. Those choices involve balancing the claims of the child, the claims of the custodial parent for help with the expense of providing for the child, and the claims of the support obligor for autonomy in deciding how to spend his own earnings. That balancing task is complicated by the fact that the child and the custodial parent necessarily share a living standard, so that any child support transfer, large or small, will unavoidably benefit the custodial parent as well as the child. This article reports the findings of an empirical study designed to reveal how the British public believe this balance should be struck. It then compares the public’s preferred policies to the policy choices implicit in the current UK child support schedule. It concludes that there are important gaps between the two, and recommends that consideration be given to amending the current UK law to better align it with the public’s values on these matters

Comprehensive HIV care and Anti-Retroviral Therapy in a conflict setting-outcomes, experiences, and lessons learned from Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo

2006 AIDS Conference in Toront

Second harmonic light scattering induced by defects in the twist-bend nematic phase of liquid crystal dimers

The nematic twist-bend (NTB) phase, exhibited by certain thermotropic liquid crystalline (LC) dimers, represents a new orientationally ordered mesophase -- the first distinct nematic variant discovered in many years. The NTB phase is distinguished by a heliconical winding of the average molecular long axis (director) with a remarkably short (nanoscale) pitch and, in systems of achiral dimers, with an equal probability to form right- and left-handed domains. The NTB structure thus provides another fascinating example of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in nature. The order parameter driving the formation of the heliconical state has been theoretically conjectured to be a polarization field, deriving from the bent conformation of the dimers, that rotates helically with the same nanoscale pitch as the director field. It therefore presents a significant challenge for experimental detection. Here we report a second harmonic light scattering (SHLS) study on two achiral, NTB-forming LCs, which is sensitive to the polarization field due to micron-scale distortion of the helical structure associated with naturally-occurring textural defects. These defects are parabolic focal conics of smectic-like ``pseudo-layers", defined by planes of equivalent phase in a coarse-grained description of the NTB state. Our SHLS data are explained by a coarse-grained free energy density that combines a Landau-deGennes expansion of the polarization field, the elastic energy of a nematic, and a linear coupling between the two

Symmetry of the order parameter in superconducting ZrZn_2

We apply symmetry considerations to study the possible superconducting order parameters in ferromagnetic ZrZn_2. We predict that the presence and the location of the superconducting gap nodes depend on the direction of magnetization M. In particular, if M is directed along the z axis, then the order parameter should always have zeros. We also discuss how to determine the gap symmetry in ZrZn_2 using ultrasound attenuation measurements.Comment: 6 pages, submitted to PRB; some corrections and discussion adde

Biochemical parameters of silver catfish (Rhamdia quelen) after transport with eugenol or essential oil of Lippia alba added to the water

The transport of live fish is a routine practice in aquaculture and constitutes a considerable source of stress to the animals. The addition of anesthetic to the water used for fish transport can prevent or mitigate the deleterious effects of transport stress. This study investigated the effects of the addition of eugenol (EUG) (1.5 or 3.0 mu L L-1) and essential oil of Lippia alba (EOL) (10 or 20 mu L L-1) on metabolic parameters (glycogen, lactate and total protein levels) in liver and muscle, acetylcholinesterase activity (AChE) in muscle and brain, and the levels of protein carbonyl (PC), thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) and nonprotein thiol groups (NPSH) and activity of glutathione-S-transferase in the liver of silver catfish (Rhamdia quelen; Quoy and Gaimard, 1824) transported for four hours in plastic bags (loading density of 169.2 g L-1). The addition of various concentrations of EUG (1.5 or 3.0 mu L L-1) and EOL (10 or 20 mu L L-1) to the transport water is advisable for the transportation of silver catfish, since both concentrations of these substances increased the levels of NPSH antioxidant and decreased the TBARS levels in the liver. In addition, the lower liver levels of glycogen and lactate in these groups and lower AChE activity in the brain (EOL 10 or 20 mu L L-1) compared to the control group indicate that the energetic metabolism and neurotransmission were lower after administration of anesthetics, contributing to the maintenance of homeostasis and sedation status.Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (FAPERGS/PRONEX) [10/0016-8]; Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento Cientifico (CNPq) [470964/2009-0]; Coordenacao de Aperfeicoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior (CAPES); CNPqinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The fundamental problem of command : plan and compliance in a partially centralised economy

When a principal gives an order to an agent and advances resources for its implementation, the temptations for the agent to shirk or steal from the principal rather than comply constitute the fundamental problem of command. Historically, partially centralised command economies enforced compliance in various ways, assisted by nesting the fundamental problem of exchange within that of command. The Soviet economy provides some relevant data. The Soviet command system combined several enforcement mechanisms in an equilibrium that shifted as agents learned and each mechanism's comparative costs and benefits changed. When the conditions for an equilibrium disappeared, the system collapsed.Comparative Economic Studies (2005) 47, 296–314. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ces.810011