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

A Catalog of Compact Groups of Galaxies in the SDSS Commissioning Data

Compact groups (CGs) of galaxies -- relatively poor groups of galaxies in which the typical separations between members is of the order of a galaxy diameter -- offer an exceptional laboratory for the study of dense galaxian environments with short (<1Gyr) dynamical time-scales. In this paper, we present an objectively defined catalog of CGs in 153 sq deg of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Early Data Release (SDSS EDR). To identify CGs, we applied a modified version of Hickson's (1982) criteria aimed at finding the highest density CGs and thus reducing the number of chance alignments. Our catalog contains 175 CGs down to a limiting galaxy magnitude of r* = 21. The resulting catalog has a median depth of approximately z = 0.13, substantially deeper than previous CG catalogs. Since the SDSS will eventually image up to one quarter of the celestial sphere, we expect our final catalog, based upon the completed SDSS, will contain on the order of 5,000 - 10,000 CGs. This catalog will be useful for conducting studies of the general characteristics of CGs, their environments, and their component galaxies.Comment: 61 pages, 15 figures (Figs. 13, 14, 15 are jpegs). Atlas of compact groups (Fig. 16) is available at http://home.fnal.gov/~sallam/LeeCG/ . Accepted for publication by the Astronomical Journa

Landscape science: a Russian geographical tradition

The Russian geographical tradition of landscape science (landshaftovedenie) is analyzed with particular reference to its initiator, Lev Semenovich Berg (1876-1950). The differences between prevailing Russian and Western concepts of landscape in geography are discussed, and their common origins in German geographical thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are delineated. It is argued that the principal differences are accounted for by a number of factors, of which Russia's own distinctive tradition in environmental science deriving from the work of V. V. Dokuchaev (1846-1903), the activities of certain key individuals (such as Berg and C. O. Sauer), and the very different social and political circumstances in different parts of the world appear to be the most significant. At the same time it is noted that neither in Russia nor in the West have geographers succeeded in specifying an agreed and unproblematic understanding of landscape, or more broadly in promoting a common geographical conception of human-environment relationships. In light of such uncertainties, the latter part of the article argues for closer international links between the variant landscape traditions in geography as an important contribution to the quest for sustainability

Should women under 50 be screened for breast cancer?

Should women under 50 be screened for breast cancer? Despite some controversy in recent years, the majority of experts agree on the evidence for effectiveness of breast screening by mammography for women aged 50 years and above, but for those under 50 years, the picture is much less clear. However, the issue remains of importance both to policy makers and to individual women; although the incidence of breast cancer is lower at younger ages, the life years lost due to cancers diagnosed below 50 years amount to a third of all those lost due to the disease

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will provide the data to support detailed investigations of the distribution of luminous and non- luminous matter in the Universe: a photometrically and astrometrically calibrated digital imaging survey of pi steradians above about Galactic latitude 30 degrees in five broad optical bands to a depth of g' about 23 magnitudes, and a spectroscopic survey of the approximately one million brightest galaxies and 10^5 brightest quasars found in the photometric object catalog produced by the imaging survey. This paper summarizes the observational parameters and data products of the SDSS, and serves as an introduction to extensive technical on-line documentation.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, AAS Latex. To appear in AJ, Sept 200

Policy Recommendations as Spurious Predictions: Toward a Theory of Economists' Ignorance

Lao Tzu and Marx together provide the basis of an epistemology based on ignorance—not on knowledge. The failure of an epistemology based on knowledge is shown by the internal inconsistencies afflicting mainstream economics: Economic theory predicts certain empirical phenomena but these fail to reveal themselves. In fact, the strongest research finding in development economics is that there are almost no robust empirical relationships between an implemented policy and its desired outcomes in the real world. A theory of ignorance can highlight many economic contradictions—and may even prove useful in understanding autistics