Knock-and-Announce Rule: An Illusory Hurdle or a Legitimate Law Enforcement Limitation, The

Woven into the western world\u27s legal fabric by English courts over four centuries ago, the knock-and-announce rule requires law enforcement officials to knock at a residence and announce their presence prior to executing a search warrant. Recently, the efficacy of this law enforcement restriction and essential civil right has been challenged by various United States courts. On June 15, 2006, the United States Supreme Court eviscerated an essential remedy for violation of this rule, and last year, the Eighth Circuit\u27s decision in Doran v. Eckold diminished the threshold for permissible no-knock entries. These decisions have eroded the constitutional protection the Supreme Court previously established. This protection is provided by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which defends [t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. To this end, the Supreme Court incorporated the common law knock-and-announce rule into its Fourth Amendment analysis of what constitutes unreasonable searches of residences. The court acknowledged that exigent circumstances, such as disposal of evidence or danger to law enforcement officials, may eliminate this requirement of officers to knock-andannounce their presence. However, the Court neglected to offer guidance for determining the existence of these circumstances. The English Circuit has conducted this exigent cirumstances analysis on numerous occassions. Without specific guidance, the Eighth Circuit has followed the Supreme Court\u27s general framework for conducting this analysis: a case-by-case examination of the totality of the circumstance. In Doran v. Eckhold, however, the Eighth Circuit\u27s exigent circumstances analysis resembed a generalized, not particularized, evaluation of the facts. This Note argues that this manner of generalized evaluation, prohibited by the Supreme Court in Richards v. Wisconsin, creates an unacceptable standard for police conduct

Coordination Control of Linear Systems

Schuppen, J.H. van [Promotor]Ran, A.C.M. [Promotor

Verschlungene Wege

Mit Gregory Bateson, his daughter Mary, nature itself and Bruce Lee. Wo Engel zögern. Fortsetzung. Volume

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in HIV-infected patients

Concordant with the emergence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in the community setting, colonization and infections with this pathogen have become a prevalent problem among the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive population. A variety of different host- and, possibly, pathogen-related factors may play a role in explaining the increased prevalence and incidence observed. In this article, we review pathophysiology, epidemiology, clinical manifestations, and treatment of MRSA in the HIV-infected population

Adjunctive surgery improves treatment outcomes among patients with multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis

SummaryObjectivesTo determine risk factors for poor outcomes among patients with pulmonary multidrug- or extensively drug-resistant (M/XDR) tuberculosis (TB) in Georgia.MethodsThis was a prospective, population-based observational cohort study.ResultsAmong 380M/XDR-TB patients (mean age 38 years), 179 (47%) had a poor outcome: 59 (16%) died, 37 (10%) failed, and 83 (22%) defaulted. Newly diagnosed M/XDR-TB cases were significantly more likely to have a favorable outcome than retreatment cases (odds ratio (OR) 4.26, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.99–9.10, p<0.001). In the multivariable analysis, independent risk factors for a poor treatment outcome included previous treatment history (OR 2.92, 95% CI 1.29–6.58), bilateral disease (OR 1.90, 95% CI 1.20–3.01), body mass index (BMI, kg/m2) ≤18.5 (OR 1.91, 95% CI 1.11–3.29), and XDR-TB (OR 2.28, 95% CI 1.11–4.71). Patients who underwent surgical resection (OR 0.27, 95% CI 0.11–0.64) and had sputum culture conversion by 4 months (OR 0.33, 95% CI 0.21–0.52) were significantly less likely to have poor treatment outcomes.ConclusionsAdjunctive surgery appeared to be beneficial in treating patients with M/XDR-TB. Retreatment cases, XDR-TB, bilateral disease, and low BMI were associated with a poor outcome. Additional studies are needed to further define the apparent beneficial role of surgery in the treatment of M/XDR-TB

Optimization of charging strategies for electric vehicles in PowerMatcher-driven smart energy grids

A crucial challenge in future smart energy grids is the large-scale coordination of distributed energy demand and generation. The well-known PowerMatcher is a promising approach that integrates demand and supply exibility in the operation of the electricity system through dynamic pricing and a hierarchical bidding coordination scheme. However, as the PowerMatcher focuses on short-term coordination of demand and supply, it cannot fully exploit the exibility of e.g. electric vehicles over longer periods of time. In this paper, we propose an extension of the PowerMatcher comprising a planning module, which provides coordinated predictions of demand/price over longer times as input to the users for determining their short-term bids. The optimal short-term bidding strategy minimizing a user's costs is then formulated as a Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP) problem. We derive an analytic solution for this SDP problem leading to a simple short-term bidding strategy. Numerical results using real-world data show a substantial performance improvement compared to the standard PowerMatcher, without significant additional complexity