An arresting officer may take a phone and hold it, but the data it carries may not be searched without a warrant. The quantity and character of that data defeat the officer-safety and evidence-destruction rationales that support a search incident to arrest. Remote wiping and encryption are answered by seizing, isolating or powering down the device rather than by reading it. Data held by a provider follows a separate statutory route, and location records raise questions of their own.
Under the automobile exception, officers may search a readily mobile vehicle without a warrant whenever they have probable cause to believe it holds evidence or contraband. Probable cause both authorizes the search and fixes its scope: officers may look anywhere in the vehicle, including a locked trunk and containers belonging to a passenger, in which the object sought could be concealed. Probable cause attaching to one container does not open the rest of the car.
A claim already presented in a prior application must be dismissed, and a new claim may proceed only on a new retroactive rule of constitutional law or on a previously undiscoverable factual predicate showing innocence by clear and convincing evidence. Authorization must be obtained from a three-judge panel before filing, must be granted or denied within thirty days, and is not appealable or subject to rehearing or certiorari.
Several immigration categories turn on figures fixed at sentencing rather than on the offense of conviction: the term of imprisonment ordered including any suspended portion, the number of counts and how they are grouped, the restitution amount, and any finding the court makes beyond the elements. Each is a legitimate subject of ordinary sentencing advocacy, and each is far harder to change once judgment enters.
Speedy trial protection comes from two sources with different mechanics: a constitutional standard weighing length, reason, assertion and prejudice, and statutory schemes that count days and exclude specified periods. A transfer into federal immigration custody stalls a case without the defendant doing anything, and the statutory exclusion for an absent or unavailable defendant turns on whether the location is known and whether reasonable efforts to obtain presence were made and recorded.
A claimant must show a colorable ownership or possessory interest in the property to satisfy Article III, and bare assertion is not enough. The statute defines an owner to include a leasehold, lien, mortgage, recorded security interest or valid assignment, and to exclude a nominee who exercises no dominion or control, a general unsecured creditor and an unexplained bailee. A motion to strike puts the burden of establishing standing on the claimant by a preponderance.
A state may schedule substances the federal schedules do not, so a conviction under a broader state statute does not by itself establish a federally controlled substance offense. Whether that mismatch is available later depends on whether the substance was named in the charging document, in the written agreement, or in the factual basis. The choice is made during the criminal case, and courts differ on how much a defendant must show about the breadth of the state list.
Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 12.2 bars use against the defendant of any statement made during a court-ordered mental examination, of expert testimony based on that statement, and of other fruits of it, except on an issue of mental condition the defense has itself raised. A competency finding is separately inadmissible at trial. A warning is constitutionally required before an examination whose results will be used at sentencing.
Truancy, running away and habitual disobedience are handled through petitions that carry different names in each state and a common structure: intake diversion, services, and a court order backed by contempt. Federal funding conditions bar placing status offenders in secure detention, subject to a narrow exception for violation of a valid court order. States differ sharply in how heavily they rely on that exception.
Section 2244(d)(2) excludes from the one-year period the time during which a properly filed application for State post-conviction or other collateral review is pending. Properly filed means accepted in compliance with the rules on form, timing, place and fee, so an application rejected as untimely tolls nothing. Pending covers one complete round including the intervals between levels, but not the certiorari period. Tolling suspends rather than restarts, and section 2255 has no equivalent.
The immigration statute counts the period of incarceration or confinement ordered by the court, and it says expressly that the count includes any part of the term whose imposition or execution was suspended. Time actually served is irrelevant, and so is early release. A sentence therefore falls below the one-year line only if the total ordered on the count, suspended portion included, is less than a year, and each count is measured separately rather than aggregated.
Records held by a bank, an employer or a communications provider belong to the custodian, and the person they describe ordinarily has no standing to object. Congress supplied partial substitutes: the Right to Financial Privacy Act governs federal access to financial records but exempts grand jury subpoenas, and the Stored Communications Act sets tiers of process with judicially ordered delay of notice. Most such subpoenas are answered without the affected person knowing.
