Criminal Justice

By Sam Kamin, Director, Constitutional Rights & Remedies Program and Professor, Sturm College of Law, University of Denver

With the passage of marijuana legalization initiatives in Washington and Colorado, the long-simmering cold war between state and federal marijuana policy threatens to break out into open hostilities. While eighteen states plus the District of Columbia now permit marijuana for medical purposes, only Washington and Colorado have taken the bolder step of both repealing entirely their marijuana prohibitions for small amounts of the drug and requiring their state legislatures to begin regulating a retail, recreational marijuana industry by the end of 2013.

Everything now depends on the response of the federal government. Notwithstanding changing policy in the states, marijuana remains on the DEA’s list of Schedule I narcotics, those drugs whose manufacture and sale are strictly prohibited. Thus, every transaction in every medical marijuana state throughout the country constitutes a federal crime. The Justice Department has grudgingly accepted the medical marijuana industry thus far; while there have been some federal raids on these businesses, they have generally been permitted to operate, notwithstanding their open flouting of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

In 2010, when the state of California considered Proposition 19 which would have legalized marijuana for recreational purposes U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder issued voters in that state a strong warning. He made clear that the federal government would “vigorously enforce” the provisions of the CSA in the state if voters passed the Proposition. After having an early lead in polls, the measure eventually lost.

By Anna-Rose Mathieson, a counsel in the appellate group for O’Melveny & Myers, and a co-author of two amicus briefs for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Bailey v. United States.

Chunon Bailey was pulled over by the police. The officers told him to exit his car, patted him down, and confiscated his keys, wallet, and car. The officers had not seen him break any laws, and found nothing incriminating during their search. They nevertheless questioned and handcuffed Bailey, and drove him away in the back of a police car. 

Today the Supreme Court considers whether the search and seizure of Bailey was justified based on the sole fact that Bailey had recently left an apartment that the police had a warrant to search. The genesis of this issue is a case decided thirty years ago, Michigan v. Summers, where the Court ruled that police officers executing a search warrant for contraband can detain all occupants of a dwelling while searching the premises. Bailey was no longer on the premises -- the police had watched him leave the house, then followed him for nearly a mile before detaining him -- but the court below thought the rule should be extended to those who had recently left the premises. This extension is significant because the Summers rule gives police broad powers: unlike most Fourth Amendment cases, where the police must show individualized suspicion as to the specific person searched or seized, the Summers rule affords police the power to detain anyone for the duration of the search, even if the person has no apparent connection to the alleged crime and appears totally harmless. And the police can, and often do, handcuff the occupants, even when the search goes on for hours.