Friday, December 16, 2016

United States v. Cook

Opinion handed down November 22, 2016
In United States v. Cook, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals held that defendant Lamar Cook was not seized for Fourth Amendment purposes when police officers pulled up behind the parked car Cook was sitting in and activated their cruiser’s “wig wag” lights, because “a reasonable person seeing the wig wag lights under these circumstances would have thought that he was still ‘at liberty to ignore the police presence and go about his business.’”[1]  This conclusion is strikingly inconsistent with the common understanding of the meaning of police emergency lights.