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.
