United States v. Wanjiku
- Court
- Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (Federal circuit court)
- Decided
- 2019
- Citation
- 919 F.3d 472 (7th Cir. 2019)
- Standard applied
- Border-search exception and the good-faith doctrine
What the court held
The court affirmed the denial of suppression of evidence from border searches of the defendant's phone, laptop and external drive without deciding what level of suspicion such searches require. It held the agents acted in good faith because they had reasonable suspicion that a crime was being committed at a time when no court had ever required more than reasonable suspicion for any search at the border.
Why
The court traced the border-search doctrine from the first customs statute through Montoya de Hernandez and Flores-Montano, noting that reasonable suspicion is the highest standard the Supreme Court has ever applied at the border and that the defendant conceded no court had required a warrant there. Rather than resolve the standard for device searches, it disposed of the case on good faith, which made the constitutional question unnecessary.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
Wanjiku is the reason a practitioner cannot assume that a border search conducted under yesterday's rules will be judged by today's: good faith regularly saves searches performed while the law was unsettled. It also illustrates a pattern worth recognising — appellate courts repeatedly avoid fixing the standard for device searches at the border, so the doctrine advances by dicta and circuit split rather than by holdings. For an examiner the practical lesson is to record what was known before the device was searched, because that record is what the good-faith analysis runs on.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: border search · good faith · laptop · external drive
Cited 33times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
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Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.