While police search hundreds of thousands of individuals and their property annually, almost nothing is known about how the Fourth Amendment regulates these searches and how they work in practice.
In their forthcoming paper, Unwarranted Warrants? An Empirical Analysis of Judicial Review in Search and Seizure, Miguel de Figueiredo (Conn.), Brett Hashimoto (BYU-linguistics), and Dane Thorley (BYU) lever digitized and timestamped metadata drawn from over 33,000 warrant applications filed through Utah’s “e-Warrants” system over a three-year period, categorize warrants by type, length, and complexity, and assess when and for how long judges reviewed warrant applications.
The paper's key findings include high approval rates and a median warrant review time of three minutes. Approximately 10 percent of warrants are “opened, reviewed, redrafted (if necessary), and approved in sixty seconds or less.” Fig.3 (below) plots the relation between an affidavit's word count and the amount of time the judge spent reviewing a subset of warrant applications that were approved, suggesting that a substantial share of the warrant applications could not have been read in their entirety or carefully (or both, even after assuming fast reading rates).
An excerpted abstract follows.
“… Our key findings demonstrate that the warrant review process is fast and nearly always results in approval. Ninety-eight percent of warrant reviews eventually result in an approval, and over 93% are approved on first submission. Further, we find that the median time for review is only three minutes, and that one out of every ten warrants is opened, reviewed, and approved in sixty seconds or less. Our analyses that account for warrant complexity and length also suggest that many approved warrants are either not read carefully or not read in full (or both). We also perform a qualitative analysis of a randomly selected subsample of warrants and find cases where the review process has clearly failed. Taken together, our results have critical implications regarding the warrant review process that force us to reconsider the constitutional nature of probable cause and the role that judicial review plays as a “check” on police searches. In light of these implications, we explore the political, economic, and logistical constraints that judges face when reviewing warrants and consider pathways to reform that are mindful of these factors.”
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