Word: contrabanding
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...timing was worthy of a first-rate Hollywood spy thriller. One day before the Swedish container ship Elgaren was due to make a seven-hour stop in the port of Hamburg, U.S. officials informed their colleagues in West Germany that the ship was carrying Soviet-bound contraband. Once the ship had docked, however, a Hamburg judge turned down the formal request for a search warrant on grounds of insufficient evidence. As the deadline ticked closer, a three-member panel of the appeals court reviewed and finally reversed the earlier decision. Just seven minutes before the Elgaren was scheduled to lift...
...conch" (as Key West natives call themselves), whose life has been spent in the single-minded effort to keep himself and his family on the upper fringes of the "have-nots." Owner of a fast motor boat, he charters it to big-game fishermen, also uses it for running contraband...
...part number on invoices correctly identifies the material in a crate as a banned military item, Customs agents have no easy way of knowing it. The Treasury Department does not have a formal arrangement with the Defense Department to verify that the parts numbers are on lists of contraband items. Says a Customs agent in Washington: "Usually, I call a friend at the Pentagon and ask him to look up the numbers for me as a favor...
...Court rulings had created a "complex superstructure of evidentiary and analytical rules." It was time, wrote Justice Rehnquist, to return to less rigid restrictions and allow a magistrate issuing a warrant to "make a practical, common sense decision whether, given all the circumstances ... there is a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place." The result, says a pleased Sue Johnson, top official of the Police Executive Research Forum, is that "officers will seek search warrants more frequently." At the same time, defense attorneys will undoubtedly find it far harder to challenge...
What about your car? The patrolman may seize any contraband that is in plain view, but the Fourth Amendment prohibits a search inside the car unless he has sound reasons for thinking that it contains contraband or illegal weapons. Your rights will not count for much if you are rude, however, because the officer can still choose to make a formal arrest for your traffic offense. If he does, he can then thoroughly search both you and the passenger compartment...