United States v. Peter John Weber

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• recognizing that to satisfy the Warrant Clause of the Fourth Amendment, a warrant “must be no broader than the probable cause on which it is based.” (citation omitted)
• explaining that “with each succeeding inference, the last reached is less and less likely to be true.”
• noting that there was no probable cause when, following each inferential leap made by the officer, “virtual certainty became probability, which merged into possibility, which faded into chance”
• noting that the affidavit contained \rambling boilerplate recitations\ about pedophiles and collectors of child pornography, but \not a whit of evidence . . . indicating that Weber was a `child molester.'\
• holding reliance on a search warrant was unreasonable where the officer’s statements concerned “child molesters” without any evidence the defendant could be so labeled
• holding that the affidavit did not establish probable cause that the defendant was a child molester when it was “clear that the ‘expert’ portion of the affidavit was not drafted with the facts of this case or this particular defendant in mind”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).