Loyalty to the King: The Circuits’ Interpretation of the Overhauled ‘Police-Created Exigency’ Doctrine

Have the U.S. Federal Circuit Courts adhered to precedent established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Kentucky v. King (“King”)? In King, the Court ruled that the police could not and did not impermissibly create the exigent circumstances unless they had expressly “violated or threatened to violate the Fourth Amendment.”The Exigent Circumstances Exception (the “Exception”) to the Fourth Amendment has long served as a legitimate tool affording the police a legal method to bypass the warrant requirement, presuming that there is a presence of circumstances that inherently requires the immediate attention of the police.The Exception was not preconceived with the objective of acting as an apparatus for police to habitually circumvent the warrant requirement. However, the Exception has been prone to instances in which the police have willingly chosen to create the exigent circumstances in order to circumvent the warrant requirement.The Court suitably addressed this issue in King, laying out a framework for similar disputes. Legal scholars have, nonetheless, ubiquitously asserted that the King decision was indeterminate and eclectic in nature, claiming that it declined to meet the fundamental threshold deemed necessary for legal clarification. To assess whether the Circuits have struggled in interpreting and applying King, I will evaluate a plethora of post-King legal disputes. This collection of qualitative data will then acquiesce for the construction of a substantiate empirical analysis. The Kingdecision had dealt a seemingly calamitous blow to the already unstable equilibrium balancing liberty and police power. This research furthers the query regarding the relative deterioration the Fourth Amendment has capitulated as a direct consequence to the refurbished “police-created exigency” doctrine.