How to Outline Criminal Procedure

Follow the order a defense lawyer uses at a suppression hearing, not the order of your casebook. Casebooks teach Fourth Amendment doctrine historically — Katz, then trespass revival in United States v. Jones, then Carpenter — but exams give you a fact pattern and ask what comes in. The only organizing principle that survives contact with an exam is: threshold, justification, remedy.

So your top-level headings are: (I) Fourth Amendment; (II) Fifth Amendment/Miranda and Due Process voluntariness; (III) Sixth Amendment right to counsel, including Massiah and lineups; (IV) Remedies — standing, fruits, and the good-faith exception. Each of the first three gets the same internal skeleton: Did the amendment apply? If yes, was the conduct justified? If not, is suppression the consequence?

Do not organize by case. A heading that reads "Arizona v. Gant" tells you nothing under time pressure. A heading that reads "Search incident to arrest — vehicles" with Gant as the rule underneath tells you where to look. Cases are authority in your outline; rules are the architecture.

Split it into three questions and refuse to blur them. First, threshold: was there a 'search' or 'seizure'? A search occurs if the government invades a reasonable expectation of privacy (Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), Harlan, J., concurring) or physically trespasses on a constitutionally protected area to obtain information (United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012); Florida v. Jardines, 569 U.S. 1 (2013)). Park the third-party doctrine and its Carpenter v. United States (2018) exception for cell-site location information here, along with Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001) on sense-enhancing technology, open fields, curtilage, and dog sniffs (Illinois v. Caballes, 543 U.S. 405 (2005)). A seizure of a person requires physical force or submission to a show of authority.

Second, justification. Make a single table with three columns: level of suspicion required, scope permitted, and the leading case. Warrant plus probable cause is the baseline (Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213 (1983), totality-of-circumstances). Then list the warrant exceptions as discrete entries, each with its own elements: search incident to lawful arrest (Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969); Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332 (2009) for vehicles; Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014) for phones); automobile exception (Carroll; California v. Acevedo, 500 U.S. 565 (1991)); consent (Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218 (1973); apparent authority under Illinois v. Rodriguez, 497 U.S. 177 (1990); the present-and-objecting co-tenant in Georgia v. Randolph, 547 U.S. 103 (2006)); plain view (Horton v. California, 496 U.S. 128 (1990)); exigent circumstances (Kentucky v. King, 563 U.S. 452 (2011); Missouri v. McNeely, 569 U.S. 141 (2013); Lange v. California (2021) on hot pursuit of a misdemeanant); inventory and administrative searches; and special needs.

Third, give Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968) its own subsection, because it has its own internal structure: reasonable suspicion to stop, separate reasonable suspicion of weapons to frisk, and scope limits. Add Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119 (2000), Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996) on pretext, Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, 532 U.S. 318 (2001) on custodial arrest for minor offenses, and Rodriguez v. United States, 575 U.S. 348 (2015) on unlawful prolongation of traffic stops.

Give each its own trigger line at the top of the section, because students lose points by merging them. Due process voluntariness applies to every confession and asks whether police coercion overbore the suspect's will under the totality of the circumstances; it requires state action, not custody or charges. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966) applies only to custodial interrogation, and both words are terms of art — custody is measured by whether a reasonable person would feel free to terminate and leave, interrogation includes words or actions police should know are reasonably likely to elicit an incriminating response.

Under Miranda, outline waiver and invocation separately. Waiver can be implied from a course of conduct (Berghuis v. Thompkins, 560 U.S. 370 (2010)); invocation of counsel must be unambiguous (Davis v. United States, 512 U.S. 452 (1994)) and triggers the Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477 (1981) bar, which dissolves after a 14-day break in custody under Maryland v. Shatzer, 559 U.S. 98 (2010). Note the public safety exception (New York v. Quarles, 467 U.S. 649 (1984)) and the limited remedy: unwarned statements are generally inadmissible in the case-in-chief but usable for impeachment, and physical fruits are treated differently than Fourth Amendment fruits.

The Sixth Amendment branch begins at the initiation of adversary judicial proceedings and is offense-specific (Texas v. Cobb, 532 U.S. 162 (2001)). Massiah v. United States, 377 U.S. 201 (1964) bars deliberate elicitation — no custody required, and undercover informants count. Montejo v. Louisiana, 556 U.S. 778 (2009) governs waiver after arraignment. Keep identifications here too: United States v. Wade, 388 U.S. 218 (1967) gives a right to counsel at post-charge corporeal lineups, while suggestive identifications otherwise run through the due process reliability test of Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98 (1977).

Make it a standalone module at the end, written so you can apply it to any violation. Start with standing — really, whether the defendant's own Fourth Amendment rights were violated (Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128 (1978)). This is the cheapest issue to spot and the one students skip most.

Then fruits: Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471 (1963), with the three break-the-chain doctrines beneath it — independent source (Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533 (1988)), inevitable discovery (Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431 (1984)), and attenuation (Utah v. Strieff, 579 U.S. 232 (2016), where a valid arrest warrant attenuated an unlawful stop). Finish with good faith: United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984) and its four exceptions, extended to negligent recordkeeping in Herring v. United States, 555 U.S. 135 (2009). Note the culpability framing — exclusion requires deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent police conduct — because that is the modern Court's move and professors reward students who see it.

Adjudication courses need a chronological spine instead of a decision tree, because the doctrine tracks the case's progress. Order it: charging and the prompt probable cause determination (Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U.S. 103 (1975); County of Riverside v. McLaughlin, 500 U.S. 44 (1991)); bail and pretrial detention; right to counsel and its scope (Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963)); discovery and disclosure (Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), plus Giglio impeachment material); guilty pleas and plea bargaining, including the ineffective-assistance line of Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper (both 2012); jury trial rights (Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145 (1968); Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986)); speedy trial (Barker v. Wingo, 407 U.S. 514 (1972)); sentencing (Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000)); double jeopardy (Blockburger v. United States, 284 U.S. 299 (1932)); and appeals and habeas.

Ineffective assistance under Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984) deserves its own subsection with the two prongs and the prejudice standard spelled out, because it reappears in the plea, trial, and sentencing chapters. Write it once and cross-reference.

Condense to a two-page attack sheet. Page one is the Fourth Amendment tree in flowchart form. Page two lists every Miranda and Massiah trigger with a one-line rule. If you cannot fit it on two pages, your outline still contains case narrative you do not need.

Add a 'twin cases' column: pairs professors love to test because they cut opposite ways. Gant against Riley on the scope of search incident to arrest. King against McNeely on police-created exigency. Randolph against Rodriguez on consent. Jardines against Caballes on dog sniffs. Edmond against Sitz on checkpoints. For each pair, write the distinguishing fact in one sentence.

Keep citations short. Full cites waste time on a closed-book exam; most professors want only the case name. In your outline, use the Bluebook short form after the first full cite — 'Gant, 556 U.S. at 343' — so you can pull a pin cite if you are writing an open-book exam or a memo. If you are unsure of a page number, cite the case name and year only rather than guess.

The most common is treating each warrant exception as a mood rather than a set of elements. Gant permits a vehicle search incident to arrest only if the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance of the passenger compartment, or it is reasonable to believe the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of arrest. Write those elements as numbered elements. Do the same for every exception.

The second is skipping the threshold question. If police conduct was not a search, the whole justification analysis is dicta, and a professor testing an open-field or third-party-doctrine issue is testing exactly that. The third is fusing Miranda and Massiah into a generic 'right to counsel' section — they have different triggers, different waiver rules, and different remedies. The fourth is omitting standing and fruits, which are worth real points and take three sentences to apply.

Finally, if your professor emphasizes state constitutional law or a specific circuit's approach, flag it explicitly in the outline. Some Crim Pro courses are taught almost entirely on federal constitutional minimums; others devote real time to state courts that reject Leon or Strieff under their own constitutions. That variation is professor-driven, and your outline should reflect the class you actually took.