scholarly journals Search and Seizure in the Supreme Court: Shadows on the Fourth Amendment

1961 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 664
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
The Supreme Court

scholarly journals Traffic Stops, Reasonable Suspicion, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: A State Constitutional Analysis

2007 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis J. Buffone
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
General Rule ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
Federal Constitution ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Lower Courts ◽  
Reasonable Suspicion ◽  
Constitutional Analysis

The Fourth Amendment to the Federal Constitution protects individuals against unreasonable searches and seizures. Traditionally, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment to require warrants supported by probable cause in both the search and seizure contexts. In Terry v. Ohio, the Supreme Court recognized that not all interactions between police and citizens involve intrusions serious enough to trigger the full probable cause standard. As a result, the Court delineated a specific, narrowly applicable exception to the general rule. The Court held that in situations where the police have specific and articulable grounds that provide them with reasonable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot, they may briefly detain an individual for purposes of investigation. Both the facts of Terry and the language of Justice Warren’s opinion leave no doubt that the exception was to be construed and applied in only the narrowest of contexts. However, as lower courts interpreted and applied Terry in the following years, the standard enunciated in Terry blurred considerably. Hence came the development of the wellentrenched, but nebulous, investigative detention doctrine.

Dangerous Warrants

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nirej Sekhon
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Police Discretion ◽  
Accurate Identification ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Local Courts ◽  
State And Local ◽  
Municipal Court

The Supreme Court has cast judicial warrants as the Fourth Amendment gold standard for regulating police discretion. It has embraced a "warrant preference" on the premise that requiring police to obtain advance judicial approval for searches and seizures encourages accurate identification of evidence and suspects while minimizing interference with constitutional rights. The Court and commentators have overlooked the fact that most outstanding warrants do none of these things. Most outstanding warrants are what this article terms "non-compliance warrants": summarily issued arrest warrants for failures to comply with a court or police order. State and local courts are profligate in issuing such warrants for minor offenses. For example, the Department of Justice found that the municipal court in Ferguson, Missouri issued one warrant for every two of its residents. When issued as wantonly as this, warrants are dangerous because they generate police discretion rather than restrain it. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has, most recently in Utah v. Strieff, treated non-compliance warrants as if no different from the traditional warrants that gave rise to the Fourth Amendment warrant preference. This article argues that non-compliance warrants pose unique dangers, constitutional and otherwise. Non-compliance warrants create powerful incentives for the police to conduct unconstitutional stops, particularly in poor and minority neighborhoods. Their enforcement also generates race and class feedback loops. Outstanding warrants beget arrests and arrests beget more warrants. Over time, this dynamic amplifies race and class disparities in criminal justice. The article concludes by prescribing a Fourth Amendment remedy to deter unconstitutional warrant checks. More importantly, the article identifies steps state and local courts might take to stem the continued proliferation of non-compliance warrants.

American Perspectives on Self-Incrimination and the Compelled Production of Evidence

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 218-242
Author(s):  
Mark Berger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
Fifth Amendment ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Intimate Relation ◽  
Government Authority

The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution provides that no person may be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. The Boyd decision in 1886 recognised an intimate relation between the privilege against self-incrimination and the restrictions on search and seizure in the Fourth Amendment and created a virtually impenetrable barrier to government demands that a suspect or defendant be compelled to produce evidence against himself. However, since that time the Supreme Court has progressively restricted the scope of Fifth Amendment protection in relation to the compelled production of evidence. This has been achieved by requiring all citizens to appear before grand juries; by denying Fifth Amendment protection to entities; by holding that the compelled production of evidence does not breach the Fifth Amendment unless the very act of production is self-incriminatory; and by denying the privilege in relation to required records. The Supreme Court's stance reflects a recognition of the complexity of contemporary law enforcement problems and may be seen as an attempt to balance the state's interest in the successful prosecution of crime against the citizen's interest in being free from state intrusion. The effect of the Supreme Court's reforms has been to broaden government authority to compel offenders to assist in their own prosecutions whilst limiting Fifth Amendment protection to incrimination through the accused's own testimony or its equivalent.

Predicting Supreme Court Cases Probabilistically: The Search and Seizure Cases, 1962-1981

1984 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 891-900 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Segal
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Preliminary Analysis ◽  
Fourth Amendment ◽  
Search And Seizure ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Legal Model

The overwhelming concensus of Fourth Amendment scholars is that the Supreme Court's sea and seizure cases are a mess. This article proposes that the confusion arises from the manner in which the cases were studied, not from the decisions themselves. A legal model with variables that me the prior justification of the search, the nature of the intrusion, and a few mitigating circumstance used to explain the Court's decisions on the reasonableness of a given search or seizure. The parameters are estimated through probit.The results show that the search and seizure cases are much more ordered than had commonly been believed. Virtually all of the estimates are as expected. Additionally, the Court is shown to act favorably toward the federal government than toward the states. Preliminary analysis suggests the model has predictive as well as explanatory value.

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