Skip to main content

Describe the rules of evidence for police actions regarding the collection of evidence, and what landmark cases were involved in establishing the...

The basic principle underlying current rules of evidence is that of probable cause; the police must have a preponderance of the evidence that this suspected person is guilty of a crime in order to search them or seize their property, and with rare exceptions must acquire a warrant on this basis.

If evidence is not obtained according to this rule, the exclusionary rule applies, disallowing the use of that evidence in court. In theory, this is not the only way one could penalize illegal searches, but it is the one we generally use.

The exclusionary rule was first applied in the case Boyd v. United States (1886), and actually applied not to a search per se but the requirement to furnish business documents. It was originally argued that this constituted a Fifth Amendment violation, requiring self-incriminating statements.

Adams v. New York (1904) actually specifically rejected the claim of a general exclusionary rule applied to all illegally-seized evidence, but this precedent did not last. In Weeks v. United States (1914), the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment did require all illegally-seized evidence to be excluded from use in federal courts.

This only applied to federal courts until 1952, when in Rochin v. California the Supreme Court ruled that egregious violations of Fourth Amendment rights were sufficient to invalidate the evidence even in state courts. In 1954, Irvine v. California established that this did not apply to all illegal searches, only the most egregious ones.

This standard held until 1961, when in Mapp v. Ohio the Supreme Court generalized the rule to all illegal searches and seizures, and applied it to both state and federal courts.

More recently, the pendulum has begun to swing backward, as starting in the 1970s a series of Supreme Court rulings have weakened or limited the standards of the exclusionary rule and added more and more exceptions. Today the exclusionary rule is only held to apply if the police would not have gotten a warrant---not simply if they didn't---and if the person being searched had a "reasonable expectation of privacy", and it must apply specifically to that person---if you hide drugs in someone else's purse, the evidence can be used against you, just not against them (established in Rawlings v. Kentucky in 1980).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

What warning does Chuchundra issue to Rikki?

Chuchundra, the sniveling, fearful muskrat who creeps around walls because he is too terrified to go into the center of a room, meets Rikki in the middle of the night. He insults Rikki by begging him not to kill him. He then insults him by suggesting that Nag might mistake Chuchundra for Rikki. He says, "Those who kill snakes get killed by snakes."  He issues this warning to Rikki not to help keep Rikki safe but as a way of explaining why Rikki's presence gives him, Chuchundra, more reason to fear.  Chuchundra starts to tell Rikki what Chua the rat told him--but breaks it off when he realizes he might be overheard by Nag. He says, "Nag is everywhere, Rikki-Tikki." Rikki threatens to bite Chuchundra to get him to talk. Even then, Chuchundra won't overtly reveal any information. But he does say, "Can't you hear, Rikki-Tikki?" This is enough of a clue for the clever mongoose. He listens carefully and can just make out the "faintest scratch-s...
Post a Comment
Read more