Exclusionary Rule in Terry vs Ohio

Supreme Court Bill of Rights Case Terry v. Ohio introduce the Terry frisk into police procedure, allowing officers to have the right to stop and frisk or do a surface search of individuals on the street even without probable cause. All the officer would need would be to have a reasonable suspicion that the person being searched had committed, was about to commit or was in the act of committing a crime.

The Supreme Court stated that the officer's suspicion had to be "specific" and able to be put into words -- that is to say, the officer could not just say he had a "hunch" that the person searched was about to violate the law: the officer would have to be able to point to a specific characteristic that made him suspect the individual in question.

However, this Supreme Court case eventually led to the allowance of the detainment of persons -- of searches and seizures such as traffic stops -- or the kinds of searches that one must undergo when flying. The Terry frisk initiated a snowball effect of more and more leeway on the part of law enforcement and security personnel to be able to detain persons, search them and their belongings, and seize items that may be constituted a threat. What Terry v.

Ohio allowed the Court to do was to reinterpret the meaning of the "exclusionary rule" as pertaining to the Fourth Amendment's guarantee to citizens against unlawful searches and seizures (Maclin, 2014). The exclusionary rule asserted that any evidence gathered by way of a violating the individual's rights against unlawful searches could not be used in a court of law against the individual charged. Implicit in this concept is the idea that unlawful searches cannot and should not be performed by law enforcement. The Court, in Terry v.

Ohio, essentially reversed the exclusionary rule principle, said it applied only to the gathering of evidence and that when it came to keeping people safe or protecting people, law enforcement agents could search/frisk because they were not attempting to "gather evidence" but rather to prevent a crime or stop a criminal. This was, of course, mere wordplay.

The Court gave law enforcement the right to stop and search anyone and everyone so long as they could later "state in words" their reason (easily contrived) for doing so. In other words, this case overrode the Fourth Amendment and effectively ended the peoples' guarantee of protection against unlawful searches. In this case, Terry and two other individuals were identified by officer Mcfadden on a Cleveland street in what appeared to be an instance of the three men casing a storefront in order to perform a robbery.

Mcfadden approached the three individuals, identified himself as an officer, patted down Terry, found a gun in his coat pocket, patted down the second individual, found another gun and patted down the third but found nothing. The two men were arrested and charged with carrying a concealed weapon. The defendants argued that they had been searched without warrant and that the guns were found as evidence in violation of the men's Fourth Amendment rights.

The Court led by Chief Justice Warren assessed that Mcfadden's frisking of the three men was reasonable and justified based on the behaviors of the men he had observed. They had been casing the store several times, looking in the window and conferring with one another. They were very suspicious to Mcfadden, who was an experienced officer with many years on the job and on that beat. He knew what to look for when seeing a casing job.

The Court judged that in this type of incident, it is appropriate to perform a frisk. The Fourth Amendment had been practically applied to society as a whole by ensuring that there is a barrier of space between individuals and the law. However, with this decision, a new era was ushered in: suspicious activity, led to protection of the public, which became the excuse for conducting stops and searches. Motorists were then allowed to be stopped at checkpoints to see if they were intoxicated.

Flyers on airlines could be stopped and searched to see if they were carrying items that might be dangerous to others. The Fourth Amendment was effectively circumvented through Terry v. Ohio, which turned one instance of a justifiable search into an excuse for law enforcement to conduct hundreds and thousands of unwarranted stops and searches -- all due to the Court's desire to give loose interpretations of this particular Bill: it has in fact led directly to the TSA's Administrative Search Exemption (Primus, 2011).

In my opinion, this Court case is an instance of giving law enforcement an inch only to see them take a mile. While the reason behind the ruling in Terry v. Ohio is sound, it is couched in too legalistic of terms. The ruling's strength lies in its willingness to judge the actions of the officer as warranted and reasonable. Yet, at the same time it should.