This paper reviews Fourth Amendment interpretive law, focusing on the exclusionary rule and its many exceptions — including good faith, inevitable discovery, and attenuation — as well as landmark cases such as Mapp v. Ohio. It examines ongoing debates over what constitutes a "search," from airport security and sobriety checkpoints to stop-and-frisk policies. The paper also explores how the rise of social media and digital technology has complicated traditional notions of public and private space, raising new questions about citizen privacy rights that courts and the Founding Fathers alike could not have fully anticipated.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects," by protecting them "against unreasonable searches and seizures," with the additional caveat that "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" (Friedman & Kerr, 2022, par. 1). Although the wording of the document seems fairly straightforward, it has proved contentious to determine what constitutes reasonable and unreasonable searches under the law, and what constitutes private versus public spaces — including areas such as one's car, workplace, and even online.
One watershed moment in the history of the Fourth Amendment was the establishment of the exclusionary rule — the principle that evidence seized improperly cannot be used in a court of law. The purpose of this restriction is widely considered to be the disincentivizing of illegal police behavior, particularly when police believe a suspect is guilty but lack adequate grounds to conduct a search or obtain a warrant. Exceptions to the exclusionary rule include the good faith exception, independent sources, inevitable discovery, attenuation, impeachment, and qualified immunity (Jurkowski, 2017). In the case of the good faith exception, courts may allow evidence even if it was obtained illegally, so long as it was gathered in evident good faith by police who believed they were acting lawfully (Jurkowski, 2017).
In the case of an independent source, if an independent source legally obtained the same evidence, the fruits of the illegal search can still be used in court and are no longer considered the so-called "fruit of the poisonous tree." Inevitable discovery holds that police would have found the evidence regardless, even without the illegal search (Jurkowski, 2017). Attenuation suggests that if there is sufficient distance — temporal or causal — between the discovery of the evidence and the illegal act, the evidence may be admitted. Illegally obtained evidence can also be used to impeach witness testimony, and it cannot be used against police officers to convict them of violating a subject's rights (Jurkowski, 2017).
The 1961 U.S. Supreme Court decision Mapp v. Ohio was the first ruling that applied the exclusionary rule universally to the states. In that case, Mapp was convicted for possessing obscene materials after being subjected to an illegal police search that was unrelated to such materials. The police had neither a warrant to search for obscene materials nor probable cause to believe she possessed them. Although Mapp appealed her conviction on First Amendment grounds, the Court struck down her conviction on the basis that the materials had been illegally obtained.
However, given the numerous exceptions that have arisen over the years regarding how and when to apply the exclusionary rule, its continued validity is far from settled. Some scholars contend that rather than discarding illegally obtained evidence, a better approach might simply be to prosecute officers who fail to follow constitutional protocols in the course of their duties (Friedman & Kerr, 2022). Civil libertarians have argued that the Court has recently been chipping away at Fourth Amendment rights, while advocates for prosecutors argue for the need to balance the rights of suspects against the public's right to safety.
"Contested forms of searching and civil rights tensions"
"Social media posts, digital surveillance, and privacy standards"
The Fourth Amendment fundamentally exists to protect citizen privacy within the confines of the citizen's own home. But what constitutes "home" is increasingly spilling over into digital space. The ubiquity of the Internet for finding jobs, communicating at work, and establishing a searchable public presence — much like an old-fashioned phone book — also calls into question whether engagement with social media is truly voluntary in any meaningful sense. Regardless, this aspect of law represents yet another domain that the Founding Fathers, or even justices of twenty years ago, could not have fully comprehended in terms of its scope and impact on individual rights.
You’re 49% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 2 sections.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.