![WISDOM CRUX [ISSN 2456-6233]](https://www.wisdomcrux.lawtimesjournal.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/WISDOM-CRUX-ISSN-2456-6233.png)
Abstract
The fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States is indeed very significant, not only for government authorities who may execute searches and arrests but also for people whose goal is to uphold these protections. The interpretation of this Amendment and the resulting court rulings influenced the police in America today. It has a long history and is in flux in the field of emerging and innovative innovations that the proponents of this Amendment have not foreseen.
Introduction
On 15 December 1791, Virginia became the tenth state to ratify the Charter of Rights (Bill of Rights)[i], and nine more were added to the Constitution. The Bill of Rights has been ratified[ii] for 223 years and 3 months and the fourth Amendment is already being enforced on a regular basis in the criminal justice system. Lawmakers, law enforcement officials, and judges have had trouble deciding for years just what our ancestors intended in terms of emerging developments and circumstances that did not occur in their day. Owing to the power of the judicial process and prosecution counsel to defend the interests of their consumers, the Fourth Amendment is now much more explicit than it was in 1791.
ANALYSIS OF 4th Amendment
Imagine driving a car, and you are being spotted and pulled for speed by a police officer. Out of the car, he commands you. Perhaps he wants to arrest you. Or perhaps he will look for evidence of a crime in your car. Is the officer able to do this?
The Fourth Amendment is the answering section of the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment gives people a right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures in their persons, homes, papers, and effects.” This right restricts the police’s ability to confiscate and search people, their property, and their homes.
The Fourth Amendment was widely discussed in recent years after police and intelligence services carried out various contentious actions in the United States. As part of the war on terrorism, the federal administration has collected American telephones and the Internet. There have been several strongly reduplicated police-citizens meetings in which the officers finally fired a civilian, but there are still some of them. “Stop and Frisk” was used vigorously. The use of aerial observation, whether by pilots or drones, is also an issue.
The fourth Amendment must have shocked those who drew it up, not only because they could not imagine new technology such as the Internet and the drones. And the organized security services remained unfamiliar to them as we are today. The civilians who engaged in ‘night watches’ were responsible for the police in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Additionally, there was still a loose group of sheriffs and officers who lacked the instruments for enforcing the order as the police do today.
The century’s key issues who ratified the Fourth Amendment were the “general warrants” and the “writs of assistance.” The fourth amended Amendment was inserted in the Constitution by prominent events on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, “general warrants,” which escalated through Wilkes v. Wood (1763)[iii] and Entick v. Carrington[iv], are used by the Crown for prosecuting political rivals (1765). General warrants allowed Crown messengers to hunt for anyone who had committed an offense without any reason to suspect it. The judges agreed, therefore, that those summonses breached the common law in the English language. In the colonies, the Crown searched goods that had not paid taxes — such as general warrants, but often unbound by time constraints. Although he lost, others like John Adams describe this struggle as a catalyst that led to the Revolution. James Otis contested his writings in a Boston court. Both scandals have given rise to the well-known belief that a person’s castle is not readily breached by the Government.
Today the Fourth Amendment is meant to restrict the Government anytime an individual or property is arrested or searched. The Fourth Amendment also says, “no warrants shall issue but for likely reasons, with support or assertion, especially describing the place to be searched and the person or things to be seized.” The theory is that any search or seizure should prevent any evils of general warrants, be cleared up by a judge in advance, and acquire a warrant; the Government must prove “probable.”
As a warrant is needed legally before the police can investigate, so many exceptions exist that warrants are only issued in practice. Police can search motor cars without permits, apprehend people on the street without them and search or seize without a judge in an emergency.
In judicial cases, the Fourth Amendment is most generally applied. In the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court held that testimony cannot be admitted to the courts if the police seize proof in the form of illicit testing. It is problematic because while the offender is guilty, testimony is more frequently ignored and can prevent convictions due to police behavior. It is also known as the exclusive rule.” Benjamin Cardozo declared: “The criminal must go free because the constable has bogged down”[v] (a famous judge and ultimately Supreme Court justice).
Yet, Louis Brandeis, another justice of the Supreme Court, said If the Government breaks the law, it creates disrespect for the law.”[vi]
What is “search” today one of the challenging questions? We wouldn’t believe that the police on Times Square in New York was staring at a guy planting a bomb in the bright daylight. But what about placing closed-circuit TV cameras at poles, flying drones over backyards, or capturing evidence of your having provided an internet service or a banking agent to a third party?
Another challenging question is that the Government has no suspicion if a citizen does anything wrong, then a search is appropriate. Think of the security of the airport if you don’t find the solution to that. Indeed, the Government should check people on flights, but the principle is that people should not be taken to arms as soon as they can be caught — there is no likely or other justification for someone to believe that something has gone wrong. This is the same concern with the storage of bulk data and the processing of biometric data.
What should be evident from now on are those technical developments and the various societal threats are a core component of the Fourth Amendment.
Challenges and Suggestions:-
The greatest challenge for the fourth Amendment is how computers and the Internet are to be implemented.
More than two hundred years ago, the Fourth Amendment was written. However, computers and the internet also constitute offenses today and demand that the police gather and examine visual information to solve crimes.
The big question is how much authority can the police gather this information? What is an unfair Internet search and attack?
Take the Facebook account example. You will use the account to give a lot of information to Facebook once you log in to Facebook. Facebook preserves both documents. Whatever messages you write, which images you “like,” and also what sites you view. Facebook gets everything and tracks what you do. Now imagine the cops going to Facebook and requesting a user’s information. The police conclude that the perpetrator has used the offense or posted information on the web with Facebook. Perhaps the perpetrator stalked and threatened a witness on Facebook. Or maybe the perpetrator is a heroin addict who was sharing texts about a possible offense with another drug dealer. Or maybe the perpetrator made a burglary and posted burglary photos to all his friends on his Facebook.
The difficult question is, what is the limit on government access to account records in the fourth Amendment? For example, is it a “search” or “seizure” of the Fourth Amendment for the Government to find what a person can see on his Facebook wall for all friends? Do the suspects send the messages a search or seizure? How about what the suspect viewed? What about records? And how much can the Government take a warrant if it is a search or seizure? Can the Government access all records of the account? Just some records of the account?
It will be up to future judges to figure out what the Fourth Amendment requires. These questions have just begun to answer. As more people spend many of their lives online, it is more and more important to answer these questions correctly.
I believe that courts should seek to answer these questions by translating from the physical to the networking world with the help of the Fourth Amendment’s traditional protections. The fourth Amendment strikes an equilibrium in the physical world. Without constitutional supervision, the Government is free to do many things. The police can be able to watch people or a suspect on the streets of the city. You can follow a car while driving down the road. On the other hand, the police need cause to stop people, and they need the warrant to enter private spaces such as home buildings.
The objective of interpreting the Fourth Amendment should be to strike the same balance in the online environment. Like in the physical world, police should collect specific evidence to ensure that crimes are investigated without restriction. And as in the physical world, there should be restrictions on what the Government can do to ensure that the police cannot infringe critical civil liberties.
The future of the rule of exclusion is a second important field, and the rule that evidence received unconstitutionally cannot be used at the court. The history of exclusion is changing history. The Supreme Court expanded the rule of exclusion significantly in the 1960s and 1970s. The Supreme Court has, however, since the 1980s, reduced its rule of exclusion.
When police violate the Fourth Amendment, the significant disagreement is that the exclusionary rule is adhered to and applied in “good faith,” for example, if the law is unclarified or the violation is only technical. In the past ten years, most judges have broadened the exclusionary rule to include the “good faith exception.” A key question is whether and how far the exemption from good faith will continue to grow.
There are several cross-cutting arguments in the decisions of the Supreme Court interpreting the Fourth Amendment.
For example, the Judges say that government agents have a strong preference for receiving warrants, and investigations without warrants are presumably invalid. They say the warranty is ineffective at other times, and the only requirement is that searches should be “reasonable” at times, while the judges say that the likely cause is necessary to support search, while in others they say that the likely cause is not the “irreducible minimum.”
The fourth Amendment protects privacy, people say, but it trivializes it. In this world, whether you like it or not, you give up much privacy. One example of this is Internet cookies or information stored in web browsers. However, Internet companies won’t come and take you away. The administration could. The right of people to be secure is what the Fourth Amendment protects. The 4th Amendment is a way to keep the Government out of our lives and property, except if it is justified.
In evaluating the Fourth Amendment’s interpretation, the profound changes in the police force since the time of its ratification must be taken into account. Whereas police forces were once reactive and tried to identify and capture criminals, they have now been proactive and disruptive. Before this, police were mainly based on “suspicion,” aiming at people suspected of being in violation or in violation of the Law.
Some fundamental rules can control searches and seizures:-
First of all, we should not encourage any Executive Branch member to interfere in life without at least one branch’s say. This is necessary and particularly critical when the executive actor controls and uses power and coercion to control the people.
Secondly, the Fourth Amendment’s fundamental goal is to prohibit unreasonable and unjustified interference into residents’ lives and property.
In view of these fundamental principles, the fourth Amendment includes specific interpretations:
No search or arrest is “reasonable” if either the search or seizure was not based on constitutional or democratic laws. The police should write laws, but if secrecy is not critical, these rules are public and sensitive to public desires. The authorities are not permitted to write legislation.
Secondly, warrants should be preferred i.e. mission-oriented policing forces shall be adopted. They have an essential role to play to protect public safety. We want them to be. But since they are mission-oriented, they can be collected in advance so that an impartial judge can determine how important it is to impact the person’s lives in advance of looking.
Thirdly, we should differentiate between searches directed at criminals and those directed at society in general. Where a specific defendant is present, the protections of the warrant and the probable cause shall extend. But those rights don’t make any sense because we’re all a police target. Under the above scenario, the most effective defense is that the police do not differentiate between us. For, e.g., at the airport screening, everyone must be checked the same unless there is suspicion—”cause”—that someone should be picked out.
Finally, today’s police department also points out a particular group. Examples include discrimination based on race, sexuality, or something else) or subjecting only staff in specific organizations to drug testing. In the case of a group-based police force, the Constitution’s right clause to rule is the Equal Rights Clause. When there is a discriminatory search or arrest, the Government does have to show two things: that the community it prefers for unfavorable care merely is more likely to include individuals deserving of the Government’s consideration, and that the frequency of inappropriate activity is reasonably high in that group to warrant burdening everybody. Otherwise, the Government should either go back to looking for criminals or searching for all of us.
Conclusion:-
The fourth Amendment is long overdue, and courts have viewed it in various ways; changing public attitudes and law procedures are strongly impacted by these judicial rulings and maybe to the degree that the killer is found and free to go. Policy-making is a significant step in reinforcing our police and citizens’ relations in partnership with the public. In the best of times, police service, civilians would be shielded from illegal activities, and law enforcement people would not feel unreasonably invaded by the police.
[i] Bill of Rights is finally ratified. (n.d.), from< http://www.history.com/this-day- in-history/bill-of-rights- is-finally-ratified.> Retrieved November 5, 2020.
[ii] Bill of Rights is finally ratified. (n.d.), from <http://www.history.com/this-day- in-history/bill-of-rights- is-finally-ratified>.Retrieved November 5, 2020.
[iii] [1763] EWHC CP J95.
[iv] [1765] EWHC KB J98.
[v] People v. Defore, 150 N.E. 585, 587 (N.Y. 1926).
[vi] Brandeis, Louis Dembitz, in Biographical Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court 46 (Melvin I. Urofsky ed., 2006), http://library.cqpress.com/scc/bioenc-427-18975-1014150.
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