TRASHING THE FOURTH AMENDMENT Consider the following: Wolf v. Colorado. In a 6 to 3 vote, the Supreme Court reinforced the arbitrary power of the states to violate individual rights by refusing to exclude evidence seized in an unconstitutional manner. The Supreme Court admitted that the State had acted illegally but upheld its right as a sovereign state to do so. In this case, the Court chose to support the violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by refusing to extend the protection of the exclusionary rule to the states. The exclusionary rule excludes the use of evidence seized in an unconstitutional manner. Wolf has since been overturned by Mapp v. Ohio. Mapp finalized the incorporation of the Fourth Amendment protections into the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It required that state officers comply with Fourth Amendment standards when making searches. Mapp imposed the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule on the state courts. The exclusionary rule was created in Weeks v. United States. In an obvious move to facilitate the Drug War at the expense of the Bill of Rights, in United States v. Leon, by a vote of 6 to 3, the Supreme Court came full-circle by deciding that, whenever evidence was seized in an unconstitutional manner by mistaken police "acting in good faith," (in other words being incompetent) the evidence would be admissible as an exception to the exclusionary rule. All police have to do is convince the government-friendly, profit motivated courts that they "honestly believed*" that their actions were constitutional. Along with the confidential informer doctrine, which denies the accused the right to face his real accuser, the good faith exception has given police a virtual Writ of Intrusion** which nullifies Fourth Amendment protection. Tinsley Grey Sammons, aka tgsam (1993) *Google: testilying **A tgsam original.
