The Downfall Of The Fourth Amendment: How The Latest Ruling By The Supreme Court Weakens The Exclusionary Rule And Our Privacy
Brittany
Ehrenman
With a recent Fourth Amendment ruling from the
Supreme Court of the United States, it seems that our privacy, and the Fourth
Amendment, are becoming less protected.[i] On June 20, 2016, the Supreme
Court of the United States may have chipped away what little remains of our
right’s governed by the Fourth Amendment.[ii] The Court held, in Utah v.
Strieff,[iii] that evidence found from an unlawful police stop would not
be inadmissible in court, so long as the initial stop and evidence are
attenuated by an active arrest warrant.[iv]
In Strieff, the police department
received an anonymous tip that drugs were being sold out of a residential home.[v]
Officer Fackrell surveyed the home, for about a week, and observed guests
leaving the house within minutes of arriving.[vi] Edward Strieff was a
visitor of the suspected home and was seen leaving and walking towards a
convenience store.[vii] Officer Fackrell stopped and detained Strieff and
questioned his activities inside the home.[viii] The Officer learned that
Strieff had an outstanding arrest warrant for a traffic violation and
subsequently arrested him.[ix] When Strieff was searched, incident to the
arrest warrant, a baggie of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia were found.[x]
Strieff was charged with unlawful possession of the drugs found in his pocket
after the search.[xi]
Strieff moved to suppress the evidence found
against him, arguing that evidence found from an illegal search would be
considered fruit of the poisonous tree, therefore, inadmissible in court.[xii]
Even though it was uncontested that the Officer lacked reasonable
suspicion for the stop itself, the Supreme Court held that the exclusionary
rule should not be used and that the evidence would be allowed to come in.[xiii]
The protection that the Supreme Court has
lessened in their ruling in Strieff was initially created to
provide a safeguard that benefits everyone from police
searching innocent people.[xiv] It is not often thought about but anyone
can acquire an arrest warrant, especially for such minor offenses.[xv]
Not all warrants that are given out have to do with criminally dangerous
actions, many are just minor infractions, such as traffic violations.[xvi]
Arrest warrants are now so ordinary that they may be unbeknownst to the person
it was written for.[xvii] One woman in Ferguson was not aware that she
had a warrant, from an old ticket for an expired car registration, until she
tried to renew her license.[xviii] Additionally, another woman was
subject to being arrested at any moment because of a ticket she could never
afford to pay for keeping an old car parked in a driveway.[xiv]
Forgetting to pay a traffic ticket could result in an arrest warrant.[xx]
Once a ticket has been ignored, a court has the ability to issue a misdemeanor,
then an arrest warrant.[xxi] Such minor violations can develop into
arrest warrants for people; almost one hundred tickets in Ferguson were
distributed out for things like having an overgrown yard of grass, playing loud
music, or walking in the road inappropriately.[xxii] Now, after the Strieff holding,
if there is a pending arrest warrant out for you, for something so trifling as
overgrown grass, it can justify an unlawful stop by the police and anything found on
your person at the time of the stop can be used again you in a court of law.[xxiii]
Racial profiling can also occur with frequent
police stops as well.[xxiv] Justice Sotomayor’s fear is that the stopping
of an individual will not be based on whether police had probable cause but
rather on physical traits, like what someone is wearing or based on ethnicity.[xxv]
She stresses how hazardous this Court’s ruling can now be on minorities,
specifically the Black and Hispanic communities.[xxvi] More often than
not, unfortunately, people of color fall victim more times than white people to
suspicionless stops and searches.[xxvii] The reality is that, although
everyone should be considered innocent until proven guilty, most people aren’t
treated as such.[xxviii] Even though most officers do conduct their
actions in good faith and with no malicious intent, the numbers speak for
themselves.[xxix] In a 2011 census for New York City, almost 87% of
people who were stopped were Black or Latino descent.[xxx] Going back to
Missouri, specifically the town of Ferguson, 92% of the arrest warrants that
were issued in the year 2013 were against African Americans.[xxxi] In
Philadelphia in 2015, 77.06% of the pedestrians who were stopped on the streets
were Black or Latino, sadly demonstrating that Justice Sotomayor’s fears of
what is to come of this Courts holding has already been taking place.[xxxii]
African Americans and Latinos have been racially profiled more frequently than
white people.[xxxiii] With this new Court holding it may very well
disproportionally impact this specific demographic even more.[xxxiv] It
has already been demonstrated that police officers have been stopping people on
the streets for questioning and not documenting those encounters, which creates
skepticism in official counting of police stops in general.[xxxv] Knowing
this information, and looking at statistics of stops in the future after this
Court’s holding, there is no measuring what is accurately being documented.[xxxvi]
As Justice Sotomayor asserts “it is no secret that people of color are
disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny.”[xxxvi] If these
police stops have already been occurring than this Court ruling may excuse
minority discriminatory stops more often.[xxxvii]
Since our Second Amendment rights seem to
always be of topical concern to the population, why should our Fourth Amendment
rights be any different? This ruling should be of concern to everyone since
the Fourth Amendment provides a safeguard for all of our
privacy rights. Because of the
Court’s holding, evidence obtained by police officers from unlawful stops will
not matter at all, so long as a warrant is present.[xxxix] This ruling
could be a demonstration as to when people speak of the justice system they say
that it is corrupt.[xxxx] We have policies and procedures set forth
that the Court system seems to finds ways to dishonor and destroy so there is
less and less protection for society. We do not want to continue tainting
the courts by allowing fruits in from unlawful searches. I am curious to see
what is to come and what justifications and excuses will be added to another
right we, as citizens, possess. What protections in the future will be taken
away from us next?
[i]. See Orin
Kerr, Opinion Analysis: The Exclusionary Rule is Weakened but it
Still Lives, Scotusblog (June 20, 2016, 9:35 PM),
http://www.scotusblog.com/2016/06/opinion-analysis-the-exclusionary-rule-is-weakened-but-it-still-lives/;
Matt Ford, Justice Sotomayor’s Ringing Dissent, Atlantic (June
20, 2016),
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/utah-streiff-sotomayor/487922/.
[ii]. Utah
v. Strieff, No. 14-1373, slip op. (U.S. June 20, 2016).
[iii]. No. 14-1373, slip op. (U.S. June 20, 2016).
[iv]. Id. at
1.
[v]. Id. at
2.
[vi]. Id.
[vii]. Id.
[viii]. Strieff,
No. 14-1373, slip op. at 2.
[ix]. Id.
[x]. Id.
[xi]. Id.
[xii]. Id.
[xiii]. Strieff,
No. 14-1373, slip op. at 1–2.
[xiv]. U.S.
Const. amend. IV.
[xv]. See Strieff,
No. 14-1373, slip op. at 7 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).
[xvi]. Id.
[xvii]. See Blake
Ellis & Melanie Hicken, One Year Later: Ferguson is Still
Pumping out Arrest Warrants, CNN Money (Aug., 06, 2015, 1:41
PM), http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/06/news/ferguson-arrest-warrants/.
[xviii]. Ellis & Hicken, supra note 17.
[xix]. Id.
[xx].
Kat Saks, Ignoring a Traffic Ticket? Be Prepared to Pay the
Consequences, DMV (July 10, 2012),
http://www.dmv.org/articles/ignoring-a-traffic-ticket-be-prepared-to-pay-the-consequences.
[xxi]. Saks, supra note 20.
[xxii]. Ellis & Hicken, supra note 17.
[xxiii]. See Utah
v. Strieff, No. 14-1373, slip op. at 1 (U.S. June 20, 2016).
[xxiv]. Lynn Langton & Matthew Durose, Police Behavior During Traffic and
Street Stops, 2011, U.S. Dep’t of Justice (Oct. 27, 2016),
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/pbtss11.pdf.
[xxv]. United
States v. Brignoni- Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 886–87 (1975); see
also Strieff, No. 14-1373, slip op. at 12 (Sotomayor, J.,
dissenting).
[xxvi]. See
also Strieff, No. 14-1373, slip op. at 12 (Sotomayor, J.,
dissenting).
[xxvii]. Id.
[xxviii]. Jazz Shaw, Returning to the 4th Amendment and Utah v. Strieff, HotAir (June
30, 2016, 9:21 AM),
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/06/30/returning-to-the-4th-amendment-and-utah-v-strieff/.
[xxix]. Id.
[xxx]. Christopher Mathias, NYPD Can’t Just Stop and Frisk People for the Hell
of it Anymore, Says Department Memo, Huffington Post (Mar. 3, 2015,
10:39 AM),
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/05/nypd-memo-stop-and-frisk-restriction_n_6807710.html.
[xxxi]. Nathan Robinson, The Shocking Finding From the DOJ’s Ferguson Report
That Nobody has Noticed, Huffington Post (March 13, 2015, 2:42
PM), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-robinson/the-shocking-finding-from-the-doj-ferguson_b_6858388.html.
[xxxii]. Sabrina Vourvoulias, What the SCOTUS Ruling on Police Searches Means
for Philadelphia, Philadelphia (June 22, 2016, 10:15 AM),
http://www.phillymag.com/news/2016/06/22/supreme-court-police-searches-utah-strieff; see also Strieff, No.
14-1373, slip op. at 12 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).
[xxxiii]. Vourvoulias, supra note 32.
[xxxiv]. See id.
[xxxv]. J. David Goodman & Al Baker, New York Police Department Is
Undercounting Street Stops, Report Says, N.Y. Times (July 09,
2015), http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/nyregion/some-new-york-police-street-stops-are-going-undocumented-report-says.html?_r=1.
[xxxvi]. Id.
[xxxvii]. See Strieff, No.
14-1373, slip op. at 12 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).
[xxxviii]. Id.
[xxxix]. Kerr, supra note 1.
[xxxx]. See
Strieff, No. 14-1373, slip op. at 12 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).
