A hunt by law enforcement officials for property or communications believed to be evidence of crime, and the act of taking possession of this property.
In INTERNATIONAL LAW, the right of ships of war, as regulated by treaties, to examine a merchant vessel during war in order to determine whether the ship or its cargo is liable to seizure.
Under England's rule, many searches were unlimited in scope and conducted without justification. Customs officials could enter the homes of colonists at will to search for violations of customs and trade laws, and suspicionless searches were carried out against outspoken political activists. Searches in the colonies came to represent governmental oppression. …
Law enforcement officers are entrusted with the power to conduct investigations, make arrests, perform searches and seizures of persons and their belongings, and occasionally use lethal force in the line of duty. But this power must be exercised within the boundaries of the law, and when police officers exceed those boundaries they jeopardize the admissibility of any evidence collected for prosecu…
Individuals ordinarily possess no reasonable expectation of privacy in things like bank records, vehicle location and vehicle paint, garbage left at roadside for collection, handwriting, the smell of luggage, land visible from a public place, and other places and things visible in plain or open view. Houseguests typically do not possess a reasonable expectation of privacy in the homes they are vis…
Once it has been established that an individual possesses a reasonable expectation of privacy in a place to be searched or a thing to be seized, the Fourth Amendment's protections take hold, and the question then becomes what are the nature of those protections. Police officers need no justification to stop someone on a public street and ask questions, and individuals are completely entitle…
Under the Fourth Amendment, a seizure refers to the collection of evidence by law enforcement officials and to the arrest of persons. An arrest occurs when a police officer takes a person against his or her will for questioning or criminal prosecution. The general rule is that to make an arrest, the police must obtain an arrest warrant. However, if an officer has probable cause to believe that a c…
Administrative agencies may conduct warrantless searches of highly regulated industries, such as strip mining and food service. Federal and state statutes authorize warrantless, random drug testing of persons in sensitive positions, such as air traffic controllers, drug interdiction officers, railroad employees, and customs officials. In each of these types of searches, the Supreme Court has ruled…
For the entire nineteenth century, a Fourth Amendment violation had little consequence. Evidence seized by law enforcement from a warrantless or otherwise unreasonable search was admissible at trial if the judge found it reliable. This made the Fourth Amendment essentially meaningless to criminal defendants. But in 1914, the U.S. Supreme Court devised a way to enforce the Fourth Amendment. In Week…
The Wisconsin Supreme Court concluded that police officers are never required to knock and announce their presence when executing a search warrant in a felony drug investigation. But the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the state high court's decision in Richards v. Wisconsin, 520 U.S. 385, 117 S.Ct. 1416, 137 L.Ed.2d 615 (U.S. 1997). In Richards the Court said Fourth Amendment does not permit…
A public school student's protection against unreasonable search and seizure is less stringent in school than in the world at large. In New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325, 105 S.Ct. 733, 83 L.Ed.2d 720 (U.S. 1985), the U.S. Supreme Court held that a school principal could search a student's purse without probable cause or a warrant. Considering the "legitimate need to maintain…
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