The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets requirements for issuing warrants: warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate, justified by probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that the exclusionary rule, which prevents a prosecutor from using evidence that was obtained by violating the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, applies to states as well as the federal government.
In the United States, the exclusionary rule is a legal rule, based on constitutional law, that prevents evidence collected or analyzed in violation of the defendant's constitutional rights from being used in a court of law. This may be considered an example of a prophylactic rule formulated by the judiciary in order to protect a constitutional right. The exclusionary rule may also, in some circumstances at least, be considered to follow directly from the constitutional language, such as the Fifth Amendment's command that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself" and that no person "shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law."
Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U.S. 25 (1949), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held 6—3 that, while the Fourth Amendment was applicable to the states, the exclusionary rule was not a necessary ingredient of the Fourth Amendment's right against warrantless and unreasonable searches and seizures. In Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383 (1914), the Court held that as a matter of judicial implication the exclusionary rule was enforceable in federal courts but not derived from the explicit requirements of the Fourth Amendment. The Wolf Court decided not to incorporate the exclusionary rule as part of the Fourteenth Amendment in large part because the states which had rejected the Weeks Doctrine had not left the right to privacy without other means of protection. However, because most of the states' rules proved to be ineffective in deterrence, the Court overruled Wolf in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961). That landmark case made history as the exclusionary rule enforceable against the states through the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the same extent that it applied against the federal government.
Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383 (1914) was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court unanimously held that the warrantless seizure of items from a private residence constitutes a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It also prevented local officers from securing evidence by means prohibited under the federal exclusionary rule and giving it to their federal colleagues. It was not until the case of Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961), that the exclusionary rule was deemed to apply to state courts as well.
California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35 (1988), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the warrantless search and seizure of garbage left for collection outside the curtilage of a home.
David Rice and Edward Poindexter were African-American activists charged and convicted of the murder of Omaha Police Officer Larry Minard. Minard died when a suitcase bomb containing dynamite exploded in a North Omaha home on August 17, 1970. Officer John Tess was also injured in the explosion. Poindexter and Rice had been members of the Black Panther Party.
United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court established the "good faith" exception to the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule.
Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U.S. 586 (2006), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a violation of the Fourth Amendment requirement that police officers knock, announce their presence, and wait a reasonable amount of time before entering a private residence does not require suppression of the evidence obtained in the ensuing search.
Arizona v. Evans, 514 U.S. 1 (1995), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court instituted an exclusionary rule exception allowing evidence obtained through a warrantless search to be valid when a police record erroneously indicates the existence of an outstanding warrant due to negligent conduct of a Clerk of Court.
Herring v. United States, 555 U.S. 135 (2009), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States on January 14, 2009. The court decided that the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule applies when a police officer makes an arrest based on an outstanding warrant in another jurisdiction, but the information regarding that warrant is later found to be incorrect because of a negligent error by that agency.
Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757 (1966), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court clarified the application of the Fourth Amendment's protection against warrantless searches and the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for searches that intrude into the human body. Until Schmerber, the Supreme Court had not yet clarified whether state police officers must procure a search warrant before taking blood samples from criminal suspects. Likewise, the Court had not yet clarified whether blood evidence taken against the wishes of a criminal suspect may be used against that suspect in the course of a criminal prosecution.
Cupp v. Murphy, 412 U.S. 291 (1973), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld a murder conviction notwithstanding a challenge that the evidence upon which guilt was based was obtained in violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The court held that in view of the station-house detention upon probable cause, the very limited intrusion of scraping the defendant's fingernails for blood and other material, undertaken to preserve highly evanescent evidence, did not violate the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.
United States v. Payner, 447 U.S. 727 (1980), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court reversed a district court's suppression of evidence in the criminal prosecution of an Ohio businessman charged with tax evasion. The case concerned both issues of criminal procedure and the application of the exclusionary rule derived from the Fourth Amendment. By a 6–3 margin the Court both reaffirmed its earlier rulings' holding that only the party whose Fourth Amendment protections may have been violated has standing to challenge the evidence seized in the search, and barred lower courts from exercising their supervisory power to exclude such evidence at the trial of third parties.
United States v. Janis, 428 U.S. 433 (1976), was a Supreme Court Case that found Max Janis and Morris Levine guilty of illegal bookmaking activities in Los Angeles in a 5-3 ruling. The two were arrested for the crime in November 1968. Appealing on the grounds of unconstitutionally seized evidence, Janis and Levine were heard by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1973. The case was ultimately heard by the Supreme Court in 1975, and the two were found guilty in 1976. More importantly, the case established that the exclusionary rule does not apply to civil cases where evidence is unconstitutionally seized by a state officer but used by a federal institution.
Elkins v. United States, 364 U.S. 206 (1960), was a US Supreme Court decision that held the "silver platter doctrine", which allowed federal prosecutors to use evidence illegally gathered by state police, to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Collins v. Virginia, No. 16-1027, 584 U.S. ___ (2018), was a case before the Supreme Court of the United States involving search and seizure. At issue was whether the Fourth Amendment's motor vehicle exception permits a police officer uninvited and without a warrant to enter private property, approach a house, and search a vehicle parked a few feet from the house that is otherwise visible from off the property. In an 8–1 judgment, the Supreme Court ruled that the automobile exception does not apply to vehicles parked within the home or the curtilage of a private homeowner.
Dollree Mapp was the appellant in the Supreme Court case Mapp v. Ohio (1961). She argued that her right to privacy in her home, the Fourth Amendment, was violated by police officers who entered her house with what she thought to be a fake search warrant. Mapp also argued that the Exclusionary Rule was violated due to the collection of the evidence that was found after the police had entered her house without a convincing search warrant according to Mapp's experience. In the Supreme Court case, Mapp v. Ohio, the decision was made in favor of Mapp, in a 6–3 ruling. As a result of the ruling in Mapp v. Ohio, Mapp's conviction was voided. A few years after Mapp v. Ohio was ruled upon, Mapp was convicted again, but this time for the possession of narcotics. After her prison sentence had ended, she began working "for a non-profit that provided legal assistance to inmates."
Kimmelman v. Morrison, 477 U.S. 365 (1986), was a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that clarified the relationship of the right to effective assistance of counsel under the Sixth Amendment to other constitutional rights in criminal procedure. In this case, evidence against the defendant was probably seized illegally, violating the Fourth Amendment, but he lost the chance to argue that point due to his lawyer's ineffectiveness. The prosecution argued that the defendant's attempt to make a Sixth Amendment argument via a habeas corpus petition was really a way to sneak his procedurally defaulted Fourth Amendment claim in through the back door. The Court unanimously disagreed, and held that the Fourth Amendment issue and the Sixth Amendment issue represented different constitutional values, and had different requirements for prevailing in court, and therefore were to be treated separately by rules of procedure. Therefore, the habeas corpus petition could go forward. In its opinion, the Court also gave guidance on how to apply its decisions in Stone v. Powell and Strickland v. Washington.
Kaufman v. United States, 394 U.S. 217 (1969), was a United States Supreme Court case decided in 1969. In a majority opinion authored by Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., the Court held that criminal defendants could bring claims that evidence against them was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution in a collateral attack under the federal habeas corpus statute. In doing so, the Court overruled the contrary decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which had held that Kaufman could not raise his Fourth Amendment claim in a collateral attack. The Supreme Court's decision in Kaufman also ran counter to most other previous decisions by federal appeals courts, most of which had held that claims of unreasonable searches and seizures could only be raised on direct appeal, rather than in collateral proceedings.
