Without the exclusionary rule the government would be free to violate the 4th amendment. Exclusionary rule protects citizens from evidence obtained illegally; any evidence obtained illegally cannot be used in a court of law. Evidence must be collected by abiding by the law and citizens’ rights, whether it be documents or any other incriminating evidence. In the following we will look at a brief historical overview of the development of the exclusionary rule, including its exceptions.
Early signs of the Exclusionary Rule are found in 1914 in Weeks v. United States. Weeks was convicted based upon evidence that was seized from his home on two warrantless searches; including evidence that had private papers that compelling in his case. The …show more content…
United States. Here we find federal authorities that had copied illegally obtained documents pertaining to tax evasion. Justice Holmes makes a bold statement, stating, “It reduces the Fourth Amendment to a form of words.” This statement is used later in other Supreme Court Justice decisions regarding the Fourth Amendment and is described as “fruits of the poisonous tree doctrine.” “Fruits of the poisonous tree doctrine” is a metaphor used to describe evidence that was collected illegally. The meaning is simply described as the “tree (source of evidence)” is tainted, therefore any “fruit (evidence)” collected is tainted as well. SO any evidence collected is inadmissible in court. The doctrine itself ensures that the Justice System remains honest in the collection of any evidence and abides the 4th amendment. An example of fruits of the poisonous tree would be any illegal arrest, search, or interrogation. Arrest cannot be made without probable cause. Searches cannot be performed without a search warrant. Interrogations cannot be performed without first giving the suspect their Miranda …show more content…
Colorado brings the exclusionary rule to the state level, prior to then “fruits of the poisonous tree doctrine,” had only been applicable to the federal level and not to state-level searches. The majority of civil liberties violations happen on the state level. The Supreme Court ruled that, “does not forbid the admission of evidence obtained by an unreasonable search and seizure” Justice Felix Frankfurter. It wasn’t until Mapp v. Ohio (1961), some twelve years later that the Supreme Court applied the exclusionary rule and “fruits of the poisonous tree doctrine” to the state level courts; thus making the basic principles of constitutional law. Justice Tom C. Clark expresses, “Since the Fourth Amendment's right of privacy has been declared enforceable against the States through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth, it is enforceable against them by the same sanction of exclusion as is used against the Federal Government. Were it otherwise, then, just as without the Weeks rule the assurance against unreasonable federal searches and seizures would be "a form of words," valueless and undeserving of mention in a perpetual charter of inestimable human liberties, so too, without that rule, the freedom from state invasions of privacy would be so ephemeral and so neatly severed from its conceptual nexus with the freedom from all brutish means of coercing evidence as not to merit this Court's high regard as a freedom "implicit in the concept of ordered