The U.S. Supreme Court announced May 1 it will decide next year whether cops can detain people from entering their own homes while police get a search warrant. The case began in April 1997 when police held Charles McArthur outside his home in Sullivan, Illinois, for two hours after he told the cops they could not search his home without a warrant.

When one cop returned with a warrant, they conducted a search and allegedly found marijuana in the house. "A seizure is not necessarily unconstitutional for the period of time necessary to secure the warrant," asserted Illinois attorney general Colleen Griffin.

Last year the High Court ruled on six Fourth Amendment cases, four of them involving cops searching cars for drugs. Three out of the four court decisions advanced the rulers' efforts to expand the powers of the police to search and seize cars without judicial approval. The states involved in these rulings were Florida, Maryland, and Wyoming.

The highest court in Maryland ruled cops could not search an automobile without a warrant. In Florida, the state Supreme Court decided a car subject to forfeiture could not be seized from a parking lot without a warrant. And in Wyoming the high court there ruled that the cops could not obtain objects from a vehicle without judicial approval. U.S. Supreme Court reached in and overturned each one of those state court decisions.  
 
War on drugs spearheads assault
The rulers' so-called war on drugs has been the leading edge in the attack on Fourth Amendment rights. Much of their debate has focused on dumping the exclusionary rule adopted by the Supreme Court in 1914, which bars evidence obtained by cops without a search warrant from use in a trial. The rule places some limits on the cops' ability to burst into a person's home without a warrant and conduct searches under the rubric of searching for drugs.

In 1995 the House of Representatives by a 2-1 margin passed the Exclusionary Rule Reform Act. It was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which never acted on it. The measure would have codified legislation permitting prosecutors to use evidence that was illegally seized by cops without a search warrant.

That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed an Arizona Supreme Court ruling that threw out evidence seized by police after they had arrested someone as a result of a clerical error. The man had been arrested because the state's computer system showed an erroneous outstanding misdemeanor warrant. The cops then searched the man's car and allegedly found drugs. The Arizona court had ruled the exclusionary rule should apply in this case, stating that there should be no distinction between the police and court employees in this situation.

Abolishing the exclusionary rule would open the door to further trampling of Fourth Amendment rights. Safeguards against illegal cop searches would be virtually nonexistent. Working people would become more vulnerable to police assaults that end with tragic consequences like the 1995 cop killing of Scott Bryant in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.

Bryant was gunned down when sheriff's deputies burst into his trailer home while conducting a drug investigation. He was unarmed and offered no resistance.

In 1994 a police SWAT team in Boston broke down an elderly resident's apartment door, supposedly searching for drugs. The elderly man, who was tackled and handcuffed by the cops, suffered a heart attack during the "search" and died that afternoon.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home