Criminal Justice of Us Supreme Court

The criminal justice cases of this week require the Court to venture into uncharted territories. In relation to last week and previous acts of judicial activism, the Court in dealing with criminal justice procedures sought to establish a uniform set of value that were believed to benefit all parts of society. This meant challenging state laws that would not have been touched before the 1960s. Yet the Warren Court was intent on expanding into every aspect of American society in order to enhance civil liberties and uphold a vast array of enumerated rights.

Mapp v. Ohio (1961) saw the Court uphold the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure and set the precedent for the exclusionary rule. The Court through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied a previously strictly federal regulation to individual states similarly as it did in last week’s civil liberties cases. This became a reoccurring trend subsequent criminal justice cases, although at times it require the Court to heavily interpret the meaning of the Constitution.

An example of this occurred in Katz v. US (1967) when the Court ruled in favour of the defendant’s right to privacy in a public place. Justice Stewart extended the Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable search and seizure in order to protect individuals not places. This emphasis along with Justice Harlan’s concurring opinion which set the ‘reasonable’ expectation test in regards to privacy shows how the Court was willing to bend the Constitution in order to establish vital rights not written in stone. This of course was met with opposition. Justice Harlan in his dissent points out that the Fourth Amendment only protects ‘places and things’ from unreasonable search and seizure and personal privacy was nowhere described. As in last week’s cases, this shows how problematic constitutional interpretation can be, especially when dealing with a case where the defendant would actually be convicted of a crime if a warrant was in place.

The right to privacy is also a reoccurring subject matter in this week’s cases. Terry v Ohio (1968) dealt with an out of uniform officer who stopped and searched Katz and his friends out of suspicion the group were about to commit a crime. This case differed from the other cases this week since the Court ruled in favour for the officer and not the defendant. The majority opinion authored by Chief Justice Warren found that the officer did not act on mere suspicion, but that he went through the same process mentally as a court would when deciding whether of not to issue a warrant. This was interesting since the Court attributed police forces the power to seek out potential threats to public and personal safety, which greatly expanded police powers. Justice Douglas points this out in his dissent and attributes this to a step towards totalitarianism, which might be “desirable to cope with modern forms of lawlessness”. This refers to the race riots of the late 1960s, which were the result of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the Black Power movements that were met with white opposition.