The Fourth Amendment is a key constitutional protection for people who are being investigated for a crime. It has been part of the Constitution since the Bill of Rights was ratified on December 15, 1791. So why do so many of the key cases about it date from the 1960s?
The answer takes us from the American Revolution through the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil War and slavery, and a little-known legal concept called the Incorporation Doctrine.
The Bill of Rights and the Federal Government
After the American Revolution was won, the colonies joined together into a country, the United States of America. However, a big concern among the politicians of the time was how much power this newly centralized government would have. To appease those who were worried about the government becoming too powerful, the Bill of Rights was added to the U.S. Constitution.
The Bill of Rights includes the first ten amendments. However, possibly the most important phrase in the entire Bill are the first five words: “Congress shall make no law…”
This phrase is in the First Amendment. It reflects the original purpose of all ten amendments. They were written to limit the new federal government, not the states.
The Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment
Until after the Civil War, the Bill of Rights was known to only apply to the federal government, not to the state governments. Importantly for the Fourth Amendment, this meant that only the federal government was prohibited from conducting unreasonable searches and seizures. State governments were not prohibited from doing anything under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, though they could be blocked by their own state constitutions.
This all changed in the years following the Union’s victory in the Civil War. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, limiting what states had the power to do: “No State shall make or enforce any law which…”
The chief concern was that southern states would continue to discriminate against recently-freed slaves by passing separate laws for them. In an attempt to prevent this from happening, the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to intervene on their behalf and guarantee them “equal protection of the laws.”
The Incorporation Doctrine
The Fourteenth Amendment raised an important question: If the Bill of Rights guaranteed certain rights to people against the federal government, and the Fourteenth Amendment barred states from taking anyone’s “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” did that mean the states were also bound by the Bill of Rights?
Over time, the Supreme Court of the United States decided that the answer was mostly “yes.” Through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, it began applying most of the rights in the Bill of Rights to state governments, as well as the federal government.
Incorporation of the Fourth Amendment
The process of incorporating the Amendments to the states, however, did not happen all at once. The Supreme Court incorporated the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights one at a time through a long and arduous process.
In 1949, in Wolf v. Colorado, the Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment’s core protection applies to the states. But Wolf did not require state courts to throw out evidence from an illegal search. Without that rule, state defendants had little practical way to enforce the right.
That changed on June 19, 1961, in Mapp v. Ohio. Mapp held that evidence from an unconstitutional search cannot be used in state court. Most criminal cases are brought by the states. So after Mapp, motions to suppress evidence became common in state courts, and Fourth Amendment cases multiplied.
Older Fourth Amendment cases do exist. For example, in Weeks v. United States (1914), the Court barred the use of evidence that federal officers seized illegally. But those early cases involved federal officers, so there were far fewer of them.
Maine Criminal Defense Attorney William T. Bly
If you’ve been charged with a crime in Maine, call the law office of criminal defense attorney William T. Bly at (207) 571-8146 or contact him online for the legal representation you need.
