The Exclusionary Rule

The Exclusionary rule requires that any evidence taken into custody be obtained by police using methods that violates an individual constitutional rights must be excluded from use in a criminal prosecution against that individual. This rule is judicially imposed and arose relatively recently in the development of the U.S. legal system. Under the common law, the seizure of evidence by illegal means did not affect its admission in court. Any evidence, however obtained, was admitted as long as it satisfied other evidentiary criteria for admissibility, such as relevance and trustworthiness. The exclusionary rule was developed in 1914 and applied to the case of Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383, and was limited to a prohibition on the use of evidence illegally obtain by federal law enforcement officers. Not until 1949, in the caw of Wolf v. Colorado, 38 U.S. 25, 27-28, did the U.S. Supreme Court take the first step toward applying the exclusionary rule to the states by ruling that the Fourth Amendment was applicable to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment which states: the security of one’s privacy against arbitrary intrusion by the police-which is at the core of the Fourth Amendment- is basic to a free society. It is therefore implicit in the “concept of ordered liberty” and as such enforceable against the States through the Due Process Clause.

However, wolf left the enforcement of Fourth Amendment right to the discretion of the individual states and did not specifically require application of the exclusionary rule. That mandate did not come until 1961, in the landmark decision of Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 655, in which the court said: since the Fourth Amendment’s right of privacy has been dec...

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...process someone decided to take the easy way out to obtain evidence, in the process hindering the prosecution of common criminals. Officers nowadays need to know the law in and out, to prevent criminals from getting away with crimes. It makes it more difficult from for the prosecution to do an effective job and bring criminals to justice. This makes an impact on victims because of evidence being thrown out of court makes it easier for criminals to get deals for less time that they actually deserve. In the present officers have to be very educated in order to performed at an acceptable level, for officers there are no excuses that a Judge can take about why the conducted an illegal search and seizure. Furthermore, it should be an incentive for officers to conduct searches according to law, since they can be criminally prosecuted because of a bad search and seizure.