Essay On Due Process Of Law

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American due process of law derived from provisions of England’s Magna Carta, clause 39 “no freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, no will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law the land (Magna Carta, 1215).” Due process of law was established and outlined in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The Fifth Amendment provides that the United States government “shall not shall deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” It is through the Fourteenth Amendment that the United States Supreme Court insured protected the basic liberties of state citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment has become a “foundation block of modern criminal procedure (Zalman, 2005).
In the 1940s and the 1950s, the United States Supreme Court came to the realization that the Constitution places limits on state proceedings. The United States Supreme Court had to determine what limits were defined by the Constitution and how to deal with them. Justices were divided on how to specify limits on states in regard to legal procedures. There were essentially two schools of thought, the fundamental fairness doctrine and the incorporation doctrine (Samaha, 2002).
Justice Felix Frankfurter was a proponent of the fundamental fairness doctrine (Rabkin, 2010). To understand why Justice Frankfurter supported the fundamental fairness doctrine one must know the understructure of the doctrine itself. One must also know Justice Frankfurter’s background which heavily influenced his dec...

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...Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165).
It is through Justice Black’s concurrence in the Rochin case, one can see the importance and necessity of the incorporation of the Bill of Rights to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment. Incorporation seems to be the only way to absolve some potential for influence of one’s own preferences and ideas about what is fair and decent. Justice Black in his dissent of Adamson v. California (1947) offered incorporation as a means to avoid arbitrary judicial decisions and further a reliance on the initial intent of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Incorporation became readily accepted and widely used during the 1960s, a time during which the Court incorporated a majority of criminal procedure rights in the Bill of Rights. This action required that states are to those rights as a guarantee to their citizens (Zalman, 2005).

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