Essay/Term paper: Legal police searches

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Sociology Essays

The laws of the United States can be hard to understand sometimes. The Fourth Amendment states that people have a right not to be searched without a reasonable warrant and that people have a right to feel secure in their homes. There are acts giving police permission to do what ever they need to to keep drunks off the streets. There are also rules and regulations, kind of like a sports game, and, just like games, there are always ways to get around these rules. Like finding it legal to randomly stop cars to give people breathalyzer tests, or entering people's homes and searching for things without a warrant. Unlike a game however, the results of going around these rules can sometimes be devastating. Police may ruin a home trying to find drugs or some other illegal thing. Where do we draw the line? What does the Constitution allow us to do? In today's world, 25,000 people per year die because of alcohol. One of those people happened to be a son of Marion Stokes. After that incident, Marion Stokes created MADD, or Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She is strongly against driving under the influence and believes it is an excellent idea to randomly stop cars to administer breathalyzer tests. The question still remains, does randomly stopping cars brake the laws of the Constitution? Should we let this happen? The Fourth Amendment does protect people from being violated without a warrant. However, the Primary Act gives permission to the police to do what they need to get more drunk drivers off the streets. Most people would agree that randomly stopping cars to test for drunk drivers falls in that category. For that reason, I believe police should have the right to stop cars for the testing. I don't think that people should get mad at the government if they pass the law because it is there to help them. If the people getting stopped aren't drunk, well, what's the problem? Why do they need to get mad? They aren't the ones getting arrested. Police are here to see that common people follow the laws. One day, not too long ago, police came into Dollree Map's house without a search warrant and trashed it, looking for a bomb suspect. Finding nothing to that affect, the police realized they had the wrong house, but during their search for the suspect, they found some "obscene material." They arrested Map because of that. Map went to court and appealed. In the end, justice had been served because the "material" the police obtained was illegally obtained, making the case end. The rule that saved Map was the Exclusionary Rule stating that anything police find that does not have anything to do with what the search warrant says has to be excluded from the case. The question here is should people allow police to go into their homes and search for whatever they want without a warrant? The answer is no. First of all, when the police do come to a house, they don't just politely knock and wait for somebody to answer. They break down the door and make a mess of the house. If people are innocent, why should they have to get their door knocked down and their house messed up? If police did find anything, they couldn't use it anyway because of the Exclusionary Rule. The Fourth Amendment states that people have a right not to be searched unless there is a search warrant describing what they are being searched for. Who gives people the right to break the laws and amendments we've had for years?