Fourth Amendment - Research Paper Example

The enactment of the fourth amendment guarantees to every citizen “the security of privacy against arbitrary intrusion by the police” (Levy 1995, p.164) In the case of Wolf v. Colorado, the Supreme Court recognized that “fourth amendment rights are basic to a free society and are therefore, implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” (Article 1, § 7 of the Tennessee Constitution) It is thus evident that the fourth amendment is also enforceable against the states through the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment that also secures the rights of an individual to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

The are various interpretations of the clauses contained in the fourth amendment, but’ reasonableness’ tends to be the defining factor in the legitimacy of a search or seizure conducted by government and law enforcement officers. There are some considerations associated with the reasonable expectation of privacy, although there is no bright line rule indicating situations in which an expectation of privacy is reasonable under the constitution of the United States. The Supreme Court has ruled that an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in any goods or property that is located inside the home of such an individual.

There is also reasonable expectation of privacy in any conversations taking place in an enclosed phone booth. On the other hand, reasonable expectation of privacy is not feasible in activities that are conducted outdoors, in open fields or in a situation where a person has entered the house of another person without the house owner’s consent, with the intent of committing crime. A person using a computer also does not have a legitimate expectation of privacy related to information from email addresses, total volume of the users traffic or the IP address of websites the user may have visited.

This is because the supreme court has long held that “an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in such information, which already has been exposed to a telecommunications carrier for the purpose of routing a communication (Lasson, 1937, p. 106), although a computer user generally has legitimate expectation of privacy with respect to the contents of email messages while they are still in transmission over the internet A relevant case law involving reasonable expectation of privacy is United States v.

Maxwell, 45 M.J. 406, 418 U.S. Armed Forces Ct. App. 1996 in which the court addressed the issue of email privacy “the sender of an e-mail generally enjoys a reasonable expectation that police officials will not intercept the transmission without probable cause and a search warrant. Users do have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the content of their text messages vis-a-vis the service provider.” (Devenpeck v. Alford, 2004) Probable cause is the situation or event that may prompt a law enforcement officer to take certain actions.

In the case Terry v. Ohio 392 U.S. 1 (1986) the supreme court ruled that in a situation in which a law enforcement officer witnesses unusual behavior that leads the officer to reasonably believe that crime is being committed or that the suspected persons pose a threat to the officer or to other people, then the officer may frisk or search such a suspect to ascertain whether the suspect is carrying a weapon. In order to conduct such a frisk, the officer must be able to