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Show w Tht r November 11, 1976 The Utah Independent Page 3 Thai Dam To Taka A Stand PRIVACY-FREED- OM I OUTLOOK READERS FROM SEARCH & SEIZURE Continued from page 2 BUGGED DART, FIRED FROM RIFLE, WILL TRANS- MIT CONVERSATIONS. Sophisticated Easvesdropping Devices Pose New Threat To Right of Privacy. Procedure sometimes seems and dull; - one often hears procedural rules dismissed carelessly as mere legal technicalities. Yet Justice Frankfurter did not exaggerate in saying thet the history of liberty has largely been the history of observance of procedural safeguards. Thus far we have looked at the development of three guarantees great of substantive the First Amendment freedom to speak, to publish, to join hands for the advancement of common interests. The balance of the Bill of Rights, especially Amendments IV, V, and VI, is concerned largely with procedural rights of Americans, that is, with the ways in which government must behave in relation to its citizens. This article will deal with one of the most complex of these limitations on governmental the It Fourth Amendment.. power, guarantees the right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. It promises that no search warrants can be issued except upon probably cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. Nothing is more important to freedom or to the exercise of other rights assured by the Constitution than to be secure against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and against random invasion of ones privacy by nosy, power-hungr- y agents Bill Drexkr, JD. for Stenographic notes of these conversations were used to convict Did this the bootleggers. constitute an unreasonable search? The Court, dividing five to The (Fourth) four, said No. Amendment, Chief Justice Taft wrote for the majority, does not forbid what was'done here. There was no searching. There was no seizure. The evidence was secured by the sense of hearing and that only. There was no entry of the houses or offices of the defendants. In short, since there was no trespass on the defendants' premises, there was no Fourth Amendment violation. I an impassioned dissent, PATRIOT NEWS been erratic. Longstanding common law tradition held that courts should ignore police practices in obtaining evidence so long as the police did not resort to physical coercion and so long as the evidence presented was competent and relevant. In a landmark case decided in 1914, however, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that in federal trials it would no longer accept evidence obtained through violation of the Constitution. The case (Weeks v. United States) involved the seizure of some papers in plain violation of the Fourth Amendment. If letters and private documents can thus be seized and held and used in evidence against a citizen accused of an offense the court declared, then the citizens right to be secure against such searches and seizures is of no value and so far as those thus placed are concerned, might as well be stricken from the Constitution. Note that was in a federal trial. As late as 1949 (in Wolfe v. Colorado) the court ruled that the admission in state trials of evidence obtained by an unreasonable search and seizure was not in violation of the ratification of the "The . ng makers he Constitution, 1776 Americans declared their independence from government over them. It was far more than just a rebellion against the British. Those Americans were not nor were they anti-King Empire but they were George who was the government over them. After Americans won independence from the government over them they were in no rush to have a new government, and when they did establish a government it was not a government over them. It was a government under them and under their control, with the Bill of Rights to insure that their government would not impose itself over them, and it was a Republic and not a Democracy or Mobocracy. But in the 20th century the forces of Democracy overthrew The Republic, and since then the love of country has cooled and patriotism has diminished. And now Americans are turning anti -- Congress, anti-Cou- rt for now as in the days of King George we have government over us. Again government is imposing its will upon the people, taking away the peoples earnings and making the people dependent upon government, increasingly of the people. But now the limiting the freedoms-of-choic- e people are not seeking independence from government over them, but instead are seeking more dependence upon the government over them to support them. It will yet be said as 1776 independence from government over us brought up the United States of America, :nd it was 1976 dependence upon government over us that brought down America. Kesner Kahn anti-Britis- h, anti-Briti- it, intrusion by the of the Fourth Amendment. It took almost 40 years for the court to come round to endorsing Brandeis dissenting view. In the course of those years, electronic eavesdropping devices had become far more sophisticated and federal pervasive. Readers comments and questions are welcome. Please write us at " The American Way Features , P.O. Box 990, Pigeon Forge, Tennessee 37863. Complicated surveillance systems were being used indiscriminately by the government to detect political dissension as well as criminal con- -- The assumptions lying duct. behind the 1928 decision had been outflanked by technological developments. Intrusions upon privacy had become a menace to liberty a menace to the exercise of the very rights of free speech and free association guaranteed by the First Amendment. Freedom of communication between free citizens is the very essence of the democratic process. In 1967, therefore, the Court abandoned the trespass doctrine enunciated by Chief Justice Taft and declared instead that the Fourth Amendment protects people and not simply areas against unreasonable searches and seizures. Today wiretapping or bugging of private conversations is unconstitutional unless authorized and its limits defined in advance by a competent judicial authority. In 1968 Congress adopted legislation authorizing such electronic The only man to me who is not respectful is the man who consumes more than he produces. -- Elbert Hubbard ! l D Independent 57 Salt Lake City , Utah 84115 Oakland Avenue 25$ each older than 2 months ,50 for $9.00 ! Subscriptions: USA $10.00 per year Foreign $15.00 per year 100 for $17.50 The UTAH INDEPENDENT 1 (Last) (Middle) Address (Number And Street) 3 l 25 for $5.00 i i i (First) i 12 for $2.75 12 for $1.00 Name I Subscription Weekly Fastest-Growin- g Assorted copies these are the identifying powerless. The Utahs Largest and searches. Law enforcement, of course, would be easier, and perhaps more efficient, if the police could arrest and interrogate suspects at will or if police could eavesdrop or conduct surprise searches wherever they supposed a crime was being plotted or contraband concealed. But characteristics of a police state. Where governments have such unregulated power, citizens are sh anti-governme- Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation so-call- ed In D. undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness .... They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unju- stifiable Many pages could be written on the infamy of this peace organization - the peace - of our put America! organization that has proved itself time after time to be an instrument for war! But let us conclude by merely saying: Get US out of the United Nations, and get the United and population 110,000); Seychelles (109 square miles, Nations out of the United States. population 56,000). Why, little Sincerely, Rhode Island has a larger area than these five UN member-nation- s Dorothy Walden Desert Hot Springs, Ca.92240 combined, and almost double their with a vote And each population! 1776 INDEPENDENCE 1976 DEPENDENCE unwarranted intrusion but also to safeguard a right of privacy essential to the ideas of human dignity and political liberty. federal were Constitution no mere theorists. They were all too familiar with random searches and arbitrary arrests conducted under the authority of writs of assistance and general warrants by King George Ills redcoats. Indeed, these were among the chief grievances that led to the American rebellion. The idea that a mans home was his castle that, however humble it might be, the king's men could not enter it without a proper warrant was already firmly established in England. The colonists felt that they were entitled to the same right of privacy. Privacy is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution under that term. At best it is an elusive and elastic concept, and just what degree of it the authors of the Constitution to assure has sparked much argument. A great debate on the subject grew out of a landmark case (Olmstead v. United States) that came before the Supreme Court in 1928 the first case testing whether the tapping of a telephone an constituted unreasonable search in the sense forbidden by the Fourth Amendment. A gang of bootleggers had been selling liquor into the State of smuggled Washington in clear violation of the Volstead Act. Over a period of many months, federal prohibition agents tapped telephones in the' homes and offices of the bootleggers and listened to them take orders for liquor and direct their far-fluenterprises. Louis equal to that of the United States of Sao Tome and Principe . (372 square miles, population 66,000); Maldives (115 square miles, Brandeis pleaded for a broader, more imaginative interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. It was designed he argued, not merely to protect private premises against Constitution. Not until 1961 did the Court change its mind, as it does from time to time, and decide (in Mapp v. Ohio) that all evidence obtained by searches and in violation of the seizures Constitution is, by that same authority, inadmissible in a state court. The men who wrote the Fourth Amendment the gist of which had already been embodied of in a number of state constitutions preceding the government. The Fourth Amendment, we should remember, forbids only searches and unreasonable is seizures. Reasonableness a disputed term but over the years the courts have defined its main characteristics. First, a search, to be reasonable, must have probably cause something more than the searchers mere guesswork or suspicion to justify it. In short, there must be information, sworn to by some responsible person, sufficient to justify a reasonable man in believing that stolen property or the instruments of a crime or certain kinds of evidence may be found by an authorized search. Second, to be reasonable, a must be approved in ad, search vance (with rare exceptions) by a neutral judge. And, third, to be reasonable, a search must be specific in regard to the place to be searched and the object to be sought. Rummaging and ransacking premises on fishing expeditions are not reasonable. The rules regarding arrest are a little looser. Arrests may be made without getting an arrest warrant in advance but only when the police have probable cause to charge someone with a particular crime. Then they must take the arrested person without unnecessary delay before a magistrate to determine the validity of the arrest. The Constitution, in brief, allows policemen to arrest but delegates to judicial authorities the decision to detain. The development of the law governing search and seizure has Justice however. fellow UN members, each with a similar single vote, are the following tiny dots on the map: Grenada (133 square miles, population 105,000); Bahrain (231 square miles, population 207,000); (SuW) I2P Code) D I |