Fourth Amendment

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated... " - Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Just in case you forgot. There has been, after all, an appalling amount of forgetting where that amendment is concerned. And New York City has become the epicenter of the amnesia. Yes, the "stop and frisk" policy of questioning and searching people a cop finds suspicious is used elsewhere as well.

I found Dan Rodricks ' commentary regarding DNA testing and the recent Maryland Court of Appeals ruling ("DNA: Why wait for an arrest?" May 3) to be quite interesting. He states at the end that he can't think of a good argument against his position that we should all give DNA samples to the authorities whether we have been accused of a crime or not. Well, Dan, I've also thought about how useful having a large repository of DNA can be. Unsolved crime and a city mayor on your back?

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. The storms may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of England cannot enter. All his forces dare not cross the threshold. -- William Pitt in the House of Commons, 1760.Noble words, but in America at that time, the above sentiment was often honored in the breach. It was, in fact, the English practice of ignoring the sanctity of colonists' living quarters that helped bring on the Revolution. Citizens were compelled to provide English troops free room and board in their cottages on occasion.

Police around Maryland said Wednesday that they would continue to collect DNA samples when suspects are arrested for violent crimes and burglaries, despite a recent ruling by the state's top court limiting the practice. Several law enforcement agencies, including the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, were awaiting a decision on whether the state will appeal before they make changes. Gov. Martin O'Malley, Baltimore's mayor and a chorus of state and local officials called for an appeal of what they see as a crucial tool that has linked suspects to other, unsolved crimes.

In a move that should be getting more notice this week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has thrown down the gauntlet over the renewal of the Patriot Act, provisions of which would expire Friday if not extended.  Paul has offered several "controversial" amendments to the bill, and could single-handedly cause the Patriot Act to lapse for a day, The Hill reported today .  What are these so-called "controversial" changes to the post-9/11 act...

SINCE THE END of the Earl Warren Supreme Court in 1969, the court has continuously and substantially watered down Fourth Amendment protections against police action. It has done so principally by sanctioning an ever-increasing array of warrantless searches and by creating exception after exception to the rule requiring that evidence obtained as a result of an unconstitutional search be excluded at trial. The Supreme Court decisional law is riddled with so many exceptions to the warrant requirement that we have reached the point where warrantless searches are the norm.

ON Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court again chopped a hunk out of what remains of the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures. A 6-3 majority ruled that a short-term visitor to a home or apartment doesn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy -- meaning, of course, that neither does the homeowner or renter.A police officer was told by an informant that two men were measuring drugs in a garden apartment. The officer managed to get a peek in the window through a gap in the blinds, saw what he believed to be two men bagging cocaine, left and came back with a warrant to search the premises.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court told police yesterday to get a court order before they help private landlords evict unwanted tenants or aid retail stores and auto dealers in repossessing property when payments aren't made.In a unanimous ruling, the court said that the Constitution's Fourth Amendment, which bars police from using "unreasonable" methods of seizing property, applies fully when police lend a hand to landlords and merchants retrieving property.The court ordered a lower federal court to decide whether police in a Chicago suburb, Elk Grove, Ill., had gone too far when they joined a mobile-home landlord in uprooting a trailer and carting it off because back rent was due.Without waiting for an eviction order from a court, the landlord at Willoway Terrace called in police and, as they stood by, had the trailer pulled free of its moorings and towed into the street.

The legal dueling at the O.J. Simpson hearing this week has focused on whether certain evidence against him could be suppressed under the "exclusionary rule." That rule says evidence gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment ("search and seizure") can be excluded from a trial. Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell's ruling yesterday that the evidence can be used could determine whether Mr. Simpson goes to trial. A similar ruling at a trial would almost surely be the subject of appeals.This is fueling public debate about the wisdom of the exclusionary rule.

WASHINGTON -- Echoing decades of American legal argument, yesterday's lengthy Senate debate focused ultimately on a single idea -- privacy. But it was new and novel, too: The privacy being talked about involved the secrets told by Sen. Bob Packwood to his diary.The battle on the Senate floor may be a prelude to a legal fight at the Supreme Court -- the ultimate arbiter of what is private under the Constitution.The Senate clearly expects a court fight if it decides to ask a judge to order Mr. Packwood to hand over more of his diary than he has been willing to do so far.One basic claim would turn on the uncertain concept of privacy under the Constitution's Fourth Amendment guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures."

In George Orwell's novel "1984," the unblinking eye of government surveillance is omnipresent and inescapable. Orwell could not have known what technology would one day make his nightmare scenario possible, but he could foresee that whatever it was, the government would misuse it. This week, the Supreme Court agreed. In a case that for the first time sought to put limits on the government's growing use of digital technology to monitor Americans, the justices came down firmly on the side of privacy.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated... " - Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Just in case you forgot. There has been, after all, an appalling amount of forgetting where that amendment is concerned. And New York City has become the epicenter of the amnesia. Yes, the "stop and frisk" policy of questioning and searching people a cop finds suspicious is used elsewhere as well.

In a move that should be getting more notice this week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has thrown down the gauntlet over the renewal of the Patriot Act, provisions of which would expire Friday if not extended.  Paul has offered several "controversial" amendments to the bill, and could single-handedly cause the Patriot Act to lapse for a day, The Hill reported today .  What are these so-called "controversial" changes to the post-9/11 act...

Judge Charles E. Moylan Jr. is well-known for introducing literary references and colorful prose to liven the opinions he writes for Maryland's second-highest court. But he might have outdone himself this month on what could have been a dry, routine drug case out of Cecil County. He put in chapters: "There is nothing wrong with investigative opportunism." "The shelf life of a traffic stop." "An incredible journey." He wrote about Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, the right of a police dog to sniff, and he even included a section partly written in German - "Bleiben sie, bitte, mein hund!"

State of Maryland v. Davon Temple." With those words from the court clerk, the defendant hobbled on crutches to the front of the courtroom. His lawyer, John Deros, was by his side. Temple was charged with a seemingly harmless offense: trespassing on school property. The school was Walbrook Uniform Services Academy. The alleged offense occurred on Oct. 11 of this year. Assistant State's Attorney Rachel Linhard said that a school police officer hadn't received a summons to testify in the case.

In a rare demonstration of bipartisan cooperation, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi together criticized the FBI's search of the office of Rep. William J. Jefferson, the Louisiana Democrat who is under investigation in connection with the alleged acceptance of bribes. How heartwarming it is that two people who seem to agree on little that can benefit the country have come together to defend the right of their colleagues to have some sort of special immunity from search warrants issued to uncover crimes committed by legislators.

The "enforcement action" -- Attorney General Janet Reno's phrase for the raid on a Little Havana home to retrieve Elian Gonzalez -- was a display of the federal government's sometimes awesome power to act as policeman. That power may be greatest in enforcing immigration law. Forcing entry to a home would raise serious constitutional issues in normal police activity. But government officials were convinced that making that kind of action in an immigration case was within their constitutional authority.

Hunter Thompson arrived less than an hour late for his first show last night at Max's on Broadway -- which was better than a lot of people expected.He tripped on stage, clumsily rearranged the rudimentary set, demanded a fan to stir up the close air and knocked the microphone into the ice bucket holding the Chivas Regal.After twirling a red umbrella over his head for a few minutes, he poured himself a tumbler of scotch, alternated sips with puffs on ever-present cigarettes and rifled through a Bible looking for the appropriate passage to read about Armageddon.

The authorization of domestic spying without warrants amounts to nothing less than a surrender of our civil liberty, the precise thing that guarantees our freedom and makes us so different from those enemies of freedom from whom the Bush administration is so determined to protect us. Expanding the power of federal agents to pry into private lives suggests that we have already surrendered in the war on terror. If we willingly sacrifice the privacy, civil liberties and individual rights that are the heart of our Constitution, have we not handed victory to the terrorists?

THE BALTIMORE housing department has a new tool to find homeowners who have been building rooftop decks without a permit: aerial mapping. Baltimore bought aerial photographs of the entire city and used software to correlate the images with databases of address information and permit records. Inspectors have just begun knocking on doors of residents who built decks without permission. On the face of it, this is nothing new. Police always have been able to inspect buildings for permit violations.