The Fourth Amendment was written as a response to the conduct of a tyrannical king?

I agree with the statement “The Fourth Amendment was written as a response to the conduct of a tyrannical king. The late Justice Black later said that the Fourth Amendment exists to make the job of the police difficult. Of course, he advanced that opinion before we had become embroiled in the war on drugs. Now that we are so embroiled, we should be grateful that the Supreme Court increasingly over the last two decades has come to apply a common sense approach to interpreting the Fourth Amendment, including the ‘exclusionary rule’ that accompanies the amendment.” Today’s is a different day then was the case in yesteryears, today we fight a different war that requires our legal format to adjust accordingly. While Justice Black’s strict constructionist ideals may have served justice in his times, today we require a ‘living constitution’ that adjusts to the current times. Using the common sense approach coupled with the exclusionary rule is the most justifiable and efficient means of fighting today’s war on drugs. The common sense addition to the Fourth Amendment gives police the power to fight on this new frontier yet still protects the rights of citizens with the supplementation of the exclusionary rule. The purpose of the Fourth Amendment additions is intended to deliberate the attainment of evidence through a neutral and removed means instead of relying on individual judgments by officers who are employed by their aptitude to find and sniff out crime. The common sense approach and exclusionary rule, in tandem, forces courts to achieve equilibrium between civilian rights under the Fourth Amendment and interests held by the state, the ends must justify the means by which evidence is acquired.

The exclusionary rule coupled with the common sense approach works to expand upon Fourth Amendment rights by creating a system by which the law can more precisely determine reasonable from unreasonable searches and seizures. This tandem application serves as a regulatory median by which the authority of law enforcement is balanced out equally by civil rights under the Fourth Amendment. In Wyoming v. Houghton, the use of common sense was applied and a new precedent was established, allowing police the power to search for contraband in places where previous law prohibited such searches. The application of common sense by the Supreme Court of Wyoming brought rise to the a standard that police couldn’t search through personal property unless someone had the possibility of concealing contraband within it. This precedent expanded the extent to which law enforcement could legal search.

In other cases we see how the exclusionary rule works to preserve the rights of citizens such as in Illinois V. Caballes. In this case, the Supreme Court of Illinois found Caballes’s routine traffic violation, which escalated into a drug seizure investigation, to be in violation of the exclusionary rule. The case was reversed on the basis that there was no reasonable suspicion to justify the use of a drug sniffing-dog in an otherwise routine traffic stop. Had the case not been overturned, Caballes would have served 12 years in federal prison along with the establishment of a new legal precedent permitting law enforcement to conduct searches without proof of reasonable suspicion. I believe that the Supreme Court interpreted and decided this case appropriately, even though one could argue from the common sense perspective, the truth of the matter is the rights of Caballes were violated. The ends did not justify the means.

In both of the cases discussed above, the courts had to balance the defendant’s rights with the interests of the state. The very creation of the Fourth Amendment came from an issue involving an imbalance of legal power. “The Fourth Amendment was written as a response to the conduct of a tyrannical king.” I believe, in order to create a perfect union, the legal power relationship between the people and the state must be in equilibrium. We have reviewed a case where the exclusionary rule helped in the preservation of citizen’s rights while also reviewing a case where the common sense approach actually made the jobs of police officers easier by expanding the extent of their searching capabilities. In my opinion, the common sense approach and exclusionary rule gives us a fluid Fourth Amendment by which the dichotomy of legal power between citizens and states can be rebalanced to compensate for changing times through the establishment of new search and seizure precedents.