When we were learning about the various school cases with students having issues feeling that their amendments were being broken. An interesting thing that I learned was that if your 4th amendment is violated and you can prove it in court, then whatever evidence was found during the violation of reasonable search and seizure cannot be used against you in your trial. My question is, is it right to not convict someone if the evidence is still there?
If an officer pulls over someone for a burnt headlight and they end up searching the car and find an ounce of cocaine, this evidence cannot be used against the person driving. Is this right because they are still in possession of drugs and have enough to distribute. I believe that they should not have the evidence used against them and this clause is good because it protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures. What do you think?
That's a good point. I agree with you to an extent, but in the first place why are the searching his car? Unless there's a reasonable cause to search him for drugs (for example, you think he is high), then yes, that evidence should be used for sure!
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ReplyDeleteAlright. Let's say the law allowed me to convict someone that has illegal substances/a dead body etc etc based on an unreasonable search. Imagine this scenario:
ReplyDeleteI'm a cop at a local police department, and let's imagine I've been lazy and I haven't met my quota for the month and it's already the 28th. Oh shoot, gotta go find someone to fine/put in jail. I then start to pull over every 100th car or so I see and ask to search their car without any reason. I do this to 5 people, and finally, one of them I find with a quarter ounce of pot. I can give them a fine and be completely justified, even though I had absolutely no reason to search this person's car, I still found something illegal.
This is obviously ridiculous, and even though this is highly unlikely to happen in real life, it COULD happen if we decide to set a precedent for convicting people based on evidence found in an unreasonable search. Searches should only be done with reasonable suspicion, and any evidence found using an unreasonable search should be disregarded, because, if we don't, the law could be susceptible to things like the hypothetical I posed.
(P.S: I deleted the comment above because of a typo lol)