Word: warrantless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...suspect's own property. The Burger court, by a 6-to-3 vote, found that the same principle applied in two cases from Maine and Kentucky, though the crops of marijuana confiscated as evidence were in fenced-off areas posted with no-trespassing signs. In upholding the warrantless searches, Justice Lewis Powell found that the landowners had "no reasonable expectation of privacy" because "open fields do not provide the setting for those intimate activities that the amendment is intended to shelter from Government interference or surveillance...
School officials also rationalize warrantless searches with the demands for discipline in the classroom. Certainly schools can't function well with satanic sacrifices in every hallway and a not in every classroom. But it's quite hard to see how the mere presence of a few reefers in a girl's purse or some speed in a a closed locker will prevent old Mr. Walker from waxing eloquent about "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner...
...Prohibition. Two bootleggers were stopped in their car by federal agents, who ripped out the rumble-seat upholstery and found 68 bottles of gin and whisky. The officers had obtained no warrant allowing the search, but in a 1925 decision, the Supreme Court declared that because cars were mobile, warrantless searches were legal if police had probable cause to believe that contraband was in the vehicle. Ever since, court majorities have been swerving from side to side, trying to define the extent of that exception to the Fourth Amendment's search and seizure rules. In the process, the court...
...majority in the case was fractionated, and the author of the prevailing opinion, Potter Stewart, has since retired. Now a new majority, including his replacement, Sandra Day O'Connor, has decided that the Justices erred last July. Since a warrantless auto search (with probable cause) is as legal as a regular search with a warrant, then the same guidelines apply, reasoned Justice John Paul Stevens in last week's decision. "When a legitimate search is under way, and when its purpose and its limits have been precisely defined, nice distinctions between . . . glove compartments, upholstered seats, trunks and wrapped...
Stevens noted, however, that limits do remain; for example, "probable cause to believe that undocumented aliens are being transported in a van will not justify a warrantless search of a suitcase." Unless, perhaps, it is a very large suitcase...