The fourth amendment

How the Fourth Amendment Applies to Police Searches

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The fourth amendment affirms people’s right to be secure in their houses, papers, in persons, and effects against searches and seizures that are unreasonable. The fourth amendment points to regulations about how the police should go about interrogation, investigation, and arrest. Since prosecution mainly relied on the available information, most times, the information is available to police officers, but at times they have to work hard to assemble the necessary evidence required to secure a conviction. At times, suspects may destroy evidence, altering it, or even hiding in a bid to escape detection and arrest. When carrying out the search, the police are required to act reasonably, and the courts draw line on the concept of unreasonable searches.

The trespass doctrine is one of the issues of concern when policies are carrying about searches. According to the law, the search needs physical intrusion in constitutionally protected areas, for instance, houses, searching people, and looking through papers. Searching these areas should meet the requirements of the fourth amendment for it to be reasonable. Asking for handwriting samples is not protected by the fourth amendment hence it is not considered physically intrusive. Additionally, the police have no right to demand for bodily fluids as its searches for evidence. Moreover, in line with the privacy doctrine, people are protected from intrusion by the police whenever their privacy expectations are deemed reasonable. Police are only given latitude when executing their mandate on citizens within public spaces. The other concern is police officers’ lawful right to use their senses, including hearing, sight, smell, and touch, to detect unlawful action. According to the plain-view doctrine, such detection of evidence does not constitute a search as police are not searching but are merely using their senses to make observations about their surroundings. As such, the fourth amendment does not protect such gathering of evidence since no search took place. The recognized criteria maintains that the item must be in the officer’s plains view. The officer should be lawfully in the place they discover the evidence and the incriminating nature of the evidence must be immediately apparent.