Electronic Searches

New technologies complicate searches and seizures. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment did not simply restrict physical entry: it “protects people, not places.”^[6] The pivotal test is whether a person has “a legitimate expectation of privacy” regardless of the technological means used to search. Thus the Court has held that the use of heat-sensing devices able to find intensive marijuana farms inside closets requires a search warrant as much as would a physical entry to one’s house.^[7]

New technologies can also intrude into formerly private domains hitherto free from the potentially prying eye of government. For example, e-mail passes through many portals en route to delivery, each of which may be available for search without the sender’s or receiver’s knowledge. E-mail and web searches are still available in shadowy form even after the hard drive has seemingly been erased, and they can be searched for key words or other patterns efficiently. Police and prosecutors now have new weapons at their disposal in tracking down possible criminal activity.

The massive computerization of information tempts the government even more. In May 2004, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on data mining. It documented 52 federal agencies conducting 122 projects to collect, analyze, and use identifiable information on US persons for national security and law enforcement purposes. These numbers, which omit classified projects, are probably low-ball estimates.

Electronic Eavesdropping

In 2006, newspapers leaked word of a secret executive order signed by President George W. Bush authorizing electronic eavesdropping on computerized and cell phone conversation without a warrant.^[8] Bush claimed that the inherent powers of the president and Congress’s authorization of force to respond to the 9/11 attacks allowed him to initiate this policy. Members of Congress, unhappy that the program had been put into place without their knowledge, supported legislation obliging the president to seek warrants from a secret court.

The Exclusionary Rule

The Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule prevents evidence from an illegal search or seizure being introduced against a defendant in court. The Supreme Court adopted this rule for federal cases in 1914 and extended it to states in 1961.

Law enforcement officers have long bridled at the exclusionary rule and claim that “technicalities” allow guilty suspects to be set free. The Supreme Court has permitted the use in trial of seized evidence that would have been “inevitably discovered” even without an unconstitutional search—such as that “in plain view”—or which police officers acquired under a search warrant that they did not know was improperly issued.^[9]

Innocent until Proven Guilty

The central right of the accused is the presumption that anyone charged with a crime is innocent until proven guilty in court. This rule can be hard to preserve when an accused individual has been subjected to massive unfavorable media attention prior to or during a trial. For example, the police have perfected a technique known as the “perp walk” (for “perpetrator”), allowing television cameras to film the accused—often handcuffed and in prison garb—escorted by police. Such images, repeated over and over again in news broadcasts, can lead viewers to presume guilt rather than innocence.

“Taking the Fifth”

The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment gives people the right to refuse to answer questions from any entity of government if they claim such responses might lead to criminal prosecution. Claiming this right not to incriminate oneself is popularly called “taking the fifth.” Witnesses may be compelled to testify only if given immunity from prosecution.^[10]

Such restrictions frustrate law enforcement officers, who find confessions among the best means to obtain a guilty verdict.

The right against self-incrimination originally meant only that individuals could not be forced to testify against themselves during their trials. In the 1920s, the Supreme Court threw out convictions for which evidence had been gained by torture or coercion and slowly expanded the right to cover all discussions with all law enforcement officials.

By 1966, the Court was weary of issuing case-by-case decisions about whether the police had gone too far in questioning suspects. In Miranda v. Arizona (384 US 436), the justices, having reviewed numerous police manuals, concluded that police often tried to create an atmosphere designed to intimidate or manipulate the accused into confessing. The justices ruled that law enforcement officials must “demonstrate the use of procedural safeguards” by ensuring that the accused is “adequately and effectively apprised of his rights.” The Miranda decision required a warning to be read to suspects prior to interrogation—this warning is known as Miranda rights—without which their statements could not be admitted as evidence in court. Suspects must be notified of the following: that they have the right to remain silent, that whatever they say can be used against them in court, that they have the right to be represented by a lawyer before and during questioning, that they have the right to have a lawyer provided by the court if they cannot afford one, and that they have the right to terminate questioning at any time.

These rights are familiar to anyone who has seen criminal detective movies or television shows.

But are they effective? Police officers view the reading of these rights as a mere technicality. They can get information by appealing to a suspect’s desire to tell his or her story and by acting as if they are on the suspect’s side. Even after suspects invoke Miranda rights, officers can try to change their minds or elicit what they term off-the-record information. Eighty percent of suspects voluntarily waive their rights; many confess.^[11]

Trial Procedures

Over time, Supreme Court decisions have outlined processes for a suspect to be tried in court. The most important are the following:

• Individuals cannot be subject to double jeopardy; in other words, they cannot be tried again for a crime after being acquitted of it in an earlier trial. This restriction does not prevent someone acquitted in a criminal case from being sued in a civil case: actor-athlete O. J. Simpson, found not guilty of the murder of his ex-wife and her friend, was found in civil court to be responsible and financially liable for their deaths.
• Suspects must know and understand the charges and evidence against them; therefore, cases against those “incompetent to stand trial” for reasons of illness or insanity must be dismissed, and juvenile suspects cannot be tried as adults.
• The trial must be speedy, so that someone not yet proven guilty is not punished by lengthy incarceration before trial.
• Defendants for serious crimes (punishable by more than six months in prison or a $500 fine) and those in federal civil cases have a right to a trial by an “impartial jury” of their peers.
• Defendants have a right to face and confront witnesses against them.
• The accused has a right to a defense attorney. At first, this meant only that accused persons could pay for lawyers to represent them. But the 1932 case of seven young African American men sentenced in Scottsboro, Alabama, to die on a charge of raping two white women (a charge later found to be trumped-up) persuaded the Supreme Court otherwise. The justices ruled that these defendants—poor, illiterate, and charged with a capital offense—had to be represented by a public defender, a defense attorney employed and paid by the state.

This ruling gradually extended to all defendants in federal courts, then to felony defendants in state courts, and eventually to anyone facing any jail time.^[12] But public defenders are underpaid and overworked. And their convicted clients can win on appeal only if they can show that public defenders made serious errors, depriving them of a fair trial.^[13]

Moreover, most charges are resolved prior to trial when a defendant agrees to plead guilty to a lesser charge. They thereby avoid being charged with—and found guilty of—a more serious crime and receiving a more severe sentence, but they lose out on the many protections of trial procedures.

The War on Terror

Civil liberties are often impaired during international crises. Witness the “war on terrorism,” which is no exception. While the revelations in April 2004 of abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison may be a matter more for international law than civil liberties, other rights of the accused were also in question after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

In October 2001, Congress enacted the USA Patriot Act. Among other things, it authorized the attorney general to detain indefinitely a noncitizen when there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that the person is a threat to national security. Attorney General John Ashcroft praised these policies, correctly observing, “It is difficult for a person in jail or under detention to murder innocent people or to aid or abet in terrorism.”^[14]

The Bush administration used these powers vigorously. Hundreds of resident aliens were detained without explanation in the fall of 2001, many in solitary confinement. When the Taliban government was overthrown in Afghanistan in late 2001, American forces captured some ten thousand soldiers and other Afghanis. Many of them were named “enemy combatants” (not “prisoners of war,” who would have greater protection under international law). Shackled and hooded, they were shipped to a military prison at the base at Guantánamo Bay. Some were subjected to abusive interrogation. The base was located on land the United States had leased from Cuba in perpetuity, and thus, according to the Bush administration, it was outside the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary.^[15]

Many rights of the accused were directly challenged by these policies: the right to know charges against oneself, the right to counsel, the right to a speedy and public trial, the right to a jury of one’s peers, the right to confront adverse witnesses, and the ability to appeal decisions to a higher court.

In 2004, the Supreme Court upheld the president’s power as commander in chief to name persons as enemy combatants, to hold them indefinitely under Congress’s authorization of military force, and to fashion trial proceedings with less stringent standards of evidence. But that due process required that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the detention’s basis before a neutral decision maker. The Court also ruled that because the United States controlled Guantánamo, all detainees there had the habeas corpus right to go to federal court to challenge their detention.^[16]

In response, the Bush administration began keeping detainees in a camp in Bagram, Afghanistan, in the theater of war, where judges could not go. And Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, removing the federal courts’ jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus applications from detainees designated as enemy combatants. Then, in 2008, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5–4, declared the Military Commissions Act unconstitutional, thereby giving back to enemy combatants their habeas corpus rights.^[17]

Prisons

Through the 1970s, prisoners were rarely expected to serve out their full sentences. Parole or “time off for good behavior” gave incentives to cooperate and acquire skills needed to reenter society. But media stories about crimes committed by paroled ex-cons impelled “truth-in-sentencing” laws—mandatory minimums or fixed sentences for given crimes.

States began adopting “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” laws. These typically increase the sentence for a second felony conviction and require life in prison without parole for a third. These lengthy sentences often bear little connection to the gravity of the crimes committed.

Lengthy sentences and the fact that over three-fourths of those put in state or federal prison each year commit nonviolent crimes raise an Eighth Amendment question: does the punishment fit the crime?^[18] In 2003 the Supreme Court decided that “three strikes” was not so “grossly disproportionate” as to violate restrictions on “cruel and unusual punishment.”^[19] The basis for “proportionality” as an Eighth Amendment test is Solem v. Helm, 462 US 277 (1983).

The United States is the world leader in the proportion of its population that is incarcerated. When you include those on probation or parole, about 3.2 percent of adults live under the criminal justice system’s direct supervision.^[20]

When prison policies are reexamined, it is less for civil liberties than for their costs. States badly needed to cut expenses when the economic depression that started in 2007 slashed their tax receipts. They instituted sentencing alternatives to prison for first-time offenders, those seeking early parole, and prisoner-release programs.

Prisoners may organize to pursue common interests, such as seeking decent conditions in prison.^[21] Inspired by 1960s civil rights movements, they claimed a denial of basic rights. Their perspectives were bolstered by Hollywood films of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Birdman of Alcatraz, Cool Hand Luke, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, that vividly depicted inhumane conditions of involuntary confinement. Some inmates taught themselves to become lawyers and sued the prisons. Starting in the 1960s, the Supreme Court recognized prisoners’ rights to bring suit and said the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” included prison conditions. While harsh conditions may be part of a convict’s penalty, prisoners cannot be subjected to “unnecessary and wanton” pain by the “deliberate indifference” of authorities.^[22]

The Death Penalty

The death penalty is now reserved for the most serious of crimes: murder and treason. In 1972, the Supreme Court threw out all state laws imposing the death penalty as a violation of due process being arbitrarily applied from one case to the next. In 1976, the Court allowed states to impose capital punishment as long as it is decided on by a jury following a strict process, weighing mitigating and aggravating circumstances to decide if death is the most appropriate punishment.^[23] After 1976, thirty-eight states reinstated the death penalty, which by then was endorsed by a strong majority of the public.

The main objection to the death penalty today is that it cannot be applied dependably enough to meet the Bill of Rights’ standards for due process. Death sentences vary greatly based on the race of the convicted murderer and of the murder victim; blacks convicted of murdering a white person are far more likely to receive a death sentence than blacks convicted of murdering a black person.

Roe v. Wade and Abortion Rights

In this 1973 decision, the Supreme Court, invoking privacy, recognized a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion in the first three months of a pregnancy.^[30] Whether to have an abortion was seen as a private decision between a woman and her doctor. Before and since then, a debate has raged between two sides calling themselves “pro-choice” and “pro-life”—a debate and a divide exaggerated by the news media’s preference for vivid conflicts.

The Roe decision mobilized a pro-life movement. Members of Congress sought but failed to obtain the two-thirds majorities necessary for a constitutional amendment declaring that life begins with conception, thereby recognizing the fetus as a “person” able to receive the protection of the Bill of Rights. President Reagan, elected in 1980, also pushed to reverse Roe. States tried to test Roe’s boundaries. The Court initially rejected such efforts as requiring the written consent of the woman’s spouse or her parents, demanding that abortions be performed in a hospital, or enforcing twenty-four-hour waiting periods.

By the end of the 1980s—President Reagan having named new justices to the Supreme Court—the original majority for Roe had eroded. In 1989, the Court limited abortion rights by ruling that the state’s interest in the fetus begins at conception, not viability; states could now regulate abortions in the first trimester.^[31]

Roe Reaffirmed

Roe v. Wade anniversary. The justices of the Supreme Court presumably did not realize when they issued the Roe v. Wade decision on January 22, 1973, that its anniversary would be marked by demonstrations by opponents and counterdemonstrations of proponents in front of their building.

When pro-life president George H. W. Bush named David Souter and Clarence Thomas to replace retiring pro-choice justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, Roe seemed doomed. In 1992, the justices considered a Pennsylvania law that required a married woman’s husband to be notified before she could have an abortion and a twenty-four-hour waiting period for a woman to be provided with information about risks and consequences of abortion. But Justice Anthony Kennedy, allying with Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor (a Reagan appointee), jointly wrote an opinion. They declined to overturn Roe’s central tenet that a woman had a right to an abortion prior to the ability of the fetus to live outside the womb. But they scrapped the trimester scheme of Roe and put in a new (if less clear) test of whether a law imposes an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to an abortion. The decision supported most of the restrictions Pennsylvania had placed on abortion. It fit public opinion that was against reversing Roe v. Wade but in support of conditions and exceptions.^[32]

D&X or Partial-Birth Abortion?

With the Court’s reaffirmation of Roe, the pro-life movement was on the defensive—until it began focusing on an unusual abortion procedure known technically as “dilate and extract” (D&X). Giving it the unsettling term “partial-birth abortion” and recounting dramatic examples of its use late in a pregnancy, the pro-life side refocused the attention of the media on the fetus and away from the pro-choice emphasis on a woman’s right to decide (with her physician) on abortion without government interference.

In 2003, Congress passed—and President George W. Bush signed—a law banning partial-birth abortion. The law allowed an exception to save the lives of women but no exception for their health. It was the first time since Roe that federal law criminalized an abortion procedure. With President George W. Bush’s two appointees voting in the majority, the Supreme Court upheld the law by a vote of 5–4 in April 2007.^[33]