Why is the 4th amendment so important

Fourth Amendment, amendment (1791) to the Constitution of the United States, part of the Bill of Rights, that forbids unreasonable searches and seizures of individuals and property. For the text of the Fourth Amendment, see below.

Introduced in 1789, what became the Fourth Amendment struck at the heart of a matter central to the early American experience: the principle that, within reason, “Every man’s house is his castle,” and that any citizen may fall into the category of the criminally accused and ought to be provided protections accordingly. In U.S. constitutional law, the Fourth Amendment is the foundation of criminal law jurisprudence, articulating both the rights of persons and the responsibilities of law-enforcement officials. The balance between these two forces has undergone considerable public, political, and judicial debate. Are the amendment’s two clauses meant to be applied independently or taken as a whole? Is the expectation of privacy diminished depending on where and what is suspected, sought, and seized? What constitutes an “unreasonable” search and seizure?

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The protections contained in the amendment have been determined less on the basis of what the Constitution says than according to what it has been interpreted to mean, and, as such, its constitutional meaning has inherently been fluid. The protections granted by the U.S. Supreme Court have expanded during periods when the court was dominated by liberals (e.g., during the tenure of Chief Justice Earl Warren [1953–69]), beginning particularly with Mapp v. Ohio (1961), in which the court extended the exclusionary rule to all criminal proceedings; by contrast, during the tenure of the conservative William Rehnquist (1986–2005) as chief justice, the court contracted the rights afforded to the criminally accused, allowing law-enforcement officials latitude to search in instances when they reasonably believed that the property in question harboured presumably dangerous persons.

The full text of the amendment is:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Fourth Amendment is one of the main constitutional privacy protections in the United States. The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant—generally, law enforcement must obtain a warrant when a search would violate a person’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The Fourth Amendment also requires that warrants be supported by probable cause and describe with particularity the places to be searched and persons to be seized. 

The advent of the internet and other digital technologies has ushered in new issues about when police must obtain a warrant, what must support the warrant, and what the warrant must say. Recurring questions include whether exceptions to the warrant requirement developed before cell phones and the internet apply to electronic data and the point at which police use of surveillance technology interferes with individuals’ reasonable expectation of privacy. EPIC works to ensure that advancing technology does not erode Fourth Amendment rights, primarily by participating as a “friend of the court” in important Fourth Amendment case.

Technological Advances Make Constitutional Privacy Protections More Important Than Ever — The Riley And Carpenter Decisions

In two seminal cases—Riley v. California (2014) and Carpenter v. United States (2018)—the Supreme Court has recognized that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of their cell phone and in their historical location information. These cases show that the Court is reluctant to extend pre-digital warrant exceptions to new technological situations.

In Riley, the Court decided that the “search incident to arrest” exception to the warrant requirement did not apply to cell phones. Under the traditional search-incident-to-arrest exception, law enforcement did not need a warrant to search objects on a person being arrested because the officer’s safety during the arrest depended on ascertaining whether the objects were weapons or contained weapons. In Riley, the Supreme Court refused to expand this exception to searches of cell phones during arrests because police do not need to look at the contents of the phone to determine whether the phone is a threat to their safety. The Court found that the warrantless search of a cell phone would be an unreasonable invasion of the person’s privacy because of the vast amount of personal information it contained. 

Similarly, in Carpenter, the Court found that police needed a warrant to obtain weeks-long records of people’s movements generated by their cell phones, refusing to expand the “third-party exception” to the warrant requirement. Under the traditional third-party exception, people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in information held by a third party. In Carpenter, law enforcement attempted to use this exception to justify obtaining cell phone tower location records from the defendant’s phone carrier without first getting a warrant. The Court ruled that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements over a several weeks-long period because the information creates a revealing portrait of the person’s daily life.

EPIC’s Fourth Amendment Work

EPIC fights to ensure that our constitutional rights are not eroded by new technologies, primarily by participating as a “friend of the court” in important Fourth Amendment cases. 

EPIC has filed briefs in cases about whether school administrators may search through students’ cell phones without consent, whether the police may collect people’s DNA before they have been convicted of a crime, whether cities may compile information about people’s e-scooter rides, and whether the police may collect a person’s public transportation records without a warrant. EPIC has also intervened in cases involving the scope and methods used in searches of private information, such as whether police who have probable cause to search a cell phone for one crime may conduct a wholesale searchof the phone’s entire contents for any crimes, whether police can search electronic data automatically scanned and reported by service providers without first obtaining a warrant, and whether law enforcement may search through phones without a warrant near the border.