Olmstead V United States Essay

Before 1914 in the Supreme Court case Olmstead v. United States, the United States Supreme Court and the American Judicial system, mostly followed the principles of English common law when the topic dealt with the rationality of announcing material in criminal trials. In many of the court cases, the basic viewpoint was that the procedure where the evidence was acquired had almost nothing to do with its permissibility of its practice in court. The one thing that held the police back was that they were unable to break the law in order to gain the evidence, but now what is considered to be illegal seizure used to be allowed by the court system which was not hard to gain.

In the year of 1914, in the groundbreaking case of Weeks v. United States, the Court apprehended consistently that illegal removal of materials from a persons’ home was an abuse of the Fourth Amendment, and recognized the exclusionary rule that disallows acceptance of unlawfully gathered proof in federal courts. The Bill of Rights did not cover the states at this time, only federal trials and federal agents were protected making this significant. The Exclusionary rule was not drawn-out to the state courts until the case Mapp v. Ohio

Justice Louis Brandeis composed a powerful opposition that was the groundwork for upcoming court verdicts. Brandeis criticized the proposal that the government had the authority to wiretap phones lacking a warrant, proposing that listening to a call and reading a closed letter is the same thing. Additionally Brandeis progressed the notion that the ‘unclean hands’ idea, the idea that the court should never support a person who has done unlawfully things with regards to the case. Going against the laws of the states in order to gain material to accuse someone is one the government should not do. In Washington state wiretapping was illegal including other states as