Miranda Essay

I'm lazy today so I'm going to post an essay I wrote for a class. But I do believe these things. If you read this, what do you think about search and siezure and legislating morality?

The film Search and Seizure highlighted the ongoing debate over the right to privacy and the effect of the Fourth Amendment on the legal system and the citizens of the U.S. The film acknowledged how far the constitution goes in protecting our individual privacy, while underscoring the importance of limiting, or abolishing, what James Madison called “arbitrary government action” against U.S. citizens. Without the intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court on the matter of unlawful search and seizure, an expansion of the Fourth Amendment, it is my belief that police would hold too much power when administering procedure and investigating a crime. The danger for the individual citizen is that there would not have to be probable cause or evidence of a crime to for that person’s privacy to be violated. For example, if I am making pancakes in my skivvies one Saturday morning and a police officer who thought he saw me smoking a funny cigarette the night before decides he can break down my door and start going through my sock drawer, my privacy has been violated. Search and seizure prevents these sorts of embarrassing predicaments.

On a more serious note, search and seizure limits the police from detaining or profiling suspects based solely on behavior or suspicious action. It also puts limits on how police can approach a suspect’s residence. The footage from the TV show Dragnet was a good example. The episode before the 1961 all inclusive ruling on search and seizure showed the cops hiding in the suspects own house in order to arrest him. The post 1961 episode showed the cops having to acquire a warrant from a magistrate to make a search on a suspect’s home. For the scriptwriters, the ruling meant a few extra lines of dialogue, but for real police officers and citizens the ruling means that there is a stop-gap, or a third party, to ensure that the search is warranted. The police officers in the film seemed to agree that the extra couple of hours that it takes to acquire a warrant are necessary to ensure that some policemen don’t play the role of judge at the scene of an investigation. In this way I believe that the search and seizure rule, however frustrating for police officers, is necessary to provide protection against rights violations by the justice system.

According to Lawrence Friedman, “vice has a way of bouncing back.” According to his history of American law in the 20th century, the legal system attempted to regulate issues of morality, largely unsuccessfully, for the better part of the century. Laws such as the Mann act tried to limit the actions of those whom the government thought were violating morality, and these laws were either met by exceptional cases being brought before the Supreme Court or an unconcerned public ignoring the laws. The elites, those who had access to channels of power, claimed that the values of the country were at stake, but Friedman suggests that underneath the fear of real dangers, such as venereal disease and dangerous drugs, there was a fear of foreign ideologies which threatened the old protestant value system. Immigration, urbanization, and technology were transforming the nation, and the backlash against immoral behavior, Friedman claims, was a result of American elites resisting change.

Personally I believe that regulating morality is practically impossible. There are some acts that are heinous, such as child molestation, which should be prosecuted to the fullest, but, when the act is victimless, it is difficult for me to justify prosecution when it seems that human behavior will never be deterred from some acts. Friedman claims that anti-prostitution advocates claimed that prostitution was a form of slavery, and I suppose that a prostitute can be seen as a victim in many circumstances, but for an occupation that is known as “the oldest profession,” how can anyone reasonably think that they would be able to stop the practice? It seems more rational to provide health care services to prevent disease and counseling to offer other alternatives.

Another farce is the “War on Drugs”. It isn’t working. All it has done is make the inter-city a war zone and hobbled the efforts made by the leaders of the civil rights movement. The war alienates inter-city youth, and leaves many feeling that they are enemies in their own country. I’m not saying that a playground drug-dealer isn’t a scumbag; I just believe that the war on drugs has created a large sub-culture who believe that survival means criminal activity. Under this mentality it is no wonder that the youth lashes out angrily, looking to embrace their outlaw status in a country, it often seems, that deems them outlaws at birth. If we are winning this war, and I remember when Reagan declared it back in the eighties, why are we building more prisons, arresting more inter-city youth, and seeing more and more evidence of the prominence of drugs in our culture, i.e. Anna Nicole Smith etc? The war on drugs has only created a huge industry based on prosecution and incarceration.

I see large problems with regulating issues of morality; in fact I believe the practice of regulating morality often leads to real criminal activity, much like prohibition lead to the rise of gang violence during the 20s and 30s. I am not advocating the legalization of prostitution or drugs, but some form of decriminalization should be considered to stem the destructive by-products of these activities’ stigmatization.