A very happy Mardi Gras to everyone.
This is a question for all those armchair Constitutional experts…..and as so to help them with their brain wracking here is the jest of the Constitution’s 4th amendment…..
The Fourth Amendment originally enforced the notion that “each man’s home is his castle”, secure from unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government. It protects against arbitrary arrests, and is the basis of the law regarding search warrants, stop-and-frisk, safety inspections, wiretaps, and other forms of surveillance, as well as being central to many other criminal law topics and to privacy law.
But read the words for yourself…..
Amendment IV
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.
In recent memory there have been news reports of raids on houses and businesses, people harassed on their property for various reasons and of course the round-up of so-called illegal immigrants….
So the question do the protections under the 4th amendment still apply to the citizens of the US?
Americans who believe the Fourth Amendment protects them from warrantless government searches may be surprised to learn that this protection only applies to about 4% of privately owned land in the United States.
A 1924 ruling by the Supreme Court in Hester v. United States established what is known as the “Open Fields Doctrine,” which states that Constitutional protections regarding real estate only apply to a person’s home and “curtilage” (meaning a yard or garden), but did not apply to “open fields” (meaning any other property a person owns). In 2024, the nonprofit Institute for Justice conducted a study to determine how much of Americans’ private land fell into the “open fields” category that government could search without a warrant.
The answer, it found, was 96%.
“The ‘Open Fields Doctrine’ blows a massive hole in Fourth Amendment protections for Americans,” Joshua Windham, an Institute for Justice senior attorney, told The Daily Signal. “What that means is that the government can enter and roam around and surveil all of the property entirely without Constitutional limits, and that presents a grave threat to our most basic Fourth Amendment rights–our right to be secure in our property, our right to privacy from unreasonable government intrusion.”
This is not simply a question of legal theory, he said, it affects “everyday Americans who are going about their lives, running farms, walking nature trails on their properties, camping on their properties, doing all sorts of things that Americans across the country do every day on their private land, and all of that is subject, not just to government intrusion, but unlimited government intrusion.”
Precious Little Remains of Americans’ Fourth Amendment Protections, Studies Find
So after some thought do you think we still have our protections under the 4th amendment?
Or are we entering into some sort of police state?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”