Informative Essay: The Fourth Amendment

Most Americans today don’t know what rights we are given. The Bill of Rights were put in place to give US citizens protection from corrupt police and government officials. A common Amendment that most Americans don’t realize we have is the Fourth amendment. The Fourth Amendment gives us protection against arbitrary searches and seizures without a proper warrant. It was first used to prevent the use of writs of assistance which is blanket search warrants with which the british custom officials had invaded homes to search for smuggled goods. As the fourth amendment has changed and evolved in its meaning over time, many Supreme Court cases have presented themselves to the states.

In order for a police officer or government official to search
An examples of this is Florida v. Bosticks of 1991. In this case defendant Bostick boarded a bus from Miami to Atlanta. At a stopover in Ft. Lauderdale, the bus was boarded by two uniformed narcotic officers who were performing a routine inspection on the bus. Without reasonable suspicion, the officers approached Bosticks in his seat and requested to see his ticket and identification. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, the officers proceeded to request consent to search his luggage. Bostick reportedly consented, at which point officers performed a search and discovered cocaine. Bostick was later on convicted, and appealed claiming that due to his apparent inability to leave the buss, the encounter constituted an unlawful seizure, the evidence obtained must be suppressed. The Supreme Court upheld Bosticks conviction, finding that the practice of contacting citizens on the buses in this fashion did not constitute an unlawful seizure under the Fourth Amendment. This case is a clear example of the Supreme Court's willingness to accommodate manipulative law enforcement practices in order to prevent the constitution's provisions from interfering with the arrrests of drug