Five-minute digest
Mapp v. Ohio
Summary
On 23 May 1957 three Cleveland police officers came to the home of Dollree Mapp looking for a man wanted for questioning about a bombing and for gambling slips. On her lawyer's advice she refused to let them in without a search warrant. About three hours later more officers forced a door, waved a paper they called a warrant, handcuffed Mapp after she seized it, and searched the whole house. They found no fugitive, but in a trunk in the basement they found books and pictures that Ohio law treated as obscene, and Mapp was convicted of possessing them. No warrant was ever produced at trial. The Ohio Supreme Court upheld the conviction, reasoning that the evidence had not been taken from her person by brutal force. The question was whether a state court may convict a defendant with evidence gathered in an unreasonable search. In Wolf v. Colorado (1949) the Court had held that the Fourth Amendment's core protection of privacy binds the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, but that states need not adopt the federal rule of Weeks v. United States (1914) excluding illegally seized evidence. Ohio stood on Wolf: each state could choose its own remedies, and relevant evidence of a crime should reach the jury. Mapp's lawyers argued chiefly that the obscenity statute violated the First Amendment, while an amicus brief from the American Civil Liberties Union asked the Court to reconsider Wolf. By a vote of 6 to 3 the Court reversed, and Justice Tom C. Clark's opinion overruled Wolf on the remedy. Clark traced the exclusionary principle from Boyd v. United States (1886) through Weeks and argued that, without it, the right against unreasonable searches would be only a form of words. He noted that more than half the states had by then adopted some form of exclusion, that other remedies had proved worthless, and that it made no sense for a federal prosecutor to be barred from using evidence that a state attorney across the street could use. The deciding consideration, he wrote, was the imperative of judicial integrity. Justice John Marshall Harlan II, joined by Justices Frankfurter and Whittaker, dissented. He argued that the case had been briefed and argued as a First Amendment case, so that the majority had reached out to overrule Wolf without full argument; that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the principle of privacy rather than every federal rule built around the Fourth; and that states should remain free to try different remedies. The library text gives Clark's opinion in full and the first two parts of Harlan's dissent; the concurrences of Black and Douglas and Stewart's memorandum are not included, and footnotes have been left out. In Linkletter v. Walker (1965) the Court declined to apply Mapp to convictions already final, and United States v. Leon (1984) recognised a good-faith exception for officers relying on a warrant later found invalid.
Top Lessons
A right needs a remedy
Clark's central argument is that the Fourth Amendment would be a mere form of words if courts could still use what officers seized in violation of it. The old legal maxim that every right has a remedy stands behind his reasoning, though Harlan answered that remedies can take more than one shape.
When should a precedent be overruled?
Only twelve years separated Wolf from Mapp. The majority pointed to changes among the states and to the confusion Wolf produced; Harlan answered that the respect owed to precedent, stare decisis, required more caution, especially when the parties had not fully argued the point.
One standard or many?
Clark found it senseless that a federal prosecutor could not use illegally seized evidence while a state attorney across the street could. Harlan valued the freedom of states to experiment with their own rules, and the case shows two serious views of American federalism side by side.
The integrity of the courts
Clark admits that sometimes the criminal goes free, but insists it is the law that sets him free, and that a government which disregards its own charter invites contempt for law. The argument rests on the idea that courts must keep their own hands clean.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free.”
Frequently cited
“Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.”
“There is no war between the Constitution and common sense.”
“Our decision, founded on reason and truth, gives to the individual no more than that which the Constitution guarantees him, to the police officer no less than that to which honest law enforcement is entitled, and, to the courts, that judicial integrity so necessary in the true administration of justice.”
“In overruling the Wolf case, the Court, in my opinion, has forgotten the sense of judicial restraint which, with due regard for stare decisis, is one element that should enter into deciding whether a past decision of this Court should be overruled.”
“The preservation of a proper balance between state and federal responsibility in the administration of criminal justice demands patience on the part of those who might like to see things move faster among the States in this respect.”
Medical Lens
The opinions concern search warrants, the admissibility of evidence and the relation of state to federal courts; nothing in them bears on medicine or the mind.