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Defendants’ Rights: The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments cover rights of individuals vis-à-vis the criminal justice system. The 4th Amendment protects people from "unreasonable searches and seizures," and requires a showing of "probable cause" before search warrants may be issued by a court. The 5th Amendment says that defendants can’t be compelled to testify against themselves, that for serious crimes they have to be indicted by a Grand Jury, that they can’t be tried twice for the same crime (double jeopardy) and that the government can’t take property away for public use "without just compensation." The 6th Amendment requires that defendants receive a "speedy and public trial," that they be given the right to confront witnesses against them, and that they be given "the assistance of counsel" for their defense. The 8th Amendment forbids "cruel and unusual punishments" as well as "excessive" bails and fines. These Amendments were originally intended to prevent the federal government from becoming authoritarian by stopping it from jailing political dissenters. However, starting in the 1960’s, courts began to apply many of these protections to defendants in state cases. In Mapp v. Ohio (1961), for example, the Supreme Court said that evidence obtained illegally (under the 4th Amendment) could not be used against a person. This is known as the exclusionary rule. There are many exceptions to this rule however. For example, if the police believe in good faith that they have a valid warrant, the evidence may still be allowed. And if a judge rules that the evidence would have been discovered eventually anyway, it may not be excluded under this rule. (This is known as inevitable discovery.) In Miranda v. Arizona (1968), the Supreme Court said that people must be told about their rights under the 5th Amendment. This led to the so-called Miranda warnings which police normally read to a suspect during his arrest and which are repeated when a suspect is arraigned in court. In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Supreme Court said that felony defendants in state courts had the same right to an attorney under the 6th Amendment as they did in federal courts. The modern public defender system is an outgrowth of this case and the 6th Amendment. These three cases dramatically changed the criminal justice system at the state level. Many people have argued that the courts have gone too far in protecting defendants’ rights. We did not talk much about the 8th Amendment. The biggest controversy here is capital punishment (the death penalty). Although there was a period during the 1970’s where it looked like the Supreme Court would declare the death penalty unconstitutional, in 1976 they ruled that execution was not necessarily "cruel and unusual" punishment under the 8th Amendment. Since then, many states have resumed capital punishment. Critics point to the fact that the criminal justice system is imperfect, that there are many cases of wrongful conviction. Additionally, there are well-documented racial biases in application of the death penalty. There have even been cases where juveniles and the mentally ill have been sentenced to death. Nevertheless, public opinion is now firmly behind capital punishment, and the trend is now towards more executions, not less.
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