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new laws to deal with terrorism. The 9/11 disaster didn't occur because we were without sufficient laws on the books. What we needed before 9/11, and now, is more competent law enforcement," he explained.
Sam - who was as hardnosed and knowledgeable a law enforcement person as could be found -- was deeply concerned that Ashcroft had asked Congress for, and then received, new laws as part of the USA Patriot Act that further narrowed the proscription of the Fourth Amendment. For there was no chance, Sam felt, that the present conservative U.S. Supreme Court would strike down the new law as unconstitutional, despite the fact that it pushed even further than the High Court's present limits.
The Development Of Fourth Amendment Rights
Dash's book, The Intruders: Unreasonable Searches and Seizures from King John to John Ashcroft, offers a compressed history of the 800-year struggle for individual privacy rights that ranges from the Magna Carta to writing of the Fourth Amendment. For this nation, those rights were central to the American Revolution.
The Fourth Amendment declares that people in this country have the right to be secure in their houses, persons, papers and effects from unreasonable searches and seizures. It repeals the English law of "general warrants," which had enabled British soldiers to search and seize from the American colonists -- in their homes, or from their persons -- at whim. Under the Fourth Amendment, warrants must be issued upon probable cause and then only regarding specific places to be searched, and persons or things to be seized.
Dash has written a history, not a treatise. And he has written it for lawyers as well as a general reader. Remarkably, while the Fourth Amendment was adopted in 1791, it did not become an issue before the U.S. Supreme Court for close to one hundred years. Until then, there were simply no federal criminal laws that raised the issue, and the state courts held that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to them. And initially, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed
From the Code of Hammurabi, to the Bible, to pronouncements of Roman emperors, civilized society has long recognized the need for individual privacy free from the prying eyes of government. But effective means of protecting this need has been slow in evolving. Indeed, it was not until 1914 that the U.S. Supreme Court discovered how to give meaning to Fourth Amendment law, when it developed what would become known as the exclusionary rule in the landmark case of Weeks v. United States.
Dash tracks the evolution and development of the exclusionary rule. That rule precluded the use of evidence obtained by unconstitutional means - which, in turn, made it impossible for law enforcement to prosecute cases where officers had failed to comply with the Fourth Amendment's strictures in investigating crimes.
Not unlike Michael Dorf's Constitutional Law Stories, Dash's book presents the human story behind the landmark Fourth Amendment decisions of the High Court. With approval, Dash tells how and why the Warren Court expanded the law to impose the exclusionary rule on state courts as well in Mapp v. Ohio.
Dash's book masterfully digests important history that is essential to understanding a freedom many Americans take for granted. But the true reason underlying Dash's work becomes apparent only in its last two chapters.
There, it takes Dash less than fifty pages to show how we are now rapidly losing rights and liberties it took us some 800 years to acquire.
Dash's Core Concern: The Limiting Of Fourth Amendment Rights
The mince-no-words professor lays out his core concerns in the book's final chapters. "Our popular belief that American constitutional principles of freedom are immutable -- that objective and wise justices consistently declare the law of the land -- is stored myth," Dash explains. "In fact, the meaning of constitutional protections of the people is politically decided from time to time, depending on who is appointed to the Court."
Dash shows that Nixon's and Reagan's appointees to the Supreme Court undertook a sustained attack on the work of the Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, who "had presided during the 1960s over what has been called the Bill of Rights revolution -- a reaffirmation and strengthening by the Court of the basic constitutional protections of the people, particularly those persons accused in criminal cases."
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