Criminal Law Foundations Evaluation

Criminal Law Foundations Evaluation Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Criminal Law Foundations Evaluation Criminal procedures play a significant role in protecting the rights of the governed in a democratic state. The United States is a democratic country with constitutional criminal procedures that safeguard the rights of suspects and tame the power of police when handling suspects. These rights are stipulated in the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. The three constitutional protections are called the constitutional safeguards. This paper discusses the three constitutional safeguards and how they have had an impact on the U.S criminal system. The paper discusses the impact that constitutional safeguards have had on protecting the rights of innocent and guilty in United States history. Some of the areas of interest in the application of constitutional safeguards include the right to counsel, Miranda warnings, speedy trial, and exclusionary rule in the day-to-day operation of the juvenile system. The Fourth Amendment The Fourth Amendment protects civilians from search and seizures and unwarranted searches. According to Perker (2011), the Fourth Amendment limits the power of the government and law enforcers when investigating a crime or searching for evidence from the suspect. This amendment ensures that suspects and all civilians are safe in their houses and also their properties are safeguarded from intrusion by police officers. Some of the rights protected by this amendment include restriction of warrants of the search of a suspect’s property and the house. Courts can only issue warrants of search and seizure whenever there is a probable cause. In case the investigators present incriminating evidence that abused the right of the suspect regarding the Fourth Amendment, the court has the right to discard the evidence to protect the suspect. The United States constitution uses the exclusionary rule to protect police from presenting incriminating evidence in courts. Perker (2011) defines an exclusionary rule as the legal rule that prevents safeguards the rights of suspects by allowing the court to dismiss evidence collected from violation of the rights of civilians. The exclusionary rule does not apply in all cases. Some limitations of the exclusionary rule include civil cases, parole revocation hearing and cases involving a grand jury. Additionally, evidence can only be dismissed if the investigator violated the rights of the suspect and not third parties to the case. In the era of globalization and technological advancements, the exclusionary rule has does not apply to cases involving data from telephone service providers such as metadata are not included in this rule. As such, police have the right to obtain data from the telephone service provider and use it to prove the case in the court of law. The definition of property does not include metadata or data obtained from third parties. In the United States v. Jones (2012), police suspected Jones of drug trafficking. They obtained the search warrant to install a GPS device to track the vehicle which belonged to Jones’ wife. Police failed to install the device until eleven days later and tracked the vehicle for twenty-eight days. The court ruled that the installati...