Significance: This ruling completed the incorporation of the protections of the Fourth Amendment into the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This incorporation meant that the guarantees of protection against unreasonable searches and seizures applied to the states as well as to the federal government.
Background: In 1957 Ohio state police broke into the Cleveland home of Dolly Mapp. They claimed they had information that a suspect in a bombing case was hiding there and that Mapp also had illegal gambling equipment. The police told her they had a warrant, even though they did not show her one. Although the police did not find what they were looking for, they did find pictures and books they considered obscene. Mapp was arrested and convicted for possessing these materials. The Ohio Supreme Court upheld her conviction, even though it recognized that the evidence against her had been found during an illegal search.
Decision: This case was argued on March 29, 1961, and decided on June 19, 1961, by a vote of 5 to 3 to 1. Justice Tom Clark gave the majority opinion, Justices John Harlan, Felix Frankfurter, and Charles Evan Whittaker dissented, and Justice Potter Stewart wrote a separate opinion. In the opinion of the Court, Clark stated that the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal search and seizure should be incorporated into the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, the protection against illegal searches and seizures applied to the states as well as to the federal government.
Justices Harlan, Frankfurter, and Whittaker dissented, rejecting the idea of incorporating the Fourth Amendment into the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Excerpt from the Opinion of the Court: “Having once recognized that the right to privacy embodied [contained] in the Fourth Amendment is enforceable against the States, and that the right to be secure against rude invasions of privacy by state officers is, therefore, constitutional in origin, we can no longer permit that right to remain an empty promise. Because it is enforceable in the same manner and to like effect as other basic rights secured by the Due Process Clause, we can no longer permit it to be revocable [cancelable] at the whim of any police officer who, in the name of law enforcement itself, chooses to suspend its enjoyment. 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.”
