All human beings have rights, even if they are accused of a crime or a misdemeanor. In the United States, the rights of all citizens are stipulated in the U.S. Constitution, specifically in its first ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Fourteenth Amendment, our basic rights are even more magnified because it empowers Congress to enact legislation to ensure “due process” and “equal protection” for all people, including persons accused of a crime. Due process and equal protection are intended not only to protect the innocent against improper conviction and punishment, but these also promote the equal and fair treatment of all people. Thus, when a person is accused of a crime, he or she is still entitled to the following rights:
- Right of a due process – The Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment contain the “Due Process Clause” that prohibits the federal government from depriving any person “of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The due process assures the accused individuals that they will give a fair trial. The two primary elements of due process are (1) the rule as applied must be reasonable and definite, and (2) fair procedures must be followed in enforcing the rule. This latter provision ensures that adequate notice is given before the rule is enforced so that persons who will be affected by it will have time to explain why the rule should or should not be enforced.
- Right to be free from illegal searches and seizures – The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution provides for limits on law enforcers, including the legality of searches and seizures and the collection of evidence against a person accused of a criminal offense. For example, the police cannot stop, question, or search an individual without any legal cause. Furthermore, any evidence that the police obtained illegally cannot be used in a court proceeding against a criminal defendant. This is called the exclusionary rule.
- Right not to be tried twice for the same crime – The constitutional right against double jeopardy is intended to prevent the government from trying again and again to convict someone of a crime. The right is supposed to force the prosecution to put its best foot forward in the first trial because there will not be a second chance. Thus, the accused can get on with his or her life if there is an acquittal.
- Right to have a trial by jury – The Constitution addresses the right of the accused to have a trial by jury in two places. Article III, section 2, clause 3 of the Constitution says, “The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury….” In addition, the Sixth Amendment says, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury….” Unlike the ambiguous, interpretable phrases in other parts of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, there is nothing ambiguous about the phrases “trial of all crimes… shall be by jury” and “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a … trial, by an impartial jury.”
- Right to counsel – The Sixth Amendment guarantees that individuals whose rights and liberty are placed at risk in the criminal justice system will receive representation from an attorney. If they cannot afford to hire a counsel, the Court should appoint one for them.
- Habeas Corpus – This Nation (2008) revealed that the “writ of habeas corpus is a directive from a court requiring the government to justify the imprisonment of a citizen.” In this case, the writ of habeas corpus is a tool for the Supreme Court to assure an accused individual that they cannot be held in prison “more than a short period of time without being formally charged with a crime.”
Aside from the rights above, the accused also have the right not to testify against oneself, the right to have reasonable bail (if not accused of a capital offense), the right to have a fair and speedy public trial, and the right to be protected from cruel and unusual punishments.
On the other hand, the right to privacy is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. During the earlier times, the right to privacy was not realized until some forms of mass media became too intrusive. While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the protection of the right to privacy is at the core of several of the amendments in the Bill of Rights, this notion has been generated by 20th-century legal thinking. The notion of the right to privacy was emphasized when the Supreme Court invalidated a Connecticut statute that made it a crime for a doctor to counsel married couples about contraception. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, that something like a right to privacy was implied in the Bill of Rights. Smith (2004) recounted the decision of this case that although the word privacy does not appear anywhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, other justices agreed with William O. Douglas’ conclusion that rights exist in the Constitution by implication. According to Douglas, various provisions of the Bill of Rights explicitly protect specific aspects of privacy. For example, the First Amendment protects freedom of association; the Third Amendment prevents the government from quartering troops in people’s homes; and the Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches in order to protect people, their homes, and their personal papers. Because Douglas saw various elements of privacy explicitly protected by the Constitution’s words, he declared that the cumulative effect of the existence of these specific rights was the creation of a generalized right to privacy. Justice Arthur Goldberg had a different but related rationale for the same result. He concluded that the right to privacy was one of the unnamed “other rights” mentioned in the Ninth Amendment as being reserved for the people. Again, he identified and defined the right through interpretive implication rather than through the Constitution’s specific words. Since the Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, the constitutional right to privacy had been cited several times, including the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling in 1973 and the decision in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 that declared the Texas anti-sodomy law to be unconstitutional.
Lastly, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution stipulates in part that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Although this amendment was directed toward the federal government, the Fourteenth Amendment specifically placed restrictions on state action impairing personal rights. In the twentieth century, the Supreme Court recognized that the fundamental concept of “liberty” embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates First Amendment guarantees and safeguards them against state interference, which means that the government should not impose any religious practice or belief on the public. Menendez and Doerr (2006) emphasized that the separation continues to inform the judicial process when religious questions reach the civil jurisdiction. They stated that as early as 1872, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this: “The structure of our government has, for the preservation of civil liberty, rescued the temporal institutions from religious interference. On the other hand, it has secured religious liberty from the invasion of the civil authority.” For example, in Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Supreme Court exempted Amish children from compulsory school attendance upon successful completion of eighth grade. Although noting that the assurance of an educated citizenry ranks at the “apex” of state functions, the Court nonetheless concluded that parents’ rights to practice their legitimate religious beliefs outweighed the state’s interest in mandating two additional years of formal schooling for Amish youth. The Court cautioned, however, that its ruling was limited to the Amish who offer a structured vocational program to prepare their youth for a cloistered agrarian community rather than mainstream American society. In the end, the separation of the church and state is important for the United States to achieve the world’s highest levels of individual religious freedom, religious pluralism, and interfaith peace and harmony. Without it, the diverse culture of the United States will become chaotic because there will always be conflicts between religions; what more if the state will impose it on the public? Thus, the concepts of equal access and equal treatment for religious groups and expression need to complement the principle of church/state separation in assessing religious influences in most institutions in the United States.
Works Cited
Menendez, Albert and Doerr, Edd. “The First Amendment Intends the Separation of Church and State.” In Karson, Jill (Ed.), Contemporary Issues Companion: Civil Liberties. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2006.
Smith, Christopher. Constitutional Rights: Myths and Realities, 1st ed., CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004.
This Nation. Rights of the Accused, 2008. Web.