Introduction
Every individual desire to be safe and at times have some degree of privacy. Public safety and privacy are some of the basic provisions of the supreme constitution of the United States of America, which guarantees the privacy and safety of every American citizen. The following are some of the rulings the Supreme Court has made in the recent past as it tries to define the extent of public safety and privacy.
Laws Relating To Search and Seizure
Sometimes courts ruling are made and the public is left in dismay questioning where justice was really served or was not. Several cases which touch on public safety and privacy have been ruled some in favor and others against the defendant. An example is a case that was in the Courts of Appeal in the state of Oregon. A man by the name of Jonathan Paul Fredricks had put forward a case against the state where he was appealing against the sentence. The defendant had been convicted following a trial on assumed facts of a variety of drug offenses were after the trial, and before the sentence, the courts denied him a motion through which he was seeking to suppress the evidence provided before it by the police who had entered the defendant room in a response to a 911 call.
The defendant argued that the court’s conclusion that the officer was allowed to enter the defendant’s by the community caretaking statute was all wrong and that he was entitled to suppression of the subsequently discovered evidence as entitled under the Oregon statutes. While the State argued that the officer was just responding to the large loud he had been informed by the neighbors about and also to the thought that maybe someone was in danger and needed his help. The defendant in his appeal argued that the evidence discovered by the officer should have rather been suppressed since it was not an emergency call that he was responding to this the officer was not authorized to enter the premises without a search warrant. In contrast, the evidence produced by the officer who had answered the call indicated that he was responding to the distress call and thus had to enter the premises to check whether everything was alright. It was while inside that he noticed some smell of marijuana and enquired from the spouse of the defendant whether he could search the room for any narcotics and the defendant’s spouse told him to ask the defendant himself. The defendant consented to the search and informed him that he could search the room as the defendant was well aware that no narcotics could be found. The officer searched the room and found the narcotics to which the man was now charged with being in possession.
To suppress the evidence, the defendant argued that the search was conducted without a warrant and that there were no valid exemptions to the Oregon statures that warranted the officer to make the search due to the fact that when the officer entered the room he found everybody and everything to be okay. While this might have violated the fourth amendment of the US constitution which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, the judge noted that the actions made by the officer were consistent with the law as the officer was just checking and maybe assisting an injured individual from the information that had been provided with. After the marijuana smell, there was a probable cause and standard reasonableness for the officer to search the room since there were chances that the evidence could be concealed thus the officer was in the room lawfully.
By the defendant consenting orally to the search of the room, the appeal court also suppressed the motion to suppress (Farb, 2010). Thus, despite the officer lacking a written official search warrant the consented by the defendant was used against him. However, in the case of
Brigham City v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398 (2006)”, (Kruger, Pg 2, 2010), “the Court reversed the suppression of the evidence and reiterated its earlier holding that officers “may enter a home without a warrant to render emergency assistance to an injured occupant or to protect an occupant from imminent injury (Kruger, Pg 2).
The existing conditions that may lead to the exception to the warrant requirement require probable cause and reasonableness and in this case, there were no such situations thus the officers were required to meet the standards since there was no emergency case.
Laws Relating To Surveillance by School Officials
In other instances, school officials take for granted the right to privacy of their students and as experienced in the case of lower Merion High School District which was accused by students of using monitoring software in the computers it gave its students. The case had been brought by a parent of a student by the name of Blake Robbins who had been punished for indecent behavior based on the images he had taken and which had been sent to the school server. The computer had been installed with software that was used to take photos and then send them to the school server. While the school claimed that the software was only activated on stolen items alone this was not the case but as it came to be discovered, the software has been activated due to other reasons
“It now appears that the software was activated because Robbins’s parents forgot to pay a $55 (ÂŁ36) insurance fee, and it was left on for over a fortnight, taking thousands of images”. (Thompson, 2010:11).
While the parents had forgotten about the insurance costs this interfered with the student privacy and the investigation of the case is still ongoing.
In another case that involved privacy violation, it pitied students against Overton County. The students accused the school administrators of having installed video surveillance equipment in the boy’s and girls’ locker rooms. In their suit, the suits alleged that their constitutional rights had been violated by the schools due to the recording and retention of the videos as they were undressing. As it came to be understood, the school board members had installed the video surveillance machines citing security cases, for about half a year, the cameras were used to record images and sent them to the server which was located at the assistant principal’s office. This process continued for quite a period and they were only removed after complaints from other schools athletes who were using the locker rooms.
The Court of Appeals initially noted that denial of a public official’s assertion of the defense of qualified immunity constitutes an appealable final judgment, which gave it jurisdiction to hear the appeal. Next, the Court turned to the school board members and officials’ claims of qualified immunity (The Judicial View, 2008: 4).
The court indicated that the privacy interests here were violated not under the fourteenth amendment as the appealing board was arguing but under the fourth amendment which protected every American citizen irrespective of status against unreasonable searches. The court also indicated that the students deserved their privacy while undressing and thus “The school officials had invaded the students’ privacy rights”, (The Judicial View, 2008: 5).
Furthermore, the court enquired what security measures the school was observing while installing such devices in changing rooms as locker rooms did not call for any of the security risks check-up.
Finally, the court established the applicability of immunity and ruled that while school board members were entitled to immunity, school officials were not thus in the final judgment the court ruled that “judgment for the school board members and the Director of Schools was to be reversed, while the denial of summary judgment for the principal and assistant principal was affirmed”, (The Judicial View, 2008:7).
Laws Relating To Surveillance by Police and Security Personnel
Most of the time, public safety and privacy are also violated by the security personnel when they use surveillance cameras on unsuspecting American citizens. Several citizens have appealed against sentences made on unwarranted surveillance and succeeded as experienced in the case of the United States America vs. Maynard (Bankston, & Cohn, 2010:1) where the country was accused through the FBI of violating public safety and privacy by installing a GPS device on a suspected drug dealer which could track the vehicle for a month while in a private property (Singel, 2010). The defendant argued that such unsupervised use of tracking devices was open to abuse to which the court agreed and indicated that such surveillance required a search warrant based on credible reason. While the government claimed that it had not violated any privacy rules according to previous court rulings on other different cases, the court indicated that it had never “Considered such length and scope and noted that: When it comes to privacy…the whole may be more revealing than its parts” (Bankston & Cohn, 2010:3).
The court further argued that it was a different case to follow an individual for a day while it was another to pick an individual and track him or her for a period of a month. Thus, a suspected drug dealer was released after the courts found that his safety and privacy had been violated by the investigating officers.
Conclusion
Through several amendments, the American constitution guarantees its citizen safety and privacy as under the fourth amendment which guards against unwarranted searches and seizures and thus no matter how guilty an individual is if the court cites some irregularities or violations against such human rights, then such cases are dismissed.
Reference List
Bankston, K., & Cohn, C. (2010). Court Rejects Warrantless GPS Tracking. Web.
Farb, R. L. (2010). 2009-2010 United States Supreme Court Term: Cases Affecting Criminal Law and Procedure. Web.
Kruger, J. K. (2010). Selected Rulings of the Supreme Court of the United States 2009-2010. Web.
Singel, R. (2010). Appeals Court Rules against Secret Police GPS Tracking. Web.
The Judicial View (2010). School Violated Privacy Rights by Surveillance in Locker Rooms. Web.
Thompson, I. (2010). FBI Investigating School Spycam Case. Web.