Weeks v. United States, 1914
By: Fidel Andrada
Tags: Weeks V United States, Fidel Andrada, Supreme Court, Andrada, Fidel

The Exclusionary Rule

by Fidel Andrada

★★★★★★★★ Background of the Case ★★★★★★★★

Weeks was arrested at his place of business on a charge of sending lottery tickets through the mail. The police had turned over to a United States marshal the various papers found there. The marshal in turn had searched Weeks’s premises in the company of police officers and took still other papers. No warrant had ever been issued for any of the searches or for Weeks’s arrest.

No warrant had ever been issued for any of the searches or for Weeks’s arrest

Prior to his trial, Weeks asked that his papers be returned to him. The request was denied. These documents were used in evidence against Weeks at his trial, and he was found guilty. The case then reached the United States Supreme Court on appeal.

★★★★★★★★ Constitutional Issue ★★★★★★★★

The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures. Yet for the first hundred years after the Constitution was adopted, evidence unlawfully seized by the police was routinely admitted in trials. In considering Weeks v. United States, the Court had to weigh not only the rights of the defendant but also the possibility that a criminal could go unpunished.

The constitutional issue in Weeks v. United States concerned the Fourth Amendment’s promise that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no warrants shall issue, but on probable cause . . . and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

★★★★★★★ The Supreme Court’s Decision ★★★★★★★

The Court decided that Weeks’s Fourth Amendment rights had indeed been violated. Justice William R. Day wrote for a unanimous Court.

Common law had long held that illegally seized evidence could still be admitted as evidence at a trial. The source of the evidence was held to be of no direct concern to the court. If it had been taken illegally or stolen, the remedy was to be found in a subsequent civil suit for trespass or in criminal prosecution for theft. In an 1886 ruling in Boyd v. United States, the Court had implicitly reversed this common law principle, but it was not until the Weeks case that the exclusionary rule, as it came to be known, became a definite legal standard. This new rule means that if unconstitutional evidence is used at trial to establish guilt, the remedy is a retrial without use of the “tainted” evidence.

Justice Day wrote, “The tendency of those who execute the criminal laws of this country to obtain conviction by means of unlawful seizures and enforced confessions, the latter often obtained after subjecting accused persons to unwarranted practices destructive of rights secured by the federal Constitution, should find no sanction in the judgments of the courts, which are charged at all times with the support of the Constitution, and to which people of all conditions have a right to appeal for the maintenance of such fundamental rights. . . .”

Day continued, “If letters and private documents can thus be seized and held and used as evidence against a citizen accused of an offense, the protection of the Fourth Amendment, declaring his right to be secure against such searches and seizures, is of no value, and, so far as those thus placed are concerned, might as well be stricken from the Constitution. The efforts of the courts and their officials to bring the guilty to punishment, praiseworthy as they are, are not to be aided by the sacrifice of those great principles established by years of endeavor and suffering which have resulted in their embodiment in the fundamental law of the land.”

Day wrote further, “We therefore reach the conclusion that the letters in question were taken from the house of the accused by an official of the United States, acting under color of his office in direct violation of the constitutional rights of the defendant; that having made a reasonable application for their return, which was heard and passed upon by the court, there was involved in the order refusing the application a denial of the constitutional rights of the accused, and that the court should have restored these letters to the accused. In holding them and permitting their use upon the trial, we think prejudicial error was committed.

“As to the papers and property seized by the policemen, it does not appear that they acted under any claim of federal authority such as would make the amendment applicable to such unauthorized seizures. The record shows that what they did by way of arrest and search and seizure was done before the finding of the indictment in the Federal court; under what supposed right or authority does not appear. What remedies the defendant may have against them we need not inquire, as the Fourth Amendment is not directed to individual misconduct of such officials. Its limitations reach the Federal government and its agencies.” Thus, this ruling was held to be applicable only in federal courts and/or against federal authorities. However, in the 1961 case Mapp v. Ohio, the exclusionary rule was made applicable to the states.

The Weeks decision held that if such evidence were to be admitted at trial, the courts would become as guilty as the police who seized the evidence, and the integrity of the entire judicial process would be threatened.