Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights

by Erwin Chemerinsky

In Wolf v. Colorado in 1949, the Court considered whether to apply the exclusionary rule to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.60 The case involved a doctor who was convicted for conspiracy to perform abortions, which were then outlawed. Police obtained the evidence against the doctor through an illegal search. The Court, in an opinion written by Justice Felix Frankfurter, rejected the argument that state courts were obligated to exclude evidence gained as the result of an illegal search: “We hold . . . that in a prosecution in a State court for a State crime the Fourteenth Amendment does not forbid the admission of evidence obtained by an unreasonable search and seizure.”61 Not for another thirteen years, or 170 years after the adoption of the Fourth Amendment, would the Court require that all U.S. courts must exclude evidence gained through such police misconduct.