The Originalist Case For the Fourth Amendment
Exclusionary Rule

By Roger Roots, J.D., Ph.D.*

45 Gonzaga Law Review 1 (2009)

(pagination designated by brackets [*1] below)










* Assistant Professor, New York Institute of Technology. Dr. Roots would like to thank Duane Horton of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, for his peerless
proofreading efforts and innumerable helpful suggestions.

Abstract

The Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule has been the law of the land in all federal
jurisdictions since 1914 n1 and in all state jurisdictions since 1961. n2 Yet critics continue to
question the rule's constitutional pedigree. Generations of conservative jurists and scholars
have called for the rule's abolition on "originalist" grounds. n3 These scholars argue that the
rule is of recent vintage, n4 unsupported in the Fourth Amendment's text, and disloyal to the
Amendment's original intent. n5 In this paper, the author argues that exclusion is actually an
ancient remedy, widely applied by courts in various contexts since the dawn of American
history. Contrary to the writings of anti-exclusion scholars, the basic framework for the
exclusionary rule was well established in the regular practices of Founding-era judges and
lawyers. Indeed, the idea that exclusion or exclusion-like remedies were required by the search
and seizure protections of the Founding period almost certainly predates by many years the
earliest American holdings opposing exclusion.

[*2]
I. Introduction

Perhaps no criminal procedure topic has enjoyed as much fiery debate in legal scholarship as
the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule. n6 Exclusion - the rule [*3] requiring that evidence
seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment n7 may not be used against a defendant in a
subsequent criminal case - has been attacked for decades by police organizations, attorneys
general, and conservative legal scholars. n8 Opponents of the rule argue that exclusion benefits
only criminals, n9 keeps juries from seeing and hearing "the truth," n10 and sometimes allows
"guilty" offenders to escape conviction. n11

But by far, the most powerful rhetorical argument against the rule involves its origins.
Anti-exclusion scholars allege that "for one hundred years after the passage of the Fourth
Amendment, evidence of the defendant's guilt was never excluded just because it was obtained
illegally." n12 Consequently, exclusion of wrongly seized evidence is said to have no
constitutional foundation. According to Yale law professor Akhil Amar, "no state court ... ever
excluded evidence in [the] first century" of American history, n13 and "nothing in the text,
history, or structure of the Fourth Amendment" supports such a remedy. n14

The claim that exclusion of illegally seized evidence represents a stark reversal of widespread
Founding-era jurisprudence is one that has gone largely unchallenged. n15 This may be
because the self-described social liberals, who generally [*4] support and promote the
exclusionary rule, tend to eschew the cape of "originalism" and cede the originalist high
ground to their "conservative," tough-on-crime opponents. n16 Yet as this paper will establish,
the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule is soundly based in the original understandings of
the
Constitution and the practices of the Founding period.

II. The Exclusionary Rule in Contemporary Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence

The Fourth Amendment states 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 that "no Warrants shall issue" without sworn, particularized affirmations of probable
cause. n17 Although a number of jurists and scholars have suggested that exclusion is required
by
their reading of the Fourth Amendment, n18 most have declared that exclusion is not invoked
by the plain language of the amendment. Thus, the applicability of the rule is said to be at the
pleasure, or sufferance, of the nation's contemporary policymakers, who may opt to abolish
the rule when they please. n19
The Supreme Court majority that imposed the rule on all American jurisdictions in 1961 did so
because it viewed exclusion as required by either the Fourth Amendment or a union of the
Fourth Amendment with the principles of the Fifth [*5] Amendment. n20 However, later
Supreme Court opinions have tended to paint the rule as the application of a temporary
cost-benefit analysis. Accordingly, the rule might be abolished when the costs and benefits are
reevaluated. n21
Criticisms of the rule have generated a steady advance against its application in recent years.
n22 Members of Congress have repeatedly attempted to limit the rule and, occasionally, even
to abolish it. n23 Some state judges have openly proclaimed that they are not bound by the
exclusionary rule and have undertaken efforts to override the rule in state courts. n24
Moreover, at least four members of the contemporary Roberts Court have signaled that they
would abolish the rule completely. n25
This paper will not delve deeply into the social costs or benefits of exclusion as many informed
books and articles have. n26 Rather, it will address the specific question [*6] of whether the
Framers of the Fourth Amendment envisioned its likely remedies to include exclusion of
evidence obtained in its violation. To this question the answer must certainly be yes, in
accordance with statements of Founding-era spokesmen and court rulings generated by
American jurists during the first three generations after ratification. Such rulings either
applied
versions of exclusion (such as discharge of defendants) or voiced the opinion that
unconstitutionally obtained evidence vitiated the criminal proceedings. The evidence
supporting this conclusion is overwhelming, and contrary to claims by modern anti-exclusion
scholars that "a strict nonexclusionary rule" prevailed in nineteenth-century jurisprudence,
driven by "the common law courts' paramount concern with truth-seeking and punishing the
guilty." n27
As this paper illustrates: (1) there were few or no published cases on search and seizure
questions in most states prior to the late nineteenth century; (2) those published cases that do
exist show that searches for physical evidence were very rare because criminal trial evidence
was for the most part testimonial; (3) the only exception to this dearth of early published
search and seizure decisions occurred in cases of warrantless or otherwise improper arrests of
suspects; and (4) in these cases, early American courts did in fact apply the remedy of exclusion
by
discharging the suspects entirely. Moreover, (5) the "guilt" or "innocence" of an arrestee -
though often undeterminable in any case - was irrelevant to the application of such
exclusionary remedies. The originalist case for the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule is
further bolstered by (6) dicta in early court opinions and non-judicial texts indicating that
exclusion was the appropriate remedy in cases of illegally seized physical evidence, and (7) the
strong relationship between silence rights and search and seizure protections (hence, the
"intimate relation" n28 between the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment
exclusionary rule), which was recognized in pre-ratification publications discussing search and
seizure issues in depth.
Having sifted through reams of antebellum documents, the author suggests that exclusion was
not only considered by the Fourth Amendment's Framers, but that exclusion was almost
certainly among the remedies for Fourth Amendment violations intended by the Amendment's
Framers in 1791. In contrast to the claims of modern anti-exclusion scholars such as Professor
Amar, n29 almost everything in the "text, history, [and] structure of the Fourth Amendment"
supports exclusionary remedies. n30
[*7]

III. The Anti-Exclusion Argument

Conventional wisdom holds that exclusion of illegally seized evidence originated in 1886 with
the U.S Supreme Court's decision in Boyd v. United States n31 and was imposed as a rule
governing Fourth Amendment outcomes in all federal courts in 1914 with Weeks v. United
States. n32 Prior to Boyd, it is alleged that no jurist ever voiced the suggestion that exclusion
was required where government agents violated the Constitution to obtain evidence.
Professor Amar, one of the most outspoken critics of the exclusionary rule, has authored a
number of books and articles attacking the Supreme Court's rulings in Boyd and Weeks. n33 A
renowned constitutional scholar, Amar's self-styled "originalist" interpretation of the Fourth
Amendment has been recited in a number of published court opinions. n34
Amar's argument is essentially that the Founders merely intended that searches and seizures
be "reasonable" (apparently as determined on a case-by-case basis). n35 Accordingly, those
who contended they were searched or seized unreasonably could only sue in civil court, where
warrants (which Amar claims were never required to search) could be used by police to defend
themselves against such lawsuits. n36 Instead [*8] of excluding incriminating evidence from
the trials of "guilty" defendants, according to this argument, the Founders merely intended to
compensate "innocent" victims by allowing them to seek civil damages for their troubles. The
"guilty," according to anti-exclusion scholars, had no remedy, either in their own criminal
prosecutions or in any civil suit, because recovery would be prohibited by the reasonableness
of an officer's actions, and the fact of guilt would categorize a seizure as reasonable by
definition. n37
While some of Amar's generalizations have been discredited, n38 there is much in his critique
to be taken seriously. n39 It is true, of course, that government agents who engaged in illegal
searches and seizures in the early republic were held liable for civil damages with great
regularity. n40 In general, these lawsuits were framed not as [*9] constitutional claims but as
tort claims such as trespass, assault and battery, false imprisonment, n41 or malicious
prosecution. n42 Yet taking Amar's argument at face value essentially writes the Fourth
Amendment out
of the Constitution altogether, or reduces it to a "truism" in the model of the Supreme Court's
occasional interpretations of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. n43 Without a warrant
requirement and an exclusionary rule, the Fourth Amendment becomes merely an awkwardly
rewritten statement of the law of trespass, which exists in common law independent of the
Constitution. n44
[*10]
Founding-era case reporters are indeed filled with civil court decisions stemming from
wrongful searches and seizures, trespasses by law enforcers and false arrests. n45 But these
published civil cases rarely indicate what pretrial or evidentiary rulings (if any) were made in
their underlying criminal prosecutions (if any). n46 As demonstrated [*11] below, the absence
of a large corpus of published criminal cases voicing exclusion-type holdings should not be read
as indicating that civil suits were the sole remedy for search and seizure violations. In many
cases, underlying criminal cases, which generally did not survive into publication, for reasons
explained below, may have been dismissed due to applications of exclusion or exclusion-like
remedies (such as pretrial discharge).
Criminal procedure in the United States has literally been transformed over the course of
American history. n47 During the late eighteenth century, when the Constitution was debated
and ratified, there were no professional police officers to enforce criminal laws. n48 Criminal
law enforcement was mostly the province of private citizens, who conducted investigations,
made arrests and initiated complaints in criminal court. n49 Constables and sheriffs were not
salaried but instead paid by user fees. n50 When a crime was alleged, a sheriff or constable
might be given a warrant to arrest a suspect and draw upon other citizens in a posse comitatus
to assist him. n51
At the time of the American Revolution, many criminal cases were privately prosecuted
without government attorneys general. n52 The distinction between civil and criminal cases
was still emerging, and most criminal accusations were simply controversies between private
parties. n53 Citizen grand juries investigated and indicted suspected criminals without the
assistance - or even the approval - of government prosecutors. n54 Searches and seizures by
state officials were rare because the domain of the state was substantially smaller than it is
today. n55 Usually, a private person [*12] would complain to a justice of the peace or a grand
jury and occasionally accompany constables on the search if a warrant was issued. n56 When
no constable was available, a justice or magistrate would deputize a private citizen to perform
executive duties such as searches and arrests. n57 Occasionally, private citizens served and
executed their own search warrants after magistrates signed them. n58
Professor Thomas Y. Davies, who has studied the origins of the Fourth Amendment for many
years, reminds us that the criminal justice machinery in existence in the late 1700s and early
1800s did not employ government law enforcement agents on the general scale we know today.
n59 Many searches and arrests were in fact executed by private citizens under the authority of
warrants issued by regional magistrates or pursuant to state statutes or ancient common law
principles. n60 Because the Bill of Rights was a restriction on government, the
Founders probably did not foresee that the focus of Fourth Amendment violations would
someday shift from judges and legislatures to (mostly private) law enforcers themselves. n61
Rather, legislatures and judges were viewed as the most likely violators of the Fourth
Amendment (and its state corollaries). n62 According to Davies, this may account for the
relatively late introduction of the issue of whether to exclude wrongly seized [*13] physical
evidence into the jurisprudence of the criminal law. n63 Nonetheless, the broad principles upon
which exclusion of physical evidence is grounded were certainly ever-present in the Founders'
constructions of search and seizure protections.
IV. Fourth Amendment Remedies in the Constitution's Text

Every originalist analysis must, of necessity, begin with scrutiny of constitutional text. It is
often said that the Fourth Amendment does not lay out or prescribe its own remedy. n64
However, scrutiny of the Constitution as a whole provides clues to the Framers' intended
remedies. There are at least three sources of potential remedies that are explicit in the
Constitution: (1) the habeas corpus clause, article I, section 9, clause 2; (2) the Seventh
Amendment right to civil jury trials - and its implication of civil remedies; and (3) the Fifth
Amendment's description of an exclusionary rule in the context of self-incriminatory
statements. n65
The Federalist contains an enunciation of a fourth possibility: criminal charges against
officials who violate the Constitution's search and seizure protections. n66 In Federalist No. 83,
Alexander Hamilton (writing as Publius) indicated that "wilful abuses of a public authority
[such as the aggressive revenue searches that the Framers were familiar with], to the
oppression of the subject, and every species of official extortion," should be remedied by
"indictment and punishment according to the circumstances of the case." n67
Scrutiny of early primary sources does indeed unearth cases in which authorities were
criminally prosecuted for violating search and seizure standards. n68 In some cases, wrongful
arrestors were charged with assault and battery upon arrestees. n69 In [*14] other cases, even
magistrates and complainants were criminally prosecuted for violating the search and seizure
rights of arrestees. n70
It is noteworthy that Blackstone's Commentaries, published in the 1760s and read widely by
the Framers, suggested that an appropriate remedy against officials who wrongfully seized
persons and sent them to overseas penal colonies was the penalty of praemunire, the
"incapacity to hold any office, without any possibility of pardon." n71 Blackstone wrote that
lesser degrees of false imprisonment should be punished by criminal indictment, fines and
imprisonment. n72 These suggested remedies should be kept in mind when more recent
scholars and jurists such as Chief Justice Warren Burger describe the exclusionary rule as a
"drastic" remedy. n73
The suggested remedies described above all further the aim of the Fourth Amendment that
people be "secure" from the threat of unreasonable search and seizure. But the exclusionary
rule is distinguishable from other collateral remedies in that it impedes or halts criminal
prosecutions before illegally seized evidence can be used at a trial. Only exclusion - or
exclusionlike remedies such as total discharge - truly "secures" people from illegal searches
and seizures by restoring the status quo ante. n74

V. Search and Seizure Remedies of the Founding Era are Difficult to Ascertain by Reading Case
Law

For a variety of reasons, the evidentiary rulings applied in the criminal courts of early America
are difficult to know. n75 For one thing, the law of evidence itself was relatively new and in a
stage of rapid development during the period. n76 According to Professor Frederick Schauer,
"There was no systematic attempt to compile the various bits and pieces of evidentiary rulings
into a distinct topic until well into the [*15] eighteenth century." n77 And it is often forgotten
that judicial doctrines now taken for granted - such as, judicial review of legislation
or stare decisis - were fledgling notions at the time of the Founding. n78
Most state criminal cases of the period were overseen and disposed of by justices of the peace
who did not preside over courts of record. n79 Even judgments and verdicts were recorded only
haphazardly, and an offender could easily escape the shame of conviction in one community by
relocating to another. n80
Of course, it is from published case reports that modern legal researchers obtain most of their
knowledge about rules of law and evidence that were applied in early American courts. But
reports of pre-Revolutionary American appellate cases were virtually nonexistent in most of
the American colonies. n81 More importantly, appellate courts of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries often had little or no jurisdiction over criminal cases, n82 even where
legal systems offered appellate review of civil cases. n83 Thus, appellate criminal opinions on
evidentiary matters were rare even when decisions in criminal trial courts were otherwise
recorded. n84 Of the paltry set of published criminal cases from the antebellum period dealing
with [*16] evidence, the number with discernable search and seizure issues is smaller still. n85
And remember that the U.S. Supreme Court lacked general appellate jurisdiction over even
federal criminal cases for almost the entire first century of the Bill of Rights. n86
There is another reason for the paucity of early published cases involving the admission of
unconstitutionally seized physical evidence: the fact that criminal prosecutions almost never
utilized physical evidence at all. n87 Law enforcers of the early Republic rarely executed
searches for physical property except when the property was alleged to be stolen, and then
only for the purpose of returning it to its owner(s). n88
Thus, almost nothing is easier for a scholar than to proclaim that a given evidentiary doctrine
is not found in published criminal cases from the Founding period. n89 Yet consider the
hauteur with which modern-day originalists assert a claim of early ubiquity for their "strict
nonexclusionary rule" under the "common law": n90

Supporters of the exclusionary rule cannot point to a single major statement from the
Founding-or even the antebellum or Reconstruction eras-supporting Fourth Amendment
exclusion of evidence in a criminal trial. n91

Not even a "single major statement" "supporting" Fourth Amendment exclusion? This is a
challenge that deserves a response. As a preliminary matter, the seemingly broadly worded
boast above is actually quite conditional. Every Fourth Amendment scholar recognizes that a
vast majority of early recorded statements about the Fourth Amendment (or, in the broader
sense, search and seizure law) involved arrest warrants or seizures of persons rather than
search warrants or searches [*17] for physical evidence. n92 And even where early search
warrants sought physical property, they almost always involved searches for stolen property -
again, not to be used for "evidence" so much as to be returned to its rightful owner. n93
Moreover, the decision whether to exclude the ill-gotten gains of searches or seizures - both
today and in the past - rarely occurs "in a criminal trial" but generally occurs in pretrial
proceedings.
As shown below, major statements supporting the concept of Fourth Amendment exclusion and
suggesting that such a remedy must naturally develop within the then-gestational law of
evidence abound in writings and decisions of the Founding era, as well as in the antebellum
and Reconstruction eras. Such statements can chiefly be categorized as accompaniments to a
trio of jurisprudential doctrines that have long been lost to history (or consolidated into the
modern exclusionary rule): (1) pretrial habeas corpus discharge as a search and seizure
remedy, which has now been abolished, (2) the "mere evidence rule," which forbade searches
for property owned by another person unless it was stolen or contraband (and has likewise
been abolished) and (3) numerous evidentiary privileges that disqualified large amounts of
early trial evidence, privileges which - in some applications - operated as exclusionary rules
(and which have since been abolished or severely limited). n94
Consider the 1787 Connecticut Superior Court decision in Frisbie v. Butler. Frisbie was
published in the first volume of the first case reporter ever printed in America. n95 It involved a
search warrant issued upon the complaint of a private person (Butler) who lost "about twenty
pounds of good pork" under suspicious circumstances. n96 Butler suspected Benjamin Frisbie
of nearby Harwinton, but the search warrant was written out in very general terms. n97 It
commanded another private person, John Birge, to accompany Butler and "search all suspected
places and persons that the complainant thinks proper" until the pork was found and a suspect
was made to "appear before some proper authority." n98 They arrested Frisbie "by [*18] virtue
of this warrant" and "brought [him] before the [issuing] justice," who found him guilty of theft.
n99
On appeal by writ of error (there being no direct appeals from Connecticut criminal judgments
at the time), Frisbie argued six grounds of illegal procedure - three of which involved flaws in
the search warrant. n100 A unanimous panel of the Connecticut Superior Court n101 reversed
Frisbie's conviction - apparently on grounds that the facts alleged did not rise to the level of
theft: "The complaint ... contained no direct charge of theft, ... nor, indeed, does it appear to
have been theft that [Frisbie] was even suspected of, but only a taking away of the plaintiff's
property, which might amount to no more than a trespass." n102
In dicta, the Court observed that the search warrant was "clearly illegal" because it did not
specify the places to be searched or the person(s) to be seized. n103"[Y]et, how far this vitiates
the proceedings upon the arraignment, may be a question, which is not necessary now to
determine."
By its own terms, the Frisbie v. Butler Court recognized that an illegal search warrant
"vitiated" proceedings in a criminal case in 1787 (The only question was how much). Is this not
a "major statement" "supporting" Fourth Amendment exclusion? Certainly, the Frisbie dicta
contradict the assertions of modern anti-exclusionists that jurists of the Founding period
considered a "doctrine of non-exclusion" as well settled. Indeed, the Frisbie case establishes
that exclusion, or remedies similar to exclusion which "vitiate the proceedings upon the
arraignment," were on the table for consideration at the time of the Fourth Amendment's
ratification. Frisbie predated the first case generally cited as representing the "common law
rule" of nonexclusion by more than a half century. n104
Major statements supporting the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule were much more than
mere dicta; early courts did in fact exclude unconstitutionally seized persons from criminal
actions. Dozens of early reported cases find judges imposing the ultimate exclusionary
sanction: discharge. n105 Such discharges occurred both as applications of that powerful yet
murky remedy known as habeas corpus as well as by impositions of courts' inherent powers to
manage and dispose of matters improperly brought before them. n106
[*19]
An 1814 Connecticut case entitled Grumon v. Raymond illustrates the Founders' interpretation
of search and seizure protections. Grumon involved a criminal complaint alleging a theft of
goods and a search warrant directing investigators to search "the premises of Aaron Hyatt ...
and other suspected places, houses, stores or barns ... and also to search such persons as are
suspected ... and arrest the person suspected" if the stolen goods were found. n107 The stolen
goods were apparently located at Hyatt's store in Wilton, Connecticut, and five suspects were
arrested and brought before the issuing justice. n108 But the search warrant was clearly too
general, and the prosecution apparently ended then and there as a consequence of the flawed
warrant: n109 "The persons arrested demurred to the complaint and warrant; and the justice
adjudged the same to be insufficient, and taxed costs against the complainant."n110
These stated facts leave many questions about the criminal proceedings unanswered. (The
published Grumon v. Raymond opinion stemmed from an appeal of a civil judgment that
followed the dismissal of the original criminal case.) However, we know that (1) both the
physical evidence and the suspects were apparently discharged entirely when the illegality of
the search warrant was recognized, (2) even though the recovered evidence was apparently the
stolen property which was sought. n111 Moreover, (3) one of the arrestees successfully sued
both the justice of the peace who issued the warrant and the constable who executed the
warrant for trespass, and (4) Connecticut's highest court upheld a civil judgment against both
the justice and the constable. n112 Thus, both exclusionary remedies and civil remedies were
applied - and with much more force than the way they operate today.
Such extreme applications of exclusionary and civil remedies would be unimaginable in today's
legal practice. But they clearly illustrate the remedies intended or sanctioned by the Founding
generation. The Connecticut Supreme Court panel that upheld the civil judgment against the
constable and justice was staffed by bona fide Founding Fathers such as Zephaniah Swift, who
had been a member of the Connecticut legislature when it voted to approve the U.S.
Constitution in 1788. n113 Justice Simeon Baldwin, also on the Grumon panel, was the
son-in-law of Roger Sherman, a delegate to the federal Constitutional Convention of 1787 and
the only man to sign all four of America's great Founding documents: the Articles of [*20]
Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the
Constitution. n114 Another member of the panel, John Trumbull, had studied law under John
Adams and attended the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. n115 Chief Justice Tapping
Reeve founded the first proprietary law school in the United States, the Litchfield Law School
in Litchfield, Connecticut, an institution that trained three future Supreme Court justices and
future Vice Presidents Aaron Burr (Reeve's brother-in-law) and John C. Calhoun. n116 The
attorney for the plaintiff in the Grumon case was Roger Minott Sherman, whose uncle was the
Roger Sherman already mentioned. n117 If these justices and lawyers disagreed with the
exclusionary remedies that were applied in the underlying criminal proceedings, or knew John
Adams or Roger Sherman (both of whom were drafters of language that became parts of the
Constitution, if not the Fourth Amendment) n118 to be of the opinion that "a strict
nonexclusionary rule" required the admission of "all competent and probative evidence
regardless of its source," n119 the Grumon case would have provided a good opportunity to say
or write so.

VI. Pretrial Writs of Habeas Corpus

Lost in the modern discussion of Fourth Amendment remedies is the fact that one ancient
remedy - the pretrial writ of habeas corpus - once operated as something of an exclusionary
rule in search and seizure cases but has since been stripped of its Founding-era substance.
Today we know habeas corpus as a narrow, post-conviction remedy applied mostly as a
sentence-review mechanism. n120 But the Framers viewed habeas corpus as primarily a
pretrial remedy that was often applied in search and [*21] seizure cases. n121 Two centuries of
relentless
legislative attacks upon the "Great Writ" have confined this remedy to an increasingly narrow
corner. n122
As Professor Amar himself acknowledges, habeas corpus was "the original Constitution's most
explicit reference to remedies." n123 The habeas corpus clause - which appears in Article I of
the Constitution and thus preceded the Bill of Rights by two years - provided that "the Privilege
of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or
Invasion the Public Safety may require it." n124 For generations prior to 1789, habeas corpus
was the means for challenging unlawful detention procedures and demanding the release of
inmates. n125 More importantly for our present discussion, habeas corpus operated as an
antebellum exclusionary rule - except that it was more powerful than the modern exclusionary
rule, which functions as a mere rule of evidence.
Under the common law, an inmate seized or held illegally could petition the nearest court for a
writ of habeas corpus to release him. n126 In cases where the inmate had no access to a court, a
friend or representative could step in and file such a petition. n127 A court receiving a habeas
petition generally called an immediate hearing to inquire into the lawfulness of the inmate's
custody. n128 Typically, the official having custody of the inmate would be called upon to bring
the inmate before the court and [*22] explain the situation. n129 The merits of a
criminal accusation - any issues relating to the guilt of the offender - were irrelevant to a
habeas corpus proceeding. n130 If a court found a constitutional or legal violation regarding an
inmate's custody, it could release the inmate from custody. n131
In eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century American jurisdictions, someone who was
improperly arrested, such as by unnecessary violence or an incomplete or invalid warrant, had
the right to demand his release from incarceration via habeas corpus. n132 Thus, in 1796, only
five years after the Fourth Amendment became part of the Constitution, the North Carolina
Supreme Court upheld the discharge of a debtor arrested pursuant to an illegal warrant. n133
Because the warrant in Lutterloh v. Powell did not specify that the debtor owed enough funds
to qualify for arrest and detention (although he may have owed a sufficient amount), "the
arrest was illegal, and releasing the Defendant in the warrant was proper and what [the trial
judge] ought to have done." n134
Surviving records suggest that such discharges were fairly routine although cases were
reported only sporadically. n135 Persons were released, for example, when [*23] warrants
failed to specify their names or the amount of their debts or were otherwise in improper form.
n136 Discharge was also warranted if an arrest was executed outside the territorial
jurisdiction where the arrest warrant had been issued. n137
In 1812, the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia considered the case of a debtor arrested for
debts without a proper warrant. n138 A defense attorney named Wickham argued that "the
defendant is entitled to a writ of habeas corpus if there be no written warrant justifying his
detention." n139 The Court held that without sufficient warrant of detention the
debtor-prisoner
was entitled to complete discharge. n140
In Jones v. Commonwealth, an 1842 Virginia case, a suspect arrested and jailed for perjury
pursuant to an invalid warrant challenged the seizure of his person. n141 A Virginia judge
granted the writ, excluding the wrongfully seized person from custody based on the illegality
of the warrant: "Whereupon, it appearing to the court that the said warrant had been illegally
issued, and that [the suspect] was illegally detained in custody thereon, it was ordered that he
be discharged out of the custody of [the constable] and that the said [constable] pay the costs ...
." n142 The defendant later succeeded in having the constable who arrested him, the magistrate
who issued the warrant and the original complainant charged with criminal assault. n143
Defects in warrants issued during the early nineteenth century generally justified the
dismissal of all proceedings. n144 The Supreme Court of Alabama, in Hemphill v. Coates (1833),
even struck down the application of a statute that purported to require adjudication of matters
regardless of "defects or informality" of process. n145 Early American courts routinely
discharged defendants arrested by authorities lacking proper paperwork, or who were
arrested on charges for which the courts did not have [*24] jurisdiction. n146 There were also
antebellum cases in which failure to introduce an arrest warrant at trial resulted in total
discharge. n147
If ever there were "major statements" supporting the proposition that the Founders intended
and assumed that wrongly seized persons, papers and effects should be excluded from use by
authorities in subsequent criminal prosecutions, they can be found in the first two Supreme
Court cases ever to mention the Fourth Amendment. In the 1806 case of Ex parte Burford, the
Supreme Court was asked to grant the release of a local scoundrel from incarceration via
habeas corpus on grounds that the man had suffered a combination of constitutional
improprieties. n148 Burford, who was apparently a vice merchant of some type in the District
of Columbia, n149 was arrested pursuant to a warrant alleging he was "an evil doer and
disturber of the peace" and demanding that he provide sureties or bond money before he was
released. n150
Because this case arose in the District of Columbia, where federal courts had jurisdiction,
Burford provides a rare (and often overlooked) glimpse into how the Framers viewed the scope
of the Fourth Amendment. The Marshall Court was "unanimously of opinion that the warrant
of commitment was illegal for want of stating some good cause certain, supported by oath,"
and ordered Burford released. n151 It was the first Supreme Court decision ever to mention the
Fourth Amendment, which the Court referred to as "the 6th article of the amendments."
n152 While the written order in Burford can be interpreted in different ways, it must certainly
be read as a major statement supporting the proposition that jurists of the Founding Era -
indeed, the Founders themselves n153 - regarded Fourth Amendment violations (at least [*25]
in cases of wrongful seizures of persons) as meriting total exclusion from custody, regardless
of the "guilt" of suspects. n154 At the very least, Burford mocks and refutes pronouncements of
the more recent Roberts Court, in cases such as Hudson v. Michigan n155 and Herring v. United
States, n156 that exclusion "has always been our last resort, not our first impulse." n157
Barely a year after its decision in Burford, the Supreme Court briefly addressed the Fourth
Amendment a second time in a case entitled Ex parte Bollman. n158 Bollman involved the
contentious treason accusations by the Jefferson Administration against former Vice President
Aaron Burr, following Burr's exploits in Louisiana Territory and the western frontier. n159
Modern legal scholars cite Bollman mostly for its narrow construction of treason and its broad
construction of habeas corpus. n160 For our purposes, the majority opinion provides insight
into the original intended remedies for Fourth Amendment violations.
The majority opinion, authored by Chief Justice Marshall, ordered two acquaintances of Burr
(Bollman and Swartwout) released via writ of habeas corpus after examining the stated
grounds for arresting the men for treason. n161 Marshall [*26] suggested that the stated
evidence hardly rose to the level required to prove treason. n162
Charles Lee, the attorney for Swartwout, specifically recited the Fourth Amendment in his
argument that the arresting and charging instruments in the case "did not show probable
cause." n163 Although the Court's ruling did not specifically invoke the Amendment in its order
to discharge Bollman and Swartwout, Marshall's pronouncement that there was "want of
precision in the description of the offense which might produce some difficulty in deciding what
cases would come within it" n164 was a clear, plain and "major statement" supporting the
Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule. It was the second pronouncement regarding the Fourth
Amendment in Supreme Court history, and again it ordered the exclusion, or total discharge, of
wrongly seized persons. n165
Reasonable minds can quibble over the precise scope of the Fourth Amendment's treatment in
Burford and Bollman. n166 At minimum, both cases support the proposition that the Founding
Fathers (several of whom were on the very [*27] Supreme Court panels that considered the
cases), n167 rather than rejecting exclusion and exclusion-like remedies, accepted and
embraced them at their "first impulse." n168 These cases illustrate that the faux originalism of
modern anti-exclusionists is largely a projection of contemporary punitive and statist
political views onto an invented past.
The idea that wrongful seizure of a person should merit discharge from prosecution, a notion
which has been lost to constitutional history, n169 was hardly confined to the halls of judges
and lawyers. The first federal arrest of great notoriety in American history - that of former
Vice President Aaron Burr for treason in 1807 - resulted in a grand jury's public condemnation
of Burr's warrantless arrest and the grand jury's refusal to indict Burr, in part, because Burr
was arrested without warrant. n170 Burr had been arrested under cloudy allegations that his
independent explorations in what was then the western United States constituted a treasonous
conspiracy to (in the words of one commentator) "seize New Orleans, attack Mexico, assume
Montezuma's throne, add Louisiana to [Burr's] empire, and then add the North American states
from the Allegheny Mountains west." n171 President Jefferson, who was a hated rival of Burr
after the contentious election of 1800, insisted upon the prosecution. n172
A federal grand jury in the Mississippi Territory shrugged off attempts by the Jefferson
Administration to indict Burr on charges relating to Burr's trip down the Mississippi River.
n173 Furthermore, the grand jury declared that the arrests of Burr and his co-travelers had
been made "without warrant, and ... without other lawful authority," and dismissed the entire
matter. n174 Burr's warrantless arrest and the illegal arrests of Burford, Bollman and
Swartwout were the first notorious violations of the Fourth Amendment in American history.
And voices of
the period - from the highest judges in the country to the common citizenry - regarded these
violations as meriting the application of exclusionary remedies.
[*28]
As far as we know, Burford, Burr, Bollman and Swartwout never sued their arrestors in civil
court. But the fact that they could have sued illustrates an important point. The record of such
civil suits does not establish that a civil suit was the only remedy recognized by the Framers of
the Fourth Amendment. n175 Many published civil cases may hide underlying exclusionary
remedies in unpublished criminal cases. n176 In early civil suits where wrongful seizure or
malicious prosecution was alleged, little was written of the underlying criminal cases. Most
antebellum civil decisions involving trespass by authorities, false arrest or malicious
prosecution offered only fleeting references to the criminal proceedings. n177 Thus, the very
civil cases referenced by anti-exclusion scholars as supporting the supposed existence of a
"strict nonexclusionary rule" n178 may also support the possibility of exclusion in the
underlying criminal cases. n179 Again, this is much more than speculation; perhaps [*29]
dozens of published antebellum civil suits over wrongful searches or seizures suggest that
exclusionary remedies were applied in their underlying criminal proceedings. n180
Although modern anti-exclusionists insist that a "strict common law rule" n181 mandated that
civil suits were the only remedy available to early search and seizure victims, n182 we know
that nineteenth-century courts often applied multiple remedies for search and seizure
violations. n183 During the American Civil War, after President Lincoln ordered the suspension
of habeas corpus, a federal judge ruled in a case entitled McCall v. McDowell that a wrongfully
imprisoned detainee could sue his captors even if habeas corpus was lawfully unavailable.
n184 The court explicitly stated that, had the illegal detention occurred without the wartime
suspension of habeas corpus, both remedies (habeas corpus and civil suit) would have applied:
"The writ of habeas corpus is the remedy by which a party is enabled to obtain deliverance
from a false imprisonment. Ordinarily, every one imprisoned without legal cause or warrant is
entitled to this remedy...." n185
In another Civil-War-era case, entitled Griffin v. Wilcox, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that
a wrongfully arrested person could sue his captors despite Lincoln's pronouncement that
habeas corpus was suspended. n186 "Can Congress enact that the citizen shall have no redress
for a violation of his rights, secured to him by ... amendments 4 and 5[?]," asked the Court. n187
The answer was no. n188
Similarly, the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Vermont, in an 1862 case entitled Ex parte
Field, held that Vermont residents arrested without warrant were [*30] entitled to release via
habeas corpus upon a showing that their Fourth Amendment rights were violated, despite the
suspension orders issued by Congress and the President that applied to battlefield theaters.
n189
McCall, Griffin and Field all illustrate the nineteenth-century view that habeas corpus is
inextricably linked to the Fourth Amendment as the Amendment's preferred remedy. Habeas
corpus discharge - a form of exclusion by another name - was thought to be required under the
Fourth Amendment. n190

VII. Analogies Between Habeas Corpus and Exclusion

The law of habeas corpus has been markedly scaled back in recent generations even as
increasing numbers of Americans have been prosecuted and imprisoned. n191 Prior to the Civil
War, habeas corpus was invoked mostly to attack pretrial proceedings, and search and seizure
issues were among the most common matters that were remedied by the Great Writ.
Consider how closely the early law of pretrial habeas corpus paralleled the modern doctrine of
Fourth Amendment exclusion. Habeas corpus operated as a (1) collateral (separate from other
issues in a case), (2) pretrial, (3) mechanism for reviewing seizures, with no consideration
given to the merits of any criminal case-in-chief. n192 In fact, the procedural course of pretrial
habeas corpus hearings was almost identical to the procedural course of modern
evidence-suppression hearings. The legal practitioners of 1791 would probably feel quite at
home
in a twenty-first-century pretrial evidence-suppression hearing.
[*31]
Remember that the text of the Fourth Amendment draws no distinction between the treatment
of persons and the treatment of "houses, papers, and effects." n193 Because the Founders
viewed habeas corpus discharge as one of the remedies (along with civil suit) for wrongful
searches and seizures of persons, they would logically have intended that exclusion be an
appropriate remedy (along with civil suit) for wrongful searches and seizures of houses, papers
and effects. What, after all, is exclusion if not an evidence-specific application of the principles
of habeas corpus? As even Akhil Amar concedes, "Dismissal with prejudice is indeed an
exclusionary rule of sorts." n194 Except that pretrial habeas corpus was a more powerful
remedy than exclusion; it often mandated the end to an entire prosecution.

VIII. Judge Wilkey's Inadvertent Argument in Favor of Founding-Era Exclusion

It seems startling that any scholar might suggest that no Founding-era jurists ever thought to
exclude wrongfully gained evidence when they clearly did exclude wrongfully arrested
individuals. But many anti-exclusion scholars appear to be ignorant of such cases.
United States Judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the D.C. Circuit unknowingly conceded this
point while arguing against the exclusionary rule in a 1978 Judicature article. n195 Wilkey
claimed that "it makes no sense to argue that the admission of illegally seized evidence
somehow signals the judiciary's condonation of the violation of rights when the judiciary's
trial of an illegally seized person is not perceived as signaling such condonation." n196 "Why
should there be an exclusionary rule for illegally seized evidence," asked Wilkey, "when there
is no such exclusionary rule for illegally seized people?" n197 Wilkey cited the 1886 Ker v.
Illinois decision n198 (holding that a defendant kidnapped in Peru and brought without
warrant to Illinois had no right to release), the 1888 decision in Mahon v. Justice n199
(refusing to release a suspect illegally captured in West Virginia for trial in Kentucky), and the
1952 case of [*32] Frisbie v. Collins n200 (upholding forcible seizure of a defendant in Illinois
for trial in Michigan) for support. n201
But as already demonstrated, Ker, Mahon and Frisbie represented clear departures from the
constitutional understandings of 1791. n202 The jurists who took seats on benches in the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries were apparently oblivious to the rule of pretrial discharge
that prevailed during the Founding period. Judge Wilkey was echoing half-truths that had been
mistakenly pronounced by generations of judges who preceded him. Justice Hugo Black,
writing in Frisbie v. Collins in 1952, stated that "this Court has never departed from the rule
announced in Ker v. Illinois ... ." n203 The Supreme Court, in Adams v. New York (the 1904 case
often cited by anti-exclusionists as validating their view of exclusion as an orphaned,
discredited remedy), cited Ker for the same points made by Judge Wilkey in 1978. n204 The
1886 Ker Court, for its part, had claimed that the illegality of a capture should not impact the
merits of a prosecution. n205
Of course, as already established, the holding in Ker was an abandonment of common law.
n206 The rule announced in Ker was not even shared by all courts during the late 1800s. Only
seven years before the Ker decision, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered the release of a
vagrant after Detroit police arrested her without a warrant in circumstances requiring a
warrant.n207 "It is the duty of all courts," wrote the Court, "to prevent good or bad citizens
from being unlawfully molested." n208 In another decision in 1888, the Michigan Supreme
Court ordered the discharge of a [*33] defendant arrested pursuant to an unsigned warrant.
n209 A Kansas Supreme Court decision entitled State v. Simmons, in 1888, struck down the
conviction of a defendant arrested by Kansas officers outside their jurisdiction in the state of
Missouri. n210 The court wrote: "It would not be proper for the courts of this state to favor, or
even to tolerate, breaches of the peace committed by their own officers in a sister state ... ."
n211
John E. Theuman entitled a 1983 A.L.R. article he authored on the topic, "Modern Status of Rule
Relating to Jurisdiction of State Court to Try Criminal Defendant Brought within Jurisdiction
Illegally." n212 The very first A.L.R. article on the topic, published in the 1920s, cited cases
announcing a doctrine contrary to that of the late nineteenth century. n213 Thus, although the
1886 Ker decision reflected the consensus of nondischarge that prevailed at that time (and
forever after), it gave short shrift to an immense body of discharge cases, flowing
backward in time to the releases of Burr, Bollman, Burford and beyond, wherein criminal
defendants won release by showing that their Fourth Amendment (or respective jurisdictional
search and seizure corollary) rights were violated.
Judge Wilkey's 1978 ruminations were not just historically inaccurate. When considered in
light of the true history of pretrial habeas corpus, they greatly undermine a central argument
of anti-exclusion scholars. n214 Therefore, Wilkey's question should be inverted and rephrased:
Why would the Founders not have sanctioned an exclusionary rule for illegally seized physical
evidence when they clearly sanctioned just such an exclusionary rule for illegally seized
people?
These remarks may be extended even more boldly. The pretrial discharge of defendants who
were improperly arrested represented the only "rule" of search and seizure remedies that was
generally applied in criminal cases at the time the Fourth Amendment was proposed and
ratified in the late 1700s. Thus, to the extent that there was any "common law rule" governing
search and seizure remedy practices in the Founding period, it was a rule of exclusion. It seems
axiomatic, therefore, that the Framers of the Fourth Amendment must have intended and
anticipated that exclusion be applied to remedy all other Fourth Amendment violations.
[*34]
IX. Early Privileges to Resist Illegal Arrest Support Exclusionary Remedies

The Founders lived in a period when even "guilty" people were privileged to use violence
against government officials who forcefully violated their Fourth Amendment rights. n215 It
has been noted that "at the time of the nation's founding, any person was privileged to resist
arrest if, for example, probable cause for arrest did not exist or the arresting person could not
produce a valid arrest warrant where one was needed." n216 Even fugitive criminals were
entitled to use deadly force to resist violent arrests by law enforcement officers. n217
Early American law also allowed third-party intermeddlers to "rescue" an arrestee from
authorities by force - either during or after an improper arrest. n218 And if a rescuer killed a
sheriff while freeing an arrestee from unlawful arrest, the rescuer was guilty of only
manslaughter. n219 The 1820 South Carolina case of City Council v. [*35] Payne illustrates a
common attitude among early Americans regarding search and seizure: a private citizen
physically rescued a suspect from a city guard, vowing that "whilst he drew the breath of life,
no guard should carry a citizen to the guard-house" without a warrant. n220 The rescuer
(Payne) was convicted of obstructing an officer only because the officer had arrested the
suspect pursuant to a recognized exception to the warrant requirement. n221
This largely forgotten line of cases n222 illustrates the Founders' high regard for the protective
technicalities of Fourth Amendment law. n223 Yet when anti-exclusion scholars depict the
Founding period, they consciously or subconsciously replace the Founders' values with those
drawn from the legal-cultural milieu of the present, with its leviathanic state institutions,
massive public budgets and professional police forces. n224 In the Founders' world, aggression
by the state was presumed unlawful and could be justified only if there was strict adherence to
prescribed procedures. n225 Entick's counsel argued this point in the famed English 1765 Entick
v. Carrington case: "if a man be made an officer for a special purpose to arrest another, he must
shew his authority; and if he refuses, it is not murder to kill him." n226 Such were the words
the Framers contemplated as they debated and approved the Fourth Amendment. n227 For a
century afterward, citizens had the right to shoot to kill law enforcement authorities who
employed violence to execute illegal arrests. n228
[*36]
Preventive remedies like exclusion - those that flow from the right to be free from government
intrusion and interference, to refuse to submit to government demands, to shoot to kill when
government authorities attempt illegal arrests with violent force, and to use violence to spring
friends and neighbors wrongly seized by government agents - were enshrined in Founding-era
criminal procedure. n229 Notions that government may trump the rights of the people, if acting
in "good faith" or in furtherance of "truth-seeking" or "punishing the guilty,"
came much later. n230

X. Mere Evidence and Exclusion

Another reason why we know that the Founders almost certainly intended that Fourth
Amendment violations be remedied with exclusionary rules involves the Founders' conception
of property rights. According to the original understanding of the Constitution's Framers,
individual property rights trumped any interest the government had in property for use as
mere evidence in court cases. n231 Because people held title to their property superior to that
held by government officials, search warrants could be issued only for contraband or stolen
property. n232 Personal property [*37] rightfully belonging to a defendant could never be
taken from him without due process and then introduced at his criminal trial.
This rule - known as the "mere evidence rule" - existed for two centuries in Anglo-American
jurisprudence. n233 It was voiced in history's greatest search and seizure decisions and
restated in treatises published on both sides of the Atlantic. n234 The Supreme Court of the
United States abandoned this rule in 1967. n235 For most of American history, however, the
rule meant that an immense sphere of information could not be made known by the powers of
government, no matter how urgent the state's claim of need. n236 Private diaries, for
example, were considered off-limits to the state even if obtained by valid warrants stating
probable cause. n237
The mere evidence rule has troubled some so-called originalists among today's scholars to no
end. While acknowledging the mere evidence rule's existence in early American jurisprudence,
they simultaneously claim that the Founders sanctioned the admission of illegally seized
property into evidence in order to convict people of crimes. n238 And while anti-exclusion
scholars present their vision as consistent with [*38] the Framers' intent, they resort to
decidedly non-originalist tactics to evade the mere evidence rule's implications vis-a-vis the
modern exclusionary rule. Professor Amar, for example, sidesteps this dilemma by accusing
the Framers of "property worship" n239 and saying that the mere evidence rule was just
"silly." n240

XI. Wilkes v. Wood and Entick v. Carrington: Precursors to Exclusion?

The Founding-era basis for the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule becomes plain when we
examine the mere evidence rule in combination with the Founders' view of the right to remain
silent against government demands. Consider the two most revered search and seizure cases
known to the Framers of the American Constitution.
It is universally acknowledged that the British cases of Wilkes v. Wood in 1763 and Entick v.
Carrington in 1765 were the most famous search and seizure cases known to the drafters of the
Fourth Amendment. n241 The Wilkes case involved a wide- [*39] ranging investigation into the
authorship of an anonymous pamphlet that harshly criticized the King and other high-ranking
British officials. n242 London investigators questioned a number of printers in the city and
quickly zeroed in on John Wilkes, a member of the House of Commons, as the
author. n243 Wilkes's home was searched pursuant to a very general warrant. n244 A
mountain of his papers were haphazardly bagged up and seized, including writings indicating
Wilkes's guilt in the affair. n245 Wilkes was subsequently arrested and charged with seditious
libel, a misdemeanor. n246
Entick similarly involved an author of publications critical of the Crown and its officers. John
Entick was an associate of Wilkes who authored and published a scathing political periodical
known as The Monitor. n247 As in Wilkes, Entick's papers were bagged up and seized in a
haphazard manner - yet pursuant to a more specific search warrant that at least named him
and described the papers' location.
The Wilkes and Entick cases were of great renown in the American colonies. n248 Americans of
the Founding period named several towns and counties for John Wilkes, including
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Wilkes County, Georgia; and Wilkes County, North Carolina.
n249 Lord Camden, the judge who presided over the Wilkes and Entick cases and authored two
of the "most famous search and seizure opinions in the history of Anglo-American law," n250
was also honored by the naming of [*40] American cities such as Camden, New Jersey
and Camden, South Carolina n251 (as well as Camden Yards, where the Baltimore Orioles play
baseball). n252
Because Wilkes and Entick successfully sued their searchers and seizers, Wilkes v. Wood and
Entick v. Carrington are sometimes referenced by "law and order originalists" n253 as
supporting the proposition that the Founding generation viewed civil litigation as the sole
appropriate remedy for search and seizure violations. n254 But such a conclusion ignores
language in both cases (especially in Entick) explicitly recognizing that the right to remain
silent is implicated by the search and seizure of papers and other evidence. n255 "It is very
certain that the law obligeth no man to accuse himself," wrote Lord Camden in Entick, n256
"and it should seem, that search for evidence is disallowed upon the same principle." n257
Thus, exclusion, the "same principle" applied in cases of compelled oral statements since time
immemorial, should likewise be applied in cases of illegally taken writings and other evidence.
"Nothing can be more unjust in itself," the Wilkes opinion proclaimed, "than that the proof of a
man's guilt shall be extracted from his own bosom," in specific reference to the seizure of
Wilkes' papers. n258
Entick and Wilkes clearly propounded a rule depriving the state of any power to possess and
use personal property taken illegally from crime suspects "to help forward their
convictions."n259 There is no denying that the exclusion principle, Entick's "same principle,"
was embedded in the Fourth Amendment from its [*41] beginning. n260 And for a hundred
years thereafter, every court opting to deny exclusion either distinguished Entick or violated
Entick's stated principles. The 1841 Commonwealth v. Dana decision in Massachusetts, often
cited by anti-exclusionists [*42] as representative of some vast jurisprudence of nonexclusion
decisions, clearly distinguished its own holding from the exclusionary call of Entick. n261
Entick and Wilkes were not the only sources suggesting the exclusion remedy among
Founding-era documents. The most important pre-Founding pamphlets and letters addressing
search and seizure topics also linked search and seizure protections with exclusion remedies. A
widely circulated 1764 pamphlet by "Father of Candor," entitled A Letter concerning libels,
warrants, and the seizure of papers, probably the most popular tract on the topic in England
and the American Colonies, n262 made the connection throughout its pages. n263 Another
widely published letter, A Reply to the Defence of the Majority, on the Question Relating to
General Warrants by Sir William Meredith, published in 1764 (and sometimes circulated along
with the "Father of Candor" pamphlet), drew the same legal conclusions:

[O]f all those laws, under which we live and are protected, there is none more sacred than that
law, which says, that no man shall be obliged to furnish evidence against himself. In felony,
you may search for stolen goods, but not for other evidence against the thief. In treason, you
may search for and seize papers, in order to discover treason, but cannot use those papers in
evidence against the man in whose custody they are found. n264

[*43]
Not much support for the anti-exclusionists' notion of a "universal law against exclusion"
there! n265 This exclusion-requiring conceptualization of the right to be secure from
unreasonable searches and seizures was embedded in the Fourth Amendment from its
inception. n266 And in 1886, Entick's "same principle" language became formally enshrined in
Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in the Boyd v. United States decision. In Boyd, the Supreme
Court conceptually married the Fourth Amendment to the exclusionary remedy of the Fifth
Amendment after finding the amendments were already in an "intimate relation." n267 From
this union was born the exclusionary rule in its modern form. n268
Because the Fifth Amendment's exclusionary remedy is explicit and unchallengeable ("No
person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself"), n269
antiexclusion scholars recognize the danger to their position posed by any link between the
Fourth and Fifth Amendments. n270 Consequently, anti-exclusionists have been trying to
divorce the pair for over a century, despite the clarity with which Founding-era sources linked
silence rights to search and seizure protections. n271 And in their zeal to narrow and deaden
the
Fourth Amendment, the anti-exclusionists have likewise had to distort the history and intent of
the Fifth Amendment as well - imaginatively claiming (as they must) that the Fifth [*44]
Amendment privilege was intended to apply only to oral testimony, only to in-court testimony,
only after a formal prosecution has begun, et cetera. Ultimately, this tortured and inaccurate
view of the Bill of Rights seems remarkably activist despite the veil of "strict constructionism"
that the anti-exclusionists cast over it. n272
It is undeniable that the most widely circulated texts that discussed search and seizure law in
any depth during the Founding period drew a clear connection between silence rights and
search and seizure protections. Yet beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century,
scholars such as John Wigmore began claiming that Boyd's finding of an "intimate relation"
between the Fourth and Fifth Amendments was based on a "radical fallacy." n273
By the 1970s, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger and other anti-exclusionists were
claiming that the two amendments (and their ancient doctrinal bases) were distinguishable on
reliability grounds. n274 Burger included a paragraph in his 1976 Stone v. Powell concurrence
suggesting that the Framers distinguished coerced oral statements from illegally seized
physical evidence because coerced oral statements are "inherently dubious" while "the
reliability of [physical evidence illegally seized] is beyond question." n275 Professor Amar has
argued in several books and articles that Boyd's "fusion" of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments
was "a plain misreading" of both Amendments. n276 Sanford E. Pitler called the notion that the
Fifth Amendment's exclusionary rule might apply to Fourth Amendment violations "the
convergence theory" and pronounced that scholars and judges "almost universally rejected"
the "theory" soon after Boyd. n277
[*45]
When these anti-exclusion writers do acknowledge the Entick "same principle" language, they
employ various means to suggest that the Framers were not aware of or influenced by it. Amar
repeatedly cites Entick as authoritative for several of his arguments, yet skips over Entick's
"same principle" language with palpable discomfort: "Boyd claimed roots in a landmark
English case that followed Wilkes v. Wood, but [others] have shown that the murky dictum on
which Boyd relied was most probably off point." n278

XII. The Troubling Presence of the Word "Papers"

There is also the troubling presence of the word papers in the Fourth Amendment ("persons,
houses, papers, and effects"). n279 The use of this word by the Framers can only support a
connection between the Fourth Amendment and the compelled-witness prohibitions of the Fifth
Amendment, its ancestors and progeny. Papers have little intrinsic value as property but may
have immense evidentiary value because of the words written upon them. Indeed, their only
true value to would-be searchers and seizers lies in their informational content.
It is through the word papers that the Fourth Amendment becomes conceptually linked with
the word witness in the Fifth Amendment. n280 "Papers are the owner's goods and chattels;
they are his dearest property; and are so far from enduring a seizure, that they will hardly
bear an inspection," wrote Lord Camden, one of the most respected jurists in English history,
in the Entick decision. n281 If the state allows its agents to rifle through people's personal
papers, wrote Camden, "the secret cabinets and bureaus of every subject in this kingdom will
be thrown open" to government inspection, and such a practice "would be subversive of all the
comforts of society." n282 Camden noted that such a power is "unsupported by one single
citation from any law book." n283 Later, in Commonwealth v. Dana, the court [*46] recognized
that Camden's opinion displayed conclusively that "the right to search for and seize private
papers is unknown to the common law." n284
Yet the construction of the Fourth Amendment suggested by law-and-order originalists denies
the special importance of papers that the Framers obviously intended. n285 According to Amar,
the Fourth Amendment is only "about things - houses, papers, effects, stuff - but it is not about
exclusion." n286 In contrast, Amar claims that "the Fifth Amendment is about exclusion in
criminal cases - but only about excluding words, because they can be unreliable." n287 Amar
reads several limitations into the Fourth and Fifth Amendments that the Amendments' Framers
did not. n288
Law enforcement agents of the Founding period were barred entirely from searching for or
seizing papers which were not themselves contraband. According to Professor Russell W.
Galloway, at the time of the Founding, the constitutional bar on searching for or seizing papers
was solidly grounded on three separate and distinct doctrines: the mere evidence rule; silence
rights; and the prohibition against general warrants (which originally barred investigators
from even perusing through papers to locate incriminating documents or statements).
n289 Over the course of the twentieth century, each of these three doctrinal bases was
undermined and then abandoned, and today the agents of government regularly search for and
seize papers, records of conversations, and electronic writings with great regularity and often
without warrants.
As Galloway showed in 1982, the Fourth Amendment's invocation of the word papers was
meant to establish an outright ban on the seizure of personal papers, rather than a weaker
requirement that authorities could seize papers only when reasonable. n290 Indeed, the 1765
Entick opinion plainly suggested the exclusionary rule that was recognized in Boyd v. United
States: "Our law has provided no paper search in these cases to help forward the convictions."
n291
[*47]
XIII. Privileges and Exclusion of Witnesses in Early American Criminal Trials

All evidentiary privileges that keep information from the eyes of a trier of facts can be
characterized as truth-suppressing devices. n292 Privileges such as the attorney-client,
doctor-patient and spousal privilege, and - first and foremost - the privilege of silence in the
face of government demands, are unquestionably mechanisms that impede "truth-seeking and
punishing the guilty." n293 But if anything, such privileges were more numerous at the time of
the Founding than they are now. n294 This alone casts doubt upon depictions of Founding-era
evidence law promoted by modern anti-exclusionists.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people were free from arrest while going
to and coming from church, n295 while attending court, n296 and while going to and returning
from election places. n297 Defendants arrested while holding such [*48] privileges were
discharged upon a mere showing that their arrests occurred while they held them. n298 John
Wilkes, the most famous victim of an illegal search and seizure known to the Founding Fathers,
was released instantly from the Tower of London upon showing that he was privileged from
arrest because he was a member of Parliament. n299
The Speech and Debate Clause of the United States Constitution describes a privilege from
arrest for Congressmen while making law and coming from or going to their legislative
chambers. n300 Congress passed a statute in 1802 prohibiting the arrest of an active soldier for
debt. n301 Such privileges differed from state to state, and sunsetted at different times in
different locations. (And some, of course, still exist today.) But their very prevalence at the time
of the Fourth Amendment's ratification mocks and defies the claims of modern anti-crime
scholars who suggest that the Founders sanctioned the interception of any person or property
at any time upon a showing of public necessity.
The same goes for the many testimonial privileges, which prevailed in court practice during the
Founding period. Various evidentiary privileges, such as the spousal privilege, the
attorney-client privilege and the priest-penitent privilege, have protected defendants from
conviction for centuries. n302 These privileges operated because the law known to the Framers
recognized values that were higher than the state's interest in "truth-seeking and punishing
the guilty." n303 They were, in some respects, more powerful obstacles to the state than a
defendant's right against compelled self-incrimination because that right can be lifted simply
by granting immunity from prosecution to the speaker and issuing him a subpoena. n304
Relationship privileges, on the other hand, rest on privacy barriers that cannot be breached no
matter how compelling the state's desire for evidence.
[*49]
Trial practices of the nineteenth century often disqualified witnesses from testifying no matter
how truthful their testimony might be. Blacks, Indians and other nonwhites were all excluded
as witnesses in early American court practice. n305 Spouses of parties were also disqualified as
witnesses. n306 The testimony of both criminal defendants and their accusers was
excluded from early trials. "Conviction of crime, want of religious belief, and other marks of ill
fame were held sufficient" during the Founding period to exclude witness testimony. n307
"Indeed," wrote Justice Sutherland, "the theory of the common law was to admit to the witness
stand only those presumably honest, appreciating the sanctity of an oath, unaffected as a party
by the result, and free from any of the temptations of interest." n308 Congress and the courts
were busy eliminating these "competency" exclusionary rules throughout the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. n309 But as late as 1878 a defendant could not testify in his own
defense in a criminal case, n310 and the Supreme Court was still dealing with whether
defendants could call their own spouses to testify in their defense as recently as 1933. n311
These lines of cases further rebut the claims of anti-exclusion scholars that "under the common
law, a strict nonexclusionary rule required a court to admit all competent and probative
evidence regardless of its source." n312 To the contrary, the evidentiary practices of the
common law were riddled with seemingly nonsensical exclusionary rules regarding the
competency of witnesses. While it is true that some of these rules were aimed at
"truth-seeking" n313 (e.g., the bar on convicted criminal or atheist testimony), others were
extensions of patrician or discriminatory interests. n314 [*50] But more importantly, these
archaic rules of witness competency allowed an immense realm of factual knowledge to evade
exposure in criminal trials. All the powers of the state, even in the government's unceasing
quest to "punish the guilty," could not pierce such rules. The all-seeing eye of the state is a
modern
invention, without sanction in the criminal justice practices of early America.

XIV. Did the Fourth Amendment's Framers Intend to Protect Only the Innocent?

What of the recurring claim that the Framers of the Bill of Rights intended that the Fourth
Amendment apply only to "innocent" people? n315 According to this argument, justice "is, or
should be, a truth-seeking process" and "the guilty" should never claim to be wrongly arrested
or convicted. n316
It is upon this set of assertions where anti-exclusion scholars are on their weakest footing.
n317 Recall that most Founding-era search cases turned on a property rationale. n318 The
Founders generally viewed property rights as stemming from values that trump the power of
the state to know all or punish all offenses against it. n319 It was only in 1967, in Warden v.
Hayden, that the Supreme Court announced for the first time that the "principle object of the
Fourth Amendment is the protection of privacy rather than property," n320 overturning at
least five prior Supreme Court decisions n321 and discarding search and seizure limitations
that had existed for two centuries. n322
[*51]
When the Supreme Court imposed the exclusionary rule on all federal courts in Weeks v.
United States, it did so because the evidence in question - certain papers relating to an illegal
lottery - was owned by Weeks and not by the government. n323 Upon consideration of a motion
by Weeks for the return of his illegally seized (stolen, actually) property, the Supreme Court
recognized that exclusion was the only rule consistent with constitutional property rights.
n324 Yet modern-day faux originalists claim the government has a constitutional power to
retain such property in its quest to "punish the guilty." n325
Given the Framers' interest in protecting property rights, it seems hardly revolutionary that
they would have looked favorably upon search and seizure remedies that require investigators
to immediately return illegally seized property to its rightful owners. As several scholars have
pointed out, exclusion simply "restores the status quo ante," placing "both the State and the
accused in the positions they would have been in had the Constitution not been violated -
neither better nor worse." n326
Judges have occasionally applied exclusionary remedies with just such simplicity. Consider the
ruling of the Kentucky Supreme Court in Youman v. Commonwealth in 1920 where the Court
reversed an order of the trial judge demanding that the sheriff pour the contraband whiskey
into a sewer and ordered that the whiskey - contraband though it appeared to be - be returned
to its owner. n327
In this light, the position of anti-exclusion scholars - that the Framers would have sanctioned a
criminal justice system allowing state actors to search for and take property from its owners
without warrant or valid process and then retain it merely because the state asserts an
evidentiary value in such property - seems quite dubious. The Founders' well-established
distrust of the state exposes this assertion as highly unrealistic. n328
Remember also that the most famous search and seizure case known to the Framers who
enacted the Bill of Rights involved an unquestionably "guilty" [*52] offender, n329 John Wilkes
of Parliament, who had authored anti-monarch pamphlets but nonetheless recovered damages
from his illegal searchers and seizers. n330 Courts of the Founding and antebellum periods
were not the voices for communitarian control or law and order that we know today. "Even
guilty persons are entitled to the benefit of the laws and constitution," wrote Justice Spencer
Roane of Virginia in 1814. n331 "It can never be the true understanding of those [constitutional]
principles, that a general warrant[] is void where the party arrested is innocent, and valid if he
be guilty." n332
In all, the notion that the Framers viewed the Fourth Amendment as a protection only for the
innocent seems remarkably foolish. n333 Those who debated the various [*53] provisions of the
Bill of Rights regarded the state not as a benevolent protector, but with suspicion and disdain.
n334 Constitutional criminal procedure was designed to thwart the state at strategic points,
sometimes in circumstances where agents of the state most desire evidence and information.
Presumption of innocence, speedy trial provisions, requirements of strict and explicit charging,
and double jeopardy clauses in early constitutions acted as bars to prosecutions even where
the state's view of "guilt" was unchallenged. Trial by jury originally functioned not only as a
mere fact-finding device but also as a fundamental check on the power of government and a
means to obstruct unwarranted government prosecutions of "guilty" offenders. n335
Most of the procedural protections enunciated in the Bill of Rights are lineal descendants of
protections that arose during the Inquisition era when the Catholic Church pursued alleged
heretics with savage zeal. n336 Silence rights - and the exclusionary rules that developed to
protect those rights at trials and other [*54] proceedings - were established as shields to protect
"the guilty" from government and the Church. n337

XV. Wigmore's Construction of a "Common Law Doctrine of Nonexclusion"

What about those nineteenth-century cases, which are often cited by anti-exclusion
originalists, that admitted illegally seized evidence? These holdings should be assessed for
what they are: isolated statements of the law that hardly represented the "universal law
against exclusion," which Professor Amar and others have suggested prevailed across the
United States in the mid-1800s. n338 Scrutiny of such citations reveals that only two
jurisdictions, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, had adopted clear rules of nonexclusion by
the time the Supreme Court
decided Boyd in 1886. n339 These two jurisdictions were greatly outnumbered by jurisdictions
with few [*55] or no criminal cases on their books regarding searches or seizures - except cases
excluding illegally seized persons from custody, as already discussed. n340
To understand the actual fabric of search and seizure jurisprudence during the nineteenth
century, one must don the hat of a historiographer. Historiography is the study of history by
means of scrutinizing the writings of historians rather than their underlying facts. n341 In the
case of the exclusionary rule, a historiographical analysis invariably and inevitably directs
and redirects scrutiny upon the writings of a single individual: the dean of evidence law, John
Henry Wigmore.
Wigmore was the Akhil Amar of his day. He invested decades of effort into a personal war
against the exclusionary rule. Wigmore's writings on the exclusionary rule began before the
end of the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth. As dean of the
Northwestern University School of Law and the author of America's foremost treatise on the
law of evidence - which continues in print long after his death n342 - Wigmore was able to
promote and foster a revisionist view of early American search and seizure law that greatly
impacted
the way future legal historians would think about the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule.
n343
In Wigmore's narrative, the 1841 Massachusetts case of Commonwealth v. Dana, 43 Mass. (2
Met.) 329 (1841), was said to be representative of a vast jurisprudence, which sustained the
admissibility of illegally seized evidence in state criminal trials. n344 But neither Dana nor
any other precedent in any American jurisdiction at the time admitted illegally-seized evidence
in criminal litigation. n345 The Dana court [*56] found that its search and seizure of lottery
tickets and other evidence was legal and reasonable because "the warrant in [that] case [was]
in conformity with all the requisites of the statute and the [Massachusetts] declaration of
rights," and, thus, there was no need to consider the question of constitutional remedies. n346
However, the court offered the dicta that an illegal search was not "good reason for excluding
the papers seized as evidence." n347
In 1858 the New Hampshire Supreme Court decided State v. Flynn, n348 upholding the
admission of testimony by an officer who had properly executed a valid search warrant and
uncovered evidence of illegal liquor sales. n349 The Flynn Court cited Commonwealth v. Dana
as support for the proposition that "evidence ...will not be rejected because it has been either
illegally or improperly obtained." n350 The Flynn decision ultimately grew into New
Hampshire's general rule that "the [*57] method by which" evidence is "obtained and produced
before the court, even if illegal, does not affect [its] value as evidence." n351
But it was not until 31 years after the Dana decision that the dicta published in Dana became
law with regard to physical evidence anywhere in the United States. In Commonwealth v.
Welsh, an 1872 Massachusetts decision, the court upheld the admission into evidence of seized
liquor in a criminal trial on grounds that "If the officer was guilty of any misconduct in his
mode of serving the warrant, he may perhaps have rendered himself liable to an action, or
indictment; but the fact that intoxicating liquors were found in the safe would not thereby be
rendered incompetent as evidence." n352
Here we have what appears to be the first sighting of a "rule of nonexclusion" in any American
jurisdiction, authored some four generations after ratification of the Bill of Rights. But such is
the nature of stare decisis that a string of citations, built upon a weak foundation and following
a particular doctrine in a single jurisdiction, can be seen as a bounty of authority within a few
decades. n353
In 1886, however, when the U.S. Supreme Court delivered the Boyd decision (holding that
compulsory production of private papers to establish a criminal charge is barred by the Fourth
Amendment), there were probably only two decisions in the country - both from Massachusetts
- that conflicted with the ruling. n354 In 1897, the [*58] Georgia Supreme Court cited the
Dana/Welsh citation string for the proposition that a rule of inclusion was "consistently
adhered to" in Massachusetts. n355 By 1909, the South Dakota Supreme Court was able to cite
the same string (along with Georgia's ruling) as standing for the proposition that "the great
weight of authority seems to be in favor of [inclusion of evidence], without regard to the
manner in which it was obtained." n356
There were cases in other jurisdictions that went the other way on the same questions. n357
But by the time of the first edition of Wigmore's A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Trials
at Common Law, in 1904, Wigmore was able to rope together a formidable citation string,
which he presented as evidence that Boyd represented an "unsatisfactory opinion" n358 and a
"dangerous heresy" n359 against settled common law. Wigmore also began mixing the
Massachusetts and New Hampshire citations with precedents that were barely on point and
packing all of them into an ever-expanding footnote in his many books and essays. n360 By the
time of Wigmore's famed 1922 anti-exclusion article in the ABA Journal, his footnote had grown
to cover parts of five pages and contained citations to more than 100 cases. n361 Such a
formidable wall of precedents supposedly showing Boyd to be "thoroughly incorrect in its
historical assertions" n362 ensured that all but Boyd's most intrepid defenders would be
dissuaded from checking Wigmore's citations, lest a week be lost in a law library.
But the devil is always in the details, and Wigmore's footnote contained much slimmer support
for his claims than its length suggested. A large number of the cases cited by Wigmore, for
example, merely distinguished the Supreme Court's Boyd or Weeks rules from their given facts
and, thus, followed the rule of exclusion [*59] implicitly. n363 Some of the cases announced
exceptions to the exclusionary rule, such as the search-incident-to-arrest n364 or consent
exceptions, n365 thus upholding exclusion by implication. One of Wigmore's cited cases
involved a lawyer who expressed regret over voluntarily surrendering deed papers to a party
in civil litigation without asserting a work-product privilege or other defense. n366 Another
case upheld the admission of a book of tax records over objections that the book did not state
exact dates or precisely match an indictment. n367 One involved litigation over a coroner
making an unauthorized autopsy. n368 Others were civil cases in which one party objected
unsuccessfully to discovery violations. n369 Many were simply cases where defendants
unsuccessfully asserted a privilege or unsuccessfully objected to the admission of evidence on
non-Fourth-Amendment grounds. n370 Still others supported exclusion, and Wigmore cited to
them as a concession. n371
Like an appellate brief written by a shrewd litigator, Wigmore's impressive-looking footnote
concealed as much as it illuminated. n372 In 1922, even after twenty years of researching the
question, Wigmore could identify no law on the subject in more than one-quarter of the states.
n373 Wigmore misstated, deliberately it would [*60] seem, the holdings in some of the cases he
cited. n374 Some states cited by Wigmore (e.g., Maryland n375 and Michigan n376) switched
from recognizing an exclusionary rule [*61] to admitting illegally seized evidence in the wake
of Wigmore's initial writings n377 - contrary to Wigmore's assertion that "the heretical
influence" of Boyd and Weeks was spreading "a contagion of sentimentality in some of the
State Courts, inducing them to break loose from long-settled fundamentals." n378
Significantly, some jurisdictions that switched from an exclusionary rule to an inclusionary
rule even cited Wigmore's assertions among their grounds for doing so. n379
[*62]
More significantly, only a small handful of Wigmore's cases were rendered prior to the 1886
Boyd decision, which anti-exclusionists claim defied the "universal law" of the nineteenth
century. n380 Even Massachusetts and New Hampshire had adopted their rules of
nonexclusion fairly recently at the time of the Boyd decision and rather tepidly at first. n381
Initially, their courts merely distinguished then-prevailing legal standards (e.g., those laid out
in 1765 in Entick v. Carrington) n382 or cited their own dicta or English cases that were not
on-point. n383 The law in the other states was unsettled, and in a state which Wilson Huhn
describes as pre-decided. n384
Yet for generations after the first publication of Wigmore's writings, scholars have cited them
for the proposition that some vast body of jurisprudence of the nineteenth century recognized
an inclusionary rule. Professor Amar, building on [*63] Wigmore's arguments, alleged the
existence of a "universal law against exclusion," which supposedly prevailed in the mid-1800s.
n385 Yet Wigmore conceded that prior to the twentieth century, criminal defendants who "had
occasion to invoke the Fourth Amendment" as a bar to seizure and admission of physical
evidence were "limited in number." n386 It was only with Prohibition and the government's
drive to convict people of victimless crimes such as selling liquor that the Fourth Amendment
"suddenly came into wide and frequent" application. n387
It must be recognized that with the exception of John Wigmore's writings, anti-exclusion
scholarship was fairly sparse until the second half of the twentieth century. n388 Most legal
scholars of the late 1800s and early 1900s were far less likely than Wigmore to express the
opinion that the exclusionary rule represented a radical revolution in criminal justice
practices. Although today's anti-exclusionists regard Wigmore's assertions as representative of
the scholarship of his day, Wigmore's bold proclamations were in fact criticized at the time.
n389 Someone on the Michigan Supreme Court must have spent a few hours checking
Wigmore's citations in preparation for a 1919 opinion. The Court, in People v. Marxhausen, cast
a doubtful eye upon his assertions:

There has been some criticism of the Boyd Case by courts and writers, who have regarded it as
not in accord with a long line of cases in state courts [citing Wigmore's principle cases]... .

We are impressed, however, that a careful consideration of the Boyd Case, in connection with
the Adams Case and the decisions of the state
courts, some of which are cited above, but many of which are not, taken in the light of what
was said by the court in the Weeks Case, demonstrate that in the main the United States
Supreme Court and the courts of last resort of the various states are in accord, and that the
Boyd Case does not conflict, as its critics claim, with the holdings of the many state courts.
n390

Consider also Osmond K. Fraenkel's 1921 critique: "the connection between the privilege
against self-incrimination and the right to be free from unreasonable [*64] searches is much
closer than the critics of the [Boyd] opinion [meaning Wigmore] concede." n391 Fraenkel
pointed out that the connection between the two principles was prominent in the pamphlets
that accompanied the Wilkes and Entick cases, with which the Amendment's drafters and
ratifiers were familiar. n392 Wigmore's contention that the Fourth Amendment was not
intended to aid "the guilty" - now the stock-in-trade of all anti-exclusion scholarship - was also
discredited by Wigmore's contemporaries. n393
As Justice Potter Stewart observed in a 1983 speech, none of the Supreme Court decisions
credited with creating the exclusionary rule included much discussion about whether the
exclusionary rule should exist. n394 They assumed it should. n395 Nor were there dissents in
any of those cases in which any justice scolded his colleagues for abandoning a long-settled
"common law rule of nonexclusion." n396 It was until the 1970s before any member of the
Supreme Court wrote that the exclusionary rule represented a novel abandonment of
longstanding nineteenth-century black-letter law. n397
What the cases cited by Wigmore illustrate is not that exclusion was a radical departure from
the settled law of the late nineteenth century, but that the law governing illegally seized
physical evidence was unsettled and developing during the period. The sparse record of
regional trial practices in the early republic yields scant basis to make any categorical
statements about early evidentiary practices. And [*65] because appellate courts rarely ruled
on criminal trial evidence decisions during the 1800s, there were no rules at all in many
jurisdictions,
other than the exclusion-implicating rules mandated by the law of pretrial habeas corpus and
the mere evidence doctrine. It was only after 1914 that some state appellate courts began ruling
one way or the other on the specific question of whether to exclude wrongfully seized physical
evidence, either following Weeks or declining to follow it. Many state jurisdictions had only a
few binding search and seizure interpretations before Mapp closed off all nonexclusionary
options in 1961. n398

XVI. Conclusion

Early American criminal evidentiary remedies went for the most part unrecorded and
unreviewed. What we do know of such remedies supports, rather than undermines, the notion
that early American judges applied exclusion where evidence was taken illegally by state
actors. The very first U.S. Supreme Court decisions to consider the meaning of the Fourth
Amendment ordered criminal defendants discharged before trial on Fourth Amendment
grounds. n399 The earliest Supreme Court decision to construe the Fourth Amendment's
applicability to physical evidence applied an exclusionary rule. n400 Pre-Founding statements
by judges and commentators indicating that illegal seizure of evidence merited exclusion, or
the vitiation of subsequent criminal prosecutions, brought no recorded challenge. n401 By
contrast, there was no known opposition to this position during the Founding period.
All of this means that exclusionary remedies were unquestionably among the originally
intended remedies of the Fourth Amendment. Although modern-day anti-exclusion scholars
claim that the Constitution's Founders lived in a world where exclusion of evidence on search
or seizure grounds was unknown, or even that a rule of nonexclusion prevailed during the
Founding and antebellum periods, the exact opposite is true. Late eighteenth-and early
nineteenth-century courts routinely discharged victims of search and seizure violations from
custody. n402 The proposition that search and seizure protections were closely allied with
silence rights (and hence exclusionary principles) is supported by a number of sources in the
political and legal discourse of the Founding period. n403 In contrast, court holdings that
explicitly rejected the notion of Fourth Amendment (or state corollary) exclusion were rare
[*66] phenomena in the American states prior to the U.S. Supreme Court's exclusion ruling in
Boyd v. United States in 1886. Such holdings arose in only two state court systems, during a
40-year period from the 1850s to the 1890s. Moreover, the legal-historical record strongly
supports the proposition that these two regional lines of pre-Boyd nonexclusion cases
represented departures from the common law known to the Founding generation and their
understandings of search and seizure provisions in the federal Constitution and early state
constitutions.

FOOTNOTES:
n1. See Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383, 398 (1914).
n2. See Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 655 (1961) (extending the federal exclusionary rule to state
court practice under the Fourteenth Amendment).
n3. See generally Yale Kamisar, The Writings of John Barker Waite and Thomas Davies on the
Search and Seizure Exclusionary Rule, 100 Mich. L. Rev. 1821 (2002) (discussing the
history of criticism of the exclusionary rule).
n4. Jerry E. Norton, The Exclusionary Rule Reconsidered: Restoring the Status Quo Ante, 33
Wake Forest L. Rev. 261, 264 (1998) (writing of the "newly discovered exclusionary rule").
n5. See generally Akhil Reed Amar, Fourth Amendment First Principles, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 757
(1994) [hereinafter Amar I]; Akhil Reed Amar, The Constitution and Criminal
Procedure: First Principles (1997) [hereinafter Amar II]; Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights:
Creation and Reconstruction (1998) [hereinafter Amar III]; Akhil Reed Amar, Against
Exclusion (Except to Protect Truth or Prevent Privacy Violations), 20 Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol'y
457 (1997) [hereinafter Amar IV].
n6. Even a partial list of articles discussing this debate would take up many pages. See, e.g.,
Randy E. Barnett, Resolving the Dilemma of the Exclusionary Rule: An Application of
Restitutive Principles of Justice, 32 Emory L.J. 937, 941-42 (1983) (calling for an alternative to
the exclusionary rule); Donald Dripps, Akhil Amar on Criminal Procedure and
Constitutional Law: "Here I Go Down that Wrong Road Again", 74 N.C. L. Rev. 1559, 1563 (1996)
(detailing the long history of criticisms of the exclusionary rule and other criminal
procedure protections); Yale Kamisar, In Defense of the Search and Seizure Exclusionary Rule,
26 Harv. J. of L. & Pub. Pol'y 119, 119 n.1 (2003) (citing dozens of articles); Randall R.
Rader, Legislating a Remedy for the Fourth Amendment, 23 S. Tex. L.J. 585, 606-07 (1982)
(discussing the abolition or replacement of the exclusionary rule); William J. Stuntz,
Warrants and Fourth Amendment Remedies, 77 Va. L. Rev. 881, 897-918 (1991) (discussing
remedies for warrant violations); Malcolm R. Wilkey, Constitutional Alternatives to the
Exclusionary Rule, 23 S. Tex. L.J. 531, 539 (1982) (criticizing the exclusionary rule and
recommending alternatives); Jeffrey Gittins, Comment, Excluding the Exclusionary Rule:
Extending the Rationale of Hudson v. Michigan to Evidence Seized During Unauthorized
Nighttime Searches, 2007 BYU L. Rev. 451, 451 (2007) (discussing the exclusionary rule
controversy); Matt J. O'Laughlin, Comment, Exigent Circumstances: Circumscribing the
Exclusionary Rule in Response to 9/11, 70 UMKC L. Rev. 707, 708 (2002); Aloysius T.
Webster, Comment, Protecting Society's Rights While Preserving Fourth Amendment
Protections: An Alternative to the Exclusionary Rule, 23 S. Tex. L.J. 693, 706 (1982) (advocating
abandonment of the modern exclusionary rule).
n7. Of course, rules of exclusion also apply in Fifth and Sixth Amendment jurisprudence, but
are less controversial in those contexts. In a broader sense, the law of evidence is riddled
with "exclusionary rules" that govern such matters as hearsay and unauthenticated records.
n8. See supra note 6 and accompanying text.
n9. See Amar II, supra note 5, at 156 ("The exclusionary rule rewards the guilty man, and only
the guilty man, precisely because he is guilty.").
n10. See Patrick Tinsley et al., In Defense of Evidence and Against the Exclusionary Rule: A
Libertarian Approach, 32 S.U. L. Rev. 63, 64 (2004).
n11. See id. at 68.
n12. Id. at 64.
n13. Amar IV, supra note 5, at 459.
n14. Amar II, supra note 5, at 91 (saying the exclusionary rule "creates what I shall call an
upside-down effect, providing the guilty with more protection than, and often at the expense of,
the innocent.").
n15. See, e.g., Michael J. Zydney Mannheimer, Coerced Confessions and the Fourth
Amendment, 30 Hastings Const. L.Q. 57, 61 (2002) (arguing in support of the exclusionary rule
as a
result of a relationship between the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, but making "no pretense
that [this opinion] is supported by an originalist view ... .To the contrary, I readily concede
that it might not have occurred to the Framers that coerced confessions are a Fourth
Amendment issue."). But see Thomas Y. Davies, Recovering the Original Fourth Amendment,
98
Mich. L. Rev. 547, 663-66 (1999). Although Davies touched upon various overstatements made
by modern anti-exclusion scholars regarding Founding-era Fourth Amendment remedies,
he did not delve deeply into them. Id.
n16. Cf. Thomas Y. Davies, The Fictional Character of Law-and-Order Originalism: A Case
Study of the Distortions and Evasions of Framing-Era Arrest Doctrine in Atwater v. Lago
Vista, 37 Wake Forest L. Rev. 239, 273-74 (2002) (documenting the Supreme Court's use of
deceptive history to uphold an arrest for a non-jailable seat-belt violation in 2002); Roger
Roots, Are Cops Constitutional?, 11 Seton Hall Const. L.J. 685, 722-24 (2001) (comparing the
admiration of policing by modern "conservatives" with the dearth of support for modernstyle
law enforcement in early America).
n17. U.S. Const. amend. IV.
n18. See, e.g., Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 648 (1961) (majority opinion) (saying without the
exclusionary rule, the Fourth Amendment "might as well be stricken from the
Constitution" (quoting Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383, 393 (1914))); see also Wolf v.
Colorado, 338 U.S. 25, 44 (1949) (Murphy, J., dissenting) (saying that the conclusion is
"inescapable that but one remedy exists to deter violations of the search and seizure clause,"
namely, "the rule which excludes illegally obtained evidence"); William C. Heffernan, On
Justifying Fourth Amendment Exclusion, 1989 Wis. L. Rev. 1193, 1224 (1989) (concluding that
the exclusionary rule is implicitly required by the text and history of the Fourth
Amendment).
n19. Justice Hugo Black, widely known as the arch-textualist of his era, expressed the opinion
this way: "The federal exclusionary rule is not a command of the Fourth Amendment but is
a judicially created rule of evidence which Congress might negate." Wolf, 338 U.S. at 39-40
(Black, J., concurring).
n20. Mapp, 367 U.S. at 660. Mapp was actually a plurality decision with two concurrences, one
dissent and one memorandum aligned with the dissent. Justice Harlan's dissent summed
up the crude alliance that was forged among the five victorious justices: "For my Brother Black
is unwilling to subscribe to [the four-member plurality's] view that the Weeks
exclusionary rule derives from the Fourth Amendment itself, but joins the majority opinion on
the premise that its end result can be achieved by bringing the Fifth Amendment to the aid
of the Fourth." Id. at 685 (Harlan, J., dissenting) (citation omitted).
n21. See Herring v. United States, 129 S.Ct. 695, 699-701 (2009) (discussing United States v.
Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984)); see also L. Timothy Perrin et al., It Is Broken: Breaking the
Inertia of the Exclusionary Rule, 26 Pepp. L. Rev. 971, 979-87 (1999) (suggesting the
exclusionary rule should be abandoned upon reevaluating its costs and impacts).
n22. See Heather A. Jackson, Arizona v. Evans: Expanding Exclusionary Rule Exceptions and
Contracting Fourth Amendment Protection, 86 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 1201, 1218
(1996).
n23. See generally The Jury and the Search for Truth: The Case Against Excluding Relevant
Evidence at Trial: Hearing on S.3 Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 104th Cong. 104-
724 (1995) (debating bill proposing to eliminate the exclusionary rule in federal courts
entirely).
n24. See, e.g., Hernandez v. State, 60 S.W.3d 106, 112-14, 115 (Tex. Crim. App. 2001) (Keller, J.,
dissenting) (contending that the states are not bound by Mapp v. Ohio because it was a
mere plurality opinion and because "modern cases have rejected the notion that the Fourth
Amendment requires exclusion and have instead described the rule as a judicially created
prophylactic").
n25. See Adam Liptak, Supreme Court Edging Closer to Repeal of Evidence Ruling, N. Y. Times,
Jan. 31, 2009, at A1 (naming Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas as justices
willing to abolish the exclusionary rule entirely).
n26. See, e.g., 1 Wayne R. LaFave, Search and Seizure: A Treatise on the Fourth Amendment §
1.2 (1978); Fletcher N. Baldwin, Jr., Due Process and the Exclusionary Rule: Integrity
and Justification, 39 U. Fla. L. Rev. 505, 539 (1987); Donald Dripps, The Case for the Contingent
Exclusionary Rule, 38 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 1 (2001); Jackson, supra note 22, at 1221-24;
Yale Kamisar, Does (Did) (Should) the Exclusionary Rule Rest on a "Principled Basis" Rather
than an "Empirical Proposition"?, 16 Creighton L. Rev. 565, 620-21 (1983); Yale Kamisar,
Wolf and Lustig Ten Years Later: Illegal State Evidence in State and Federal Courts, 43 Minn. L.
Rev. 1083, 1145-50 (1959); Thomas S. Schrock & Robert C. Welsh, Up From
Calandra: The Exclusionary Rule as a Constitutional Requirement, 59 Minn. L. Rev. 251, 308-09
(1975); Potter Stewart, The Road to Mapp v. Ohio and Beyond: The Origins,
Development and Future of the Exclusionary Rule in Search-and-Seizure Cases, 83 Colum. L.
Rev. 1365, 1392 (1983).
n27. Sanford E. Pitler, Comment, The Origin and Development of Washington's Independent
Exclusionary Rule: Constitutional Right and Constitutionally Compelled Remedy, 61 Wash.
L. Rev. 459, 466 (1986).
n28. Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 633 (1886).
n29. Amar IV, supra note 5, at 459.
n30. See Amar II, supra note 5, at 91 (saying that "nothing in the text, history, or structure of
the Fourth Amendment supports" the exclusionary rule).
n31. 116 U.S. at 634-35.
n32. 232 U.S. 383, 398 (1914). See D. Shane Jones, Application of the "Exclusionary Rule" to Bar
Use of Illegally Seized Evidence in Civil School Disciplinary Proceedings, 52 Wash.
U. J. Urb. & Contemp. L. 375, 376 (1997) (claiming the Supreme Court created the exclusionary
rule in Weeks); James Stribopoulos, Lessons From the Pupil: A Canadian Solution to the
American Exclusionary Rule Debate, 22 B.C. Int'l & Comp. L. Rev. 77, 94 (1999) (claiming the
Supreme Court "introduced the exclusionary rule to American law through its 1914
decision in Weeks"); Captain Douglas R. Wright, How to Improve Military Search and Seizure
Law, 116 Mil. L. Rev. 157, 171 (1987) (stating Weeks "originated" the exclusionary rule);
Christopher A. Harkins, Note, The Pinocchio Defense Witness Impeachment Exception to the
Exclusionary Rule: Combating a Defendant's Right to Use with Impunity the Perjurious
Testimony of Defense Witnesses, 1990 U. Ill. L. Rev. 375, 378 (1990) (saying the Supreme Court
announced the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule in Weeks).
n33. See, e.g., Amar I, supra note 5, at 788; Amar II, supra note 5, at 22; Amar IV, supra note 5,
at 460-61.
n34. See, e.g., Virginia v. Moore, 128 S.Ct. 1598, 1603-04 (2008) (citing Akhil Reed Amar, Fourth
Amendment First Principles, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 757, 764 (1994), for the proposition
that warrantless arrests were "taken for granted" by early judges); Atwater v. City of Lago
Vista, 532 U.S. 318, 332 n.6 (2001) (citing Amar's Fourth Amendment commentary as
authoritative); City of West Covina v. Perkins, 525 U.S. 234, 247 n.2 (1999) (Thomas, J.,
concurring) (citing Amar's Fourth Amendment scholarship); Dubbs v. Head Start, Inc., 336
F.3d 1194, 1212 (10th Cir. 2003) (citing Akhil Reed Amar, The Constitution and Criminal
Procedure: First Principles 7-19 (1997), for the proposition that "not all searches lacking
warrants or consent are unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment").
n35. Cf. Amar III, supra note 5, at 71.
n36. See id. at 69.
n37. See supra notes 35-36.
n38. See Davies, supra note 15, at 573-74 (criticizing Amar's claims that early courts applied a
"generalized reasonableness" test for determining Fourth Amendment violations). Amar's
argument that the Framers of the Fourth Amendment did not intend to require warrants in any
circumstances has also been thoroughly undermined by countervailing scholarship. See,
e.g., Dripps, supra note 6, at 1603-08 (1996) (criticizing Amar's claims); Roots, supra note 16, at
729-31. No scholar familiar with Founding-era law would support Amar's claims that
warrants were not required for early searches and seizures. Dozens of published antebellum
decisions refute this claim alone. The citizens of early America were known to be so insistent
upon the warrant requirement that they would occasionally stop an officer in the act of
executing an arrest and demand to see his warrant. The 1820 South Carolina case of City
Council
v. Payne, 11 S.C.L. (2 Nott & McC.) 475 (S.C. 1820), is illustrative of a common attitude of the
citizenry regarding the warrant requirement. In City Council, a private citizen physically
rescued a suspect from a city guard, vowing that "whilst he drew the breath of life, no guard
should carry a citizen to the guard-house" without a warrant. Id. at 476. The rescuer (Payne)
was convicted of obstructing an officer only because the officer had arrested the suspect
pursuant to a recognized exception to the warrant requirement. Id. at 478-79.
n39. One published Founding-era case that appears to give partial support to Amar's thesis is
Wrexford v. Smith, 2 Root 171 (Conn. 1795). In Wrexford, a thief who stole tobacco from a
store and ran off was pursued and arrested without warrant by a person responding to an
"advertisement from the owner of the store." Id. at 171. (From the given facts, it is not clear how
much time elapsed between the theft and the pursuit.) When the thief sued for assault and
battery and false imprisonment (after being "prosecuted and convicted of the theft"), the
arrestor
was found not liable. Id. An arrestor, wrote the court, "will be excusable provided the person
taken is found guilty." Id. "Stealing is a crime so odious in itself and so destructive to the
well being of society, that every good citizen ought to assist in arresting the thief in his flight."
Id.
In general, warrants immunized searchers and seizers from civil liability. See, e.g., Horn v.
Boon, 34 S.C.L. (3 Strob.) 307 (S.C. 1848) (refusing to hold complainants liable for initiating
a prosecution against a woman accused of selling liquor without a license). But even facially
valid warrants did not immunize authorities who carried out searches or seizures in an
improper manner. See, e.g., McElhenny v. Wylie, 34 S.C.L. (3 Strob.) 284 (S.C. 1848) (holding
searcher civilly liable for search carried out late at night in which sleeping couple were
awakened in their bed, and a home was searched by a citizen posse unnecessarily). An
otherwise lawful search would be "a mere naked trespass, under color but without the sanction
of
law," if executed with unnecessary harshness and disruptiveness. Id. at 288.
n40. In fact, early American law imposed much greater civil liability upon actors in the
criminal justice system than does contemporary law. See, e.g., Roots, supra note 16, at 733-35.
Founding-era law made even judges liable for search and seizure violations. See, e.g., Taylor v.
Alexander, 6 Ohio 144, 147 (1833) ("And if the magistrate proceed unlawfully in issuing
the process, he, and not the executive officer, will be liable for the injury."). Indeed, warrants
offered no protection from civil liability in certain cases. See Duckworth v. Johnston, 7 Ala.
578, 580, 582 (1845) (a warrant issued pursuant to an accusation that did not constitute a crime
exposed the constable, the court, and the complainant to liability; even the original
complainants were liable for the execution of some improper warrants); Randall v. Henry, 5
Stew. & P. 367 (Ala. 1834) (involving a prosecutor held liable for a defective complaint);
Scott v. McCrary, 1 Stew. 315 (Ala. 1828) (civil suit against arrestors); Backus v. Dudley, 3 Conn.
568 (1821) (upholding judgment in favor of pauper who was arrested without warrant
by town selectmen); Pearce v. Atwood, 13 Mass. 324, 353 (1816) (upholding judgment against
officer who unnecessarily executed arrest warrant on the Sabbath); Holley v. Mix, 3
Wend. 350, 353-55 (N.Y. 1829) (upholding judgment and award against constable and
complainant for arresting an accused felon pursuant to a warrant that did not specifically
name the
party to be arrested); State v. Curtis, 2 N.C. (1 Hayw.) 543, 543 (1797) (stating officer is liable if
executing a warrant beyond his jurisdiction).
n41. See Lawson v. Buzines, 3 Del. (3 Harr.) 416, 416 (1842); Boggs v. Vandyke, 3 Del. (3 Harr.)
288, 288 (1840); Hall v. Hall, 6 G. & J. 386, 409 (Md. 1834) (holding that "the
constable in execution of a warrant to arrest a party, breaks another's house at his peril").
n42. See Roots, supra note 16, at 729-49 (discussing numerous early state cases).
n43. Cf. United Public Workers of America v. Mitchell, 330 U.S. 75, 95-96 (1947) (treating both
the Ninth and Tenth Amendments as mere truisms without substantive power to limit
Congress); United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100, 124 (1941) (in which the Supreme Court
dismissed the Tenth Amendment as "but a truism"); see also Kurt T. Lash, James Madison's
Celebrated Report of 1800: The Transformation of the Tenth Amendment, 74 Geo. Wash. L. Rev.
165, 192-94 (2006) (describing the Supreme Court's occasional treatment of the Ninth
and Tenth Amendments as "mere truisms," i.e., statements of the existing relationships among
the states, the people, and the national government, without any distinct authority to limit
government).
n44. It seems axiomatic that the Framers intended the Fourth Amendment to enshrine the body
of search and seizure protections, which were glorified in the most illustrious decisions
and statements of the period, rather than continuing practices that were widely criticized in
common discourse. Cf. Andrew E. Taslitz, Reconstructing the Fourth Amendment: A History
of Search and Seizure 1789-1868, at 41 (2006) ("The Fourth Amendment ultimately embodied
therefore a repudiation rather than a celebration of colonial search and seizure
precedent."). Post-Founding jurisprudence also made clear that the Fourth Amendment (or,
more properly speaking, constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and
seizures
at both state and federal levels) offered greater protection than the law of trespass. For
example, in the 1854 Alabama case of Thompson v. State, a defendant convicted of assault for
invading the home of a slave without a warrant argued that the slave owner's ratification of
the warrantless search should make the search legal in case of criminal prosecution. 25 Ala.
41, 44 (1854). "If the search was unlawful, [the slave owner]'s acquiescence in and approval of it
made it lawful, as in the beginning it was a mere civil trespass; and [the slave owner]
being the prosecutor, whatever affects him affects the State." Id. Thus, the argument was that
just as after-the-fact consent by the slave owner was a good defense to a civil action, "so it is
to an indictment" for "if, upon the facts, [the slave owner] could not recover damages, the State
ought not to convict upon the same facts, because the State would get an advantage of its
citizen if it were otherwise." Id. Yet, the Alabama Supreme Court held that it made "not the
slightest difference[] that the owner of the premises consented to or acquiesced in the search."
Id. at 48.
n45. See Findlay v. Pruitt, 9 Port. 195, 200 (Ala. 1839) (upholding liability of arrestor for
trespass and assault for arrest with insufficient cause); Braveboy v. Cockfield, 27 S.C.L. (2
McMul.) 270, 273 (S.C. 1841) (holding that words on the arrest warrant were insufficient to
justify an arrest, thus placing liability on constable); Colvert v. Moore, 17 S.C.L. (1 Bail.)
549, 549 (S.C. 1830) (action against arrestor for assault and false imprisonment); Garvin v.
Blocker, 4 S.C.L. (2 Brev.) 157, 158 (S.C. 1807) (successful suit against constable and justice
of the peace). During the early 1800s, there was virtual strict liability for every search and
seizure violation. See Randall v. Henry, 5 Stew. & P. 367 (Ala. 1834) (suggesting that someone
- the magistrate, the complainant or the arrestor - was liable for every false arrest); Reed v.
Legg, 2 Del. (2 Harr.) 173, 176 (1837) (holding that complainants are liable for procuring a
search warrant that turns up nothing, even if an executing officer is protected by the warrant);
Simpson v. Smith, 2 Del. Cas. 285 (1817) (holding person who swore out search warrant
application liable, regardless of the existence of probable cause and the procedural propriety of
his claims, when the arrestee was found innocent); State v. McDonald, 14 N.C. (3 Dev.)
468, 471-72 (1832) (officer and other defendants liable for searching a house upon inaccurate
search warrant); Harmon v. Gould, Wright 709, 710 (Ohio 1834) (all parties responsible for
invalid process were liable). Warrants were illegal if they lacked formal seals, but the lack of
such seals was no defense for a complainant who instigated the issuance of a warrant. See,
e.g., Kline v. Shuler, 30 N.C. (8 Ired.) 484, 486 (1848) (upholding liability of complainant even
though constable should not have served the defective warrant).
In contrast to the legal regime of today, even the magistrates who signed invalid warrants
were held liable in the civil courts of the nineteenth century. See Hall v. Hall, 6 G. & J. 386, 412
(Md. 1834) ("The law anxiously regards the security of a ministerial officer in serving process
directed to him ... [but] a magistrate issuing a warrant may act illegally and subject himself
to an action or to a prosecution ... ."); Miller v. Grice, 31 S.C.L. (2 Rich.) 27 (S.C. 1845) (holding a
magistrate liable for false arrest if he knowingly signs arrest warrant for a crime
committed outside his jurisdiction); Perrin v. Calhoun, 4 S.C.L. (2 Brev.) 248, 250 (S.C. 1808)
(holding magistrate liable for aiding in a trespass for wrongly endorsing an out-of-state
warrant); see also Roots, supra note 16, at 698-99 (discussing gradual abandonment of the rule
of strict liability for false arrest). If an officer was immunized from suit by a valid warrant,
a victim had recourse against those who swore out a fruitless affidavit upon which the warrant
was based. See, e.g., Reed, 2 Del. (2 Harr.) at 175.
n46. See, e.g., Hall v. Hall, 6 G. & J. 386 (Md. 1834) (involving appeal of civil suit for trespass by
constable and posse, with little mention of what happened in underlying prosecution);
Price v. Graham, 48 N.C. (3 Jones) 545, 546 (1856) (saying only that the arrestee was "brought
before two justices of the peace [and] discharged").
n47. See generally Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed (2001) (describing
growth of government as a component of democratization).
n48. See Roots, supra note 16, at 687.
n49. See id. at 687 ("Initiation and investigation of criminal cases was the nearly exclusive
province of private persons... . The courts of that period were venues for private litigation -
whether civil or criminal - and the state was rarely a party.").
n50. Id. at 687 & n.5.
n51. See, e.g., Hallett v. Lee, 3 Ala. 28, 29 (1841) (holding it is the duty of a sheriff to gather as
many citizen deputies as it takes to execute court mandates); McElhenny v. Wylie, 34
S.C.L. (3 Strob.) 284, 286 (S.C. 1848) (stating that a sheriff or deputy has power to call out a
posse "whenever he is resisted, or has reasonable grounds to suspect and believe that such
assistance will be necessary").
n52. See Randall v. Henry, 5 Stew. & P. 367 (Ala. 1834) (involving private prosecutor who
launched complaint); see also Roots, supra note 16, at 689.
n53. See generally Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Fifth Amendment (1968) (indicating that the
distinction between civil and criminal cases grew steadily between the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries).
n54. See, e.g., State v. Evans, 1 Del. Cas. 251 (1800).
n55. See Roots, supra note 16, at 698 ("The Framers lived in an era in which much less of the
world was in "plain view' of the government and a "stop and frisk' would have been rare
indeed."); see also Donald A. Dripps, Reconstruction and the Police: Two Ships Passing in the
Night?, 24 Const. Comment. 533, 535 (2007) (book review) (discussing the book's
argument that "modern law's tolerance of broad police powers conflicts with founding-era
values" (citing Andrew E. Taslitz, Reconstructing the Fourth Amendment: A History of Search
and Seizure, 1789-1868 (2006)).
n56. See, e.g., Reed v. Legg, 2 Del. (2 Harr.) 173, 173, 176 (1837) (complainant liable for swearing
out an affidavit for a search warrant which turned up no stolen goods; complainant
accompanied officers on the search); Simpson v. Smith, 2 Del. Cas. 285 (1817) (complainant was
sued for seeking search warrant which uncovered no stolen goods; the complaining
citizen actually accompanied the officer during the search); State v. McDonald, 14 N.C. (3 Dev.)
468, 469 (1832).
n57. See State v. Dean, 48 N.C. (3 Jones) 393, 395 (1856).
n58. See Reed v. Legg, 2 Del. (2 Harr.) 173, 173, 176 (1837) (indicating that a private individual
sought out and then accompanied the execution of a search warrant); State v. Hancock, 2
Del. Cas. 249 (1802). The search and seizure provisions of early state constitutions and the
federal constitution were intended to apply to private individual searchers and seizers as well
as government actors. See Roots, supra note 16, at 735.
n59. Davies, supra note 15, at 660 ("The Framers likely perceived the threat to the right to be
secure in house and person in very specific terms - they feared the possibility that future
legislatures might authorize the use of general warrants for revenue searches of houses.").
n60. Id.
n61. See generally Roots, supra note 16; see also Russell W. Galloway, Jr., The Intruding Eye: A
Status Report on the Constitutional Ban Against Paper Searches, 25 How. L.J. 367, 377
n.44 (1982) ("The Boyd case was the first Supreme Court case to discuss the issue of paper
searches because between 1790 and the Civil War, federal statutes did not authorize such
searches."). The Boyd Court addressed the rarity of the seizure in its consideration: "The act of
1863 was the first act...in this country or in England, so far as we have been able to
ascertain, which authorized the search and seizure of a man's private papers ... ." Boyd v.
United States, 116 U.S. 616, 622-23 (1886).
n62. See Davies, supra note 15, at 660.
n63. See id. at 663.
n64. See Bradford P. Wilson, The Fourth Amendment as More Than a Form of Words: The View
from the Founding, in The Bill of Rights: Original Meaning and Current Understanding
151, 154 (Eugene W. Hickock, Jr. ed., 1991).
n65. U.S. Const. amend. V ("Nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a
witness against himself....").
n66. The Federalist No. 83, at 563 (Alexander Hamilton) (Jacob E. Cooke ed., 1961).
n67. Id.; see also Taslitz, supra note 44, at 57.
n68. See State v. Wagstaff, 105 S.E. 283, 283-84 (S.C. 1920) (holding official criminally liable in
a prosecution for assault); State v. Armfield, 9 N.C. (2 Hawks) 246, 246-47 (1822)
(finding constable criminally liable for being too forceful and going beyond the scope of a
warrant).
n69. State v. Brown, 5 Del. (5 Harr.) 505, 506 (1854) (involving an officer who was criminally
indicted and convicted for entering an occupied dwelling at night without warrant while
chasing a fleeing felon); State v. Mahon, 3 Del. (3 Harr.) 568, 569 (1841) (finding arrestor lacked
sufficient authority and was unduly forceful); Long v. State, 12 Ga. 293, 295-96 (1852)
(involving vigilantes who were criminally charged with theft for wrongly taking property from
a suspected criminal without warrant).
n70. Jones v. Commonwealth, 40 Va. (1 Rob.) 748, 753 (1842) (upholding criminal liability for
the informer and the constable, but overturning conviction of magistrate who issued
invalid warrant).
n71. 4 William Blackstone, Commentaries 218.
n72. Id.
n73. See Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Fed. Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388, 413
(1971) (Burger, C.J., dissenting) (writing that society pays a high price "for such a
drastic remedy").
n74. Thus, John H. Wigmore (author of the foremost treatise on evidence) complained that the
remedy of exclusion "rests on a reverence for the Fourth Amendment so deep and cogent
that its violation will be taken notice of, at any cost of other justice, and even in the most
indirect way." John H. Wigmore, Using Evidence Obtained by Illegal Search and Seizure, 8
A.B.A. J. 479, 482 (1922).
n75. Cf. David E. Steinberg, The Original Understanding of Unreasonable Searches and
Seizures, 56 Fla. L. Rev. 1051, 1072 (2004) ("Prior to Boyd v. United States, constitutional
search and seizure provisions probably were discussed in fewer than fifty opinions.").
n76. Frederick Schauer, On the Supposed Jury-Dependence of Evidence Law, 155 U. Pa. L. Rev.
165, 168 (2006).
n77. Id.
n78. See Commonwealth v. Carver, 26 Va. (5 Rand.) 660, 661-62 (1827) (holding that decisions of
higher courts are binding on lower courts).
n79. See, e.g., Ellis v. White, 25 Ala. 540, 541-42 (1854).
n80. See Roger Roots, When the Past is a Prison: The Hardening Plight of the American
Ex-Convict, 1 Just. Pol'y J., Fall 2004, at 8,
http://www.cjcj.org/jpj/2007/08/justice/policy/journal/3 (offering some early American
anecdotes).
n81. Bernard Schwartz, A History of the Supreme Court 7 (1993) (saying "no meaningful
reporting of cases in the modern sense existed" during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth
centuries). See Ephraim Kirby, Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Superior Court of the State of
Connecticut from the Year 1785, to May, 1788, with Some Determinations in the
Supreme Court of Errors (1789) (the first full-fledged official case reporter published in the
colonies); John H. Langbein, Chancellor Kent and the History of Legal Literature, 93 Colum.
L. Rev. 547, 573 (1993) (referring to Kirby's Reports as America's first case reports). Kirby's
Reports published rulings from 1785 to 1788, an important period. Aside from Kirby's
Reports, only a handful of ratification-era lawyers' journals have been preserved, and
collections of reports of trials reported in early newspapers or books are found here and there.
See,
e.g., The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson 1772-1773 (John T. Farrell ed., 1942)
(published diary of a judge and authentic Framer of the Constitution).
n82. See Marc M. Arkin, Rethinking the Constitutional Right to a Criminal Appeal, 39 UCLA L.
Rev. 503, 503 (1992) (conventional wisdom is that "criminal appeals did not exist at the
time of the Founding").
n83. See, e.g., id.; 6 Del. (1 Houst.) intr. n. (1920) (stating that Delaware offered no appeal
whatsoever from its criminal courts until the late nineteenth century).
n84. See, e.g., Ned v. State, 7 Port. 187, 201 (Ala. 1838) (stating appellate jurisdiction is reserved
for civil cases); Humphrey v. State, Minor 64, 65 (Ala. 1822) (holding that the Alabama
Supreme Court has no general criminal appellate jurisdiction without passage of a specific act
granting such jurisdiction by the state legislature).
n85. Steinberg, supra note 75, at 1072 ("Prior to Boyd v. United States, constitutional search
and seizure provisions probably were discussed in fewer than fifty opinions.").
n86. See Amar II, supra note 5, at 146.
n87. Davies, supra note 15, at 627 ("In the late eighteenth century, searches were still of limited
utility to criminal law enforcement. The principal possessory offense was possession of
stolen property. In the absence of forensic science, items other than stolen property would
usually have been of limited evidentiary value."). Nor is this proposition only of recent notice.
See 2 James Wilson, The Works of James Wilson 163 (James DeWitt Andrews ed., Chicago,
Callaghan & Co. 1896) (authored circa 1790) ("The principal species of evidence, which
comes before juries, is the testimony of witnesses.").
n88. Consider the example of Reed v. Legg, 2 Del. (2 Harr.) 173, 173-74 (Del. 1837), where the
facts indicate that allegedly stolen goods recovered during a search were immediately
returned to their alleged rightful owner.
n89. Sources of law known to the Framers themselves consisted primarily of treatises by
English jurists such as Hale and Blackstone. In colonial America "the reporting of any decision
was unusual," and "this state of affairs lasted well into the early national period." Langbein,
supra note 81, at 572-73 (citation omitted).
n90. Pitler, supra note 27, at 466.
n91. Amar I, supra note 5, at 786.
n92. See Davies, supra note 15, at 627.
n93. See id.
n94. See generally infra notes 292-314 and accompanying text.
n95. See Langbein, supra note 81, at 573 (referring to Kirby's Reports as the first American case
reporter).
n96. Frisbie v. Butler, 1 Kirby 213, 213 (Conn. 1787).
n97. Constitutional search and seizure provisions require warrants to state with specificity
"the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." U.S. Const. amend. IV.
However, the warrant in Frisbie v. Butler gave searchers authority to "search all suspected
places and persons that the complainant thinks proper" and to arrest unnamed perpetrators. 1
Kirby at 213-14.
n98. Frisbie, 1 Kirby at 213-14.
n99. Id. at 214.
n100. Id.
n101. The opinion states it was issued "by the whole Court," although it is not clear how many
judges participated. Id. at 215.
n102. Id.
n103. Id.
n104. See Pitler, supra note 27, at 466 n.36 ("The earliest statement of the common law rule
came in Commonwealth v. Dana, 43 Mass. 329 (2 Met. 1841)...."); Davies, supra note 15, at
664 n.318 (identifying the 1841 case of Commonwealth v. Dana as the first American
appearance of a court holding suggesting that courts may admit illegally seized evidence).
n105. See, e.g., Sturdevant v. Gaines, 5 Ala. 435, 436 (1843) (upholding judgment for malicious
prosecution where a criminal suspect had been arrested without probable cause and
released by pretrial habeas corpus).
n106. See generally Robert J. Pushaw, Jr., The Inherent Powers of Federal Courts and the
Structural Constitution, 86 Iowa L. Rev. 735 (2001).
n107. Grumon v. Raymond, 1 Conn. 40, 41 (1814).
n108. Id.
n109. Id.
n110. Id.
n111. Id. at 40-41.
n112. Id. at 40-41, 54.
n113. See George E. Hinman, Zephaniah Swift, in Founders and Leaders of Connecticut
1633-1783, at 293, 294 (Charles Edward Perry ed., 1934) (describing Zephaniah Swift's's early
political career).
n114. Lewis Henry Boutell, The Life of Roger Sherman 165 (Chicago, A.C. McClurg & Co. 1896).
n115. The Connecticut Wits: John Trumbull (1750-1831), Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), Joel
Barlow (1754-1812), in American Literature Survey: Colonial and Federal to 1800, at 483,
484 (Milton R. Stern & Seymour L. Gross eds., 1968).
n116. See generally Marian C. McKenna, Tapping Reeve and the Litchfield Law School (1986).
n117. William A. Beers, A Biographical Sketch of Roger Minott Sherman (Bridgeport, J.H.
Cogswell 1882).
n118. John Adams was overseas serving as Ambassador to England during the Constitutional
Convention. However, the Fourth Amendment contains language originally drafted by
Adams which first appeared in the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution. See Davies, supra note 15,
at 566 n.25 (stating that "virtually all of the language in the Fourth Amendment,
including "unreasonable searches and seizures,' had appeared as of the 1780 Massachusetts
provision" drafted by Adams).
n119. Pitler, supra note 27, at 466.
n120. Allen E. Shoenberger, The Not So Great Writ: The European Court of Human Rights Finds
Habeas Corpus an Inadequate Remedy: Should American Courts Reexamine the Writ?,
56 Cath. U. L. Rev. 47, 56 (2006) ("The ambit of the writ has been greatly limited - some would
say to the virtual vanishing point.").
n121. See Arkin, supra note 82, at 535, 536 (finding that "habeas corpus was primarily a pretrial
remedy" during the early 1800s); Rollin C. Hurd, A Treatise on the Right of Personal
Liberty, and on the Writ of Habeas Corpus and the Practice Connected with It: With a View of
the Law of Extradition of Fugitives 182 (Albany, W.C. Little & Co. 1858) (quoting In re
Carlton, 7 Cow. 471 (1827)) ("Any person illegally detained has a right to be discharged, and it
is the duty of this court to restore him to his liberty.").
n122. See James Robertson, Lecture, Quo Vadis, Habeas Corpus?, 55 Buff. L. Rev. 1063, 1080
(2008) (saying that after 1920, habeas corpus "began its transition into what it mostly is
today - a legal tool for bringing post-conviction, collateral challenges in criminal cases.").
n123. Akhil Reed Amar, Of Sovereignty and Federalism, 96 Yale L.J. 1425, 1509 n.329 (1987).
n124. U.S. Const. art. I, § 9, cl. 2.
n125. William S. Church, A Treatise on the Writ of Habeas Corpus § 87 (2d ed., San Francisco,
Bancroft-Whitney 1893).
n126. See, e.g., Porter v. Porter, 53 So. 546, 547 (Fla. 1910) ("The writ of habeas corpus is a
common-law writ of ancient origin designed as a speedy method of affording a judicial
inquiry into the course of any alleged unlawful custody of an individual or any alleged
unlawful actual deprivation of personal liberty."); Ex parte Sullivan, 138 P. 815, 821 (Okla.
Crim.
App. 1914) (saying the writ is granted to inquire into all cases of illegal imprisonment); see also
Sims v. M'Lendon, 34 S.C.L. (3 Strob.) 557, 557 (S.C. 1849) (involving suspect released
from jail without indictment after a defective arrest).
n127. See Caroline Nasrallah Belk, Note, Next Friend Standing and the War on Terror, 53 Duke
L.J. 1747, 1750-54 (2004) (discussing the history of so-called next-friend standing in
habeas corpus cases).
n128. See People ex rel. McCanliss v. McCanliss, 175 N.E. 129, 129 (N.Y. 1931) ("By immemorial
tradition the aim of habeas corpus is a justice that is swift and summary.").
n129. See Porter v. Porter, 53 So. 546, 547 (Fla. 1910) ("The writ requires the body of the person
alleged to be unlawfully held in custody or restrained of his liberty to be brought before
the court that appropriate judgment may be rendered upon judicial inquiry into the alleged
unlawful restraint.").
n130. See Ex parte Tong, 108 U.S. 556, 559 (1883) (the purpose of a habeas inquiry "is not to
inquire into the criminal act which is complained of, but into the right to liberty
notwithstanding the act"); 20 Am. Jur. Trials § 3, at 13 (1973) ("Moreover, the guilt or
innocence of the petitioner is in no way brought into question ... .").
n131. See 1 Joseph Chitty, A Practical Treatise on the Criminal Law 119 (2d ed., London, Samuel
Brooke 1826). As stated by Chitty:


Indeed whenever a person is restrained of his liberty, by being confined in a common gaol
[jail], or by a private person, whether it be for a criminal or civil cause, and it is apprehended
that the imprisonment is illegal, he may regularly by habeas corpus have his body, and the
proceedings under which he is detained, removed to some superior jurisdiction, having
authority to examine the legality of the commitment; and on the return, he will be either
discharged, bailed, or remanded.

Id.
n132. See Ex parte Beatty, 12 Wend. 229, 231-33 (N.Y. 1834) (involving suspect discharged due to
irregular process); Nelson v. Cutter, 17 F. Cas. 1316, 1316 (C.C.D. Ohio 1844) (No.
10,104) (discharging defendants due to defect in arrest affidavit); Commonwealth v. Alexander,
6 Binn. 176, 176-77 (Pa. 1813) (discharging debtor due to wrongful arrest).
n133. See Lutterloh v. Powell, 2 N.C. (1 Hayw.) 307, 307-08 (1796).
n134. Id. at 307, 308.
n135. See Arkin, supra note 82, at 535-36 ("The difficulty in ascertaining state habeas practice
in the antebellum period partly results from the fact that habeas decisions were reported
sporadically at best, especially by the lower courts where petitions for the writ were
entertained most frequently."); see also In re Reynolds, 20 F. Cas. 592, 595 (N.D.N.Y. 1867) (No.
11,721) ("During my own service as judge in a state court, I exercised the power of discharging
minors held under invalid enlistments in repeated instances ... In most of these instances
not even a newspaper notice of the case was ever published.").
n136. See Sims v. M'Lendon, 34 S.C.L. (3 Strob.) 557, 557 (S.C. 1849) (involving suspect released
from jail without indictment after a defective arrest); M'Clintic v. Lockridge, 38 Va.
(11 Leigh) 253, 253, 258 (1840) (upholding issuance of habeas corpus writ for a prisoner
arrested pursuant to an invalid escape warrant).
n137. See Miller v. Grice, 30 S.C.L. (1 Rich.) 147, 147 (S.C. 1844) (describing habeas corpus
discharge of defendant arrested on a South Carolina warrant for a crime committed in
North Carolina; defendant later sued and recovered against the magistrate who signed the
warrant, Miller v. Grice, 31 S.C.L. (2 Rich.) 27, 31-32, 36 (S.C. 1845)).
n138. See Green v. Garrett, 17 Va. (3 Munf.) 339 (1812).
n139. Id. at 343 (argument of Wickham).
n140. Id. at 344.
n141. 40 Va. (1 Rob.) 748 (1842).
n142. Id. at 750.
n143. Id.
n144. Hemphill v. Coats, 4 Stew. & P. 125 (Ala. 1833) (quashing and dismissing case after
judgment on ground that underlying arrest warrant was irregular and defective).
n145. Id. at 128.
n146. See, e.g., In re Stacy, 10 Johns. 328, 334 (1813) (per curiam) (releasing civilian arrested
for treason by military authorities due to lack of jurisdiction); Miller v. Grice, 30 S.C.L. (1
Rich.) 147, 147-48 (S.C. 1844) (describing habeas corpus discharge of defendant arrested by
warrant outside the jurisdiction where the alleged crime was committed).
n147. For example, in 1850, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed the murder conviction of an
African-American slave because no evidence of a valid charging warrant was admitted into
evidence during the prosecution's case at trial. Judge v. State, 8 Ga. 173 (1850). Although a valid
warrant charging murder existed, the warrant was not introduced until after the defense
moved for a directed verdict after the closing of the prosecution's case. Id. at 176. The trial court
admitted the warrant; the Supreme Court reversed. Id. at 176-77.
n148. Ex parte Burford, 7 U.S. (3 Cranch) 448 (1806).
n149. Id. at 449-50. The opinion provides few specific details of Burford's allegedly
objectionable conduct; however, the Court at one point addresses the issue of how authorities
should
properly deal with a "person of ill fame." Id. at 452-53.
n150. Id. at 450-52.
n151. Id. at 453.
n152. Id. at 451.
n153. The panel of justices that decided Burford included William Cushing, William Paterson,
Bushrod Washington, Samuel Chase, John Marshall and William Johnson. Cushing had
been a Massachusetts judge during the Revolutionary and ratification periods. Paterson
actually signed the Constitution as a convention delegate from New Jersey. Chase had been a
member of the Continental Congress during the Revolution and signed the Declaration of
Independence. Bushrod Washington was George Washington's nephew. John Marshall had
been
a member of the Virginia Convention that ratified the Constitution. William Johnson was the
son of a Revolutionary War hero and studied law in the office of Charles Cotesworth
Pinckney, an influential delegate at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. See generally
Gustavus Myers, History of the Supreme Court of the United States (1912).
n154. That the Marshall Court assumed Burford may have been a real offender is clear from the
penultimate sentence in the opinion: "If the prisoner is really a person of ill fame, and
ought to find sureties for his good behavior, the [lower court] justices may proceed de novo,
and take care that their proceedings are regular." Burford, 7 U.S. at 453.
n155. 547 U.S. 586 (2006).
n156. 129 S.Ct. 695 (2009).
n157. Hudson, 547 U.S. at 591.
n158. 8 U.S. (4 Cranch) 75 (1807).
n159. See generally Eric M. Freedman, Habeas Corpus: Rethinking the Great Writ of Liberty
20-35 (2001) (providing detailed analysis of the proceedings in Bollman).
n160. See id.
n161. Bollman, 8 U.S. (4 Cranch) 75. It was a practice in early American criminal litigation for
defendants to "demur" to the charges against them rather than tendering a plea when
challenging warrants or charging instruments. Upon a defendant's demur, a court would
inquire into the validity of the complaint and other documents and conduct whatever
proceedings
were necessary to examine the propriety of the accusations. In the case of Grumon v.
Raymond, for example, the demurrals of five arrested suspects apparently led to a summary
discharge of the suspects as a consequence of an illegal general warrant. 1 Conn. 40, 41 (1814)
(describing a pretrial discharge after the five suspects demurred to the charges).
n162. See Bollman, 8 U.S. (4 Cranch) at 125 ("If ... upon this inquiry it manifestly appears that
no such crime has been committed, or that the suspicion entertained of the prisoner was
wholly groundless, in such cases only is it lawful totally to discharge him.") (quoting a "very
learned and accurate commentator") (internal quotation marks omitted).
n163. Id. at 109-10 (argument of C. Lee).
n164. Id. at 136.
n165. It should be noted that in earlier proceedings in the Bollman case, the D.C. Circuit Court,
also represented by bona fide Founding Fathers such as William Cranch, a nephew of
John Adams, had written that the issuance of arrest warrants against the men was
inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment. See United States v. Bollman, 24 F. Cas. 1189, 1190,
1192-93
(C.C.D.C. 1807) (No. 14,622).
n166. Even those Fourth Amendment scholars who are aware of Burford and Bollman don't
seem to find their words to be as significant as I do. See Wayne R. LaFave, Pinguitudinous
Police, Pachydermatous Prey: Whence Fourth Amendment "Seizures"?, 1991 U. Ill. L. Rev. 729,
764 (1991) (saying "the very first Fourth Amendment case of any consequence to reach
the Supreme Court" was Boyd v. United States in 1886). Davies discusses Burford and Bollman
in a lengthy footnote but doesn't seem to regard the cases as making any important
statements about the Fourth Amendment or the exclusionary rule. See Davies, supra note 15, at
613 n.174. Certainly, statesmen of the nineteenth century regarded Bollman as an
important precedent, which supported exclusionary remedies for illegal seizures of persons.
See, e.g., James Asheton Bayard, Executive Usurpation: Speech of Hon. James A. Bayard, of
Delaware, in the Senate of the United States 15 (July 19, 1861) (transcript available in the
Harvard College Library) (addressing Fourth Amendment law). Bayard stated that:

T
here must be probable cause of guilt, and without that supported by oath, the court will
discharge. There must also be authority for the arrest and commitment, or the court will
discharge. If an offense be not charged, if there is no oath, or the oath does not show probable
cause in support of the charges, as in the case of Swartout [sic] and Bollman, the court will
discharge.

Id.
n167. See supra notes 153, 167. After the Court's decision in Burford, but before the Court's
decision in Bollman, Justice Paterson died. His seat was taken by Henry Brockholst
Livingston, another Founder who had been a Revolutionary War officer.
n168. Again, the quotation marks frame a rebuttal to the Supreme Court's recent claims
regarding the exclusionary rule. See supra notes 155-157 and accompanying text.
n169. See infra Part VIII and accompanying notes.
n170. Roger Roots, If It's Not a Runaway, It's Not a Real Grand Jury, 33 Creighton L. Rev. 821,
840-41 (2000).
n171. Robertson, supra note 122, at 1074.
n172. See generally Walter Flavius McCaleb, Ph.D., The Aaron Burr Conspiracy (New York,
Wilson-Erickson 1936) (1903).
n173. See 1 J.F.H. Claiborne, Mississippi, As a Province, Territory and State 284 (La. State Univ.
Press 1964) (1880) (reprinting the grand jury's presentment). Burr was later rearrested
on essentially the same charges, tried, and acquitted. See McCaleb, supra note 172.
n174. Roots, supra note 170, at 841.
n175. See, e.g., Treadaway v. Finney (Conn. Super. Ct. 1773), in American Historical
Association, Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson, 1772-1773, at 206 (1942)
(conceding that plaintiff recovering damages for false arrest "does not say what has been the
Event or is become of the information").
n176. Cf. Sims v. M'Lendon, 34 S.C.L. (3 Strob.) 557, 557 (S.C. 1849) (involving suit over defective
prosecution; the underlying charge was dismissed without clear procedural
narrative); Cleek v. Haines, 23 Va. (2 Rand.) 440, 440 (1824) (involving false arrest case over an
arrest which was discharged by justice of the peace without prosecution). Taylor v.
Alexander, 6 Ohio 144 (1833), an 1833 Ohio Supreme Court decision, provides an example of a
case in which exclusion may have gone unrecorded. Taylor was arrested after a flawed
search warrant was executed on his residence. Id. The warrant was flawed in that the
underlying affidavit claimed the alleged crime - stealing buckwheat - was committed by either
Taylor or his wife, but the warrant required that only Taylor answer for the crime if the goods
were found. Id. at 145-46. The allegedly stolen items sought by the search warrant were
found in Taylor's possession, and he was arrested and brought before a magistrate. Id. at 144,
148. Little further is known of the criminal prosecution (if any). Taylor later sued his
arrestors for trespass, assault and battery, and false imprisonment based on the flawed
warrant, but he did not recover. Id. at 144-45. From the reported facts on appeal we know: (1)
Taylor was found in possession of purportedly stolen goods sought by the (invalid) search
warrant; (2) any criminal case against Taylor ended in Taylor's exoneration (perhaps because
of
the invalidity of the search warrant); and (3) Taylor later sued his arrestors for torts arising
from the invalid search warrant. Id. at 144-45, 148.
Consider also the case of State v. Brown, 5 Del. (5 Harr.) 505, 505 (1854), involving criminal
charges against a town watchman who illegally entered a home without warrant while
chasing a chicken thief. The case mentions the underlying arrests of "three negroes" who were
"taken before the Mayor next morning and discharged" due to the illegality of the
warrantless arrests. Id. at 506.
n177. See Reed v. Legg, 2 Del. (2 Harr.) 173, 174 (1837) (stating only that "the prosecution of
course failed" after the suspect's possession of allegedly stolen goods was found to have an
innocent explanation, "and these actions were brought ... for the alledged trespass"); Johnson
v. Chambers, 32 N.C. (10 Ired.) 287, 290 (1849) (saying only that "magistrate had dismissed
the warrant, on which the plaintiff had been arrested"); Murray v. Lackey, 6 N.C. (2 Mur.) 368,
368-69 (1818) (involving malicious prosecution suit where evidence of underlying
discharge was not recorded).
n178. Pitler, supra note 27, at 466.
n179. See Price v. Graham, 48 N.C. (3 Jones) 545, 546-47 (1856) (suggesting that man arrested
under an invalid warrant and immediately discharged upon appearance was released
apparently because of the invalidity of the warrant; the accused murderer later sued the
complainant for malicious prosecution).
n180. See supra Part VI and accompanying notes.
n181. Pitler, supra note 27, at 466.
n182. The discussion on this topic is dominated by voices calling for one Fourth Amendment
remedy exclusive of all others: "With respect to Fourth Amendment remedies, almost all
commentators take for granted that either liquidated damages or exclusion will be exclusively
applied." Alan Dalsass, Note, Options: An Alternative Perspective on Fourth Amendment
Remedies, 50 Rutgers L. Rev. 2297, 2298 n.8 (1998).
n183. Cf., e.g., Letter from Charles Francis Adams to Hon. William H. Seward (Feb. 25, 1864), in
Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Message of the
President to the Second Session Thirty-Eighth Congress (1864 pt. 1) 230-31 (1865) (quoting "Sir
H. Cairns" as saying, "The moment you arrest [a criminal suspect] you have made the
seizure, and the law also says in the interests of justice that the magistrate may remand him
within certain limits ... and, moreover, there are safeguards in the habeas corpus against the
abuse of authority there... . It is no answer to say that the individual may have his action for
damages where there has been a breach of the law.") (emphasis added).
n184. McCall v. McDowell, 15 F. Cas. 1235 (C.C.D. Cal. 1867) (No. 8,673).
n185. Id. at 1242 (emphasis added).
n186. 21 Ind. 370, 372, 383 (1863).
n187. Id. at 373.
n188. Id.
n189. See Ex parte Field, 9 F. Cas. 1, 9 (C.C.D. Vt. 1862) (No. 4,761) (releasing inmate charged
with discouraging enlistment and fining a marshal for failing to produce the inmate upon
receipt of the habeas corpus writ).
n190. Id. at 3-4. Judge Smalley drew a clear conceptual nexus between habeas corpus as a
remedy for search and seizure violations and the paper seizures condemned in the English
decision of Wilkes v. Wood that guided the Framers who drafted the Fourth Amendment. See
Wilkes v. Wood, (1763) 98 Eng. Rep. 489 (K.B.); infra notes 242-251 and accompanying
text. "If the arrest and detention in this case be sustained," wrote Judge Smalley, "it strikes a
much more deadly and fatal blow to civil liberty, than did the general warrants which the
British cabinet ordered to be issued against the printers and publishers of the North Briton,
number 45 ... ." Ex parte Field, 9 F. Cas. at 6 (citing the search of the residence of House of
Commons member John Wilkes in 1763).
n191. See Bennett L. Gershman, The Gate is Open But the Door is Locked - Habeas Corpus and
Harmless Error, 51 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 115, 124 (1994) ("Each Term [of the Supreme
Court] seems to bring several new decisions that further restrict the availability of the writ.");
Robertson, supra note 122, at 1084 (remarking that federal judges now "expend a lot more
energy" dismissing habeas petitions by applying the numerous statutory and doctrinal
limitations of contemporary habeas practice than they would if they ever reached the merits of
such
petitions).
n192. See, e.g., Lacey v. Palmer, 24 S.E. 930, 931 (Va. 1896) ("The...writ of habeas corpus is not
to determine the guilt or innocence of the prisoner.").
n193. U.S. Const. amend. IV ("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 upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and
particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.").
n194. Amar II, supra note 5, at 113.
n195. Malcolm Richard Wilkey, The Exclusionary Rule: Why Suppress Valid Evidence?, 62
Judicature 214, 215-32 (1978).
n196. Malcolm Richard Wilkey, Why Suppress Valid Evidence?, as reprinted in Taking Sides:
Clashing Views on Controversial Legal Issues 264, 269 (M. Ethan Katsh ed., 5th ed.
1993).
n197. Id.
n198. Ker v. Illinois, 119 U.S. 436, 445 (1886).
n199. 127 U.S. 700, 715 (1888).
n200. 342 U.S. 519, 522-23 (1952).
n201. Professor Amar has made the same assertion as Wilkey. See Amar II, supra note 5, at 108
(citing Frisbie v. Collins for the claim that "an exception for unconstitutional seizures of
persons was always recognized").
n202. See, e.g., Miller v. Grice, 30 S.C.L. (1 Rich.) 147, 147-48 (S.C. 1844) (describing habeas
corpus discharge of a defendant arrested by warrant outside the jurisdiction where the
alleged crime was committed); In re Stacy, 10 Johns. 328, 333-34 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1813) (Kent,
C.J.) (releasing civilian arrested for treason by military authorities due to lack of
jurisdiction).
n203. Frisbie, 342 U.S. at 522 (citing Ker, 119 U.S. at 444).
n204. See Adams v. New York, 192 U.S. 585, 596 (1904) (saying Ker established that an illegal
arrest "would not prevent the trial of the person thus abducted in the state wherein he had
committed an offense").
n205. Ker, 119 U.S. at 444; see also Annotation, Right to Try One Brought within Jurisdiction
Illegally or as a Result of a Mistake as to Identity, 165 A.L.R. 947, 948 (1946). Only
Kansas, it was said, adhered to precedents "contrary to the general rule." 165 A.L.R. at 950.
n206. See supra notes 141-146 and accompanying text. The case of In re Pleasants, 11 Am. Jurist
& L. Mag. 257 (1834), almost directly contradicted the ruling in Ker. In Pleasants, an
inmate arrested upon a warrant issued in the D.C. Circuit but executed in the Eastern District
of Virginia was ordered discharged, on grounds that the warrant was without validity in
Virginia. Id. at 257-59.
n207. In re May, 1 N.W. 1021, 1021, 1024 (Mich. 1879) (ordering release of prostitute arrested
without warrant).
n208. Id. at 1024.
n209. People v. Crocker, 1 Mich. 31, 31 (1869).
n210. 18 P. 177, 178-79 (Kan. 1888).
n211. Id. at 178.
n212. John E. Theuman, Annotation, Modern Status of Rule Relating to Jurisdiction of State
Court to Try Criminal Defendant Brought within Jurisdiction Illegally or as a Result of
Fraud or Mistake, 25 A.L.R. 4th 157 (1983) (emphasis added).
n213. Annotation, Right to Try One Brought within Jurisdiction Illegally or as a Result of
Mistake as to Identity, 18 A.L.R. 509, 512 (1922) (citing State v. Simmons, 18 P. 177 (Kan.
1888); State v. Garrett, 45 P. 93 (Kan. 1896); In re Robinson, 45 N.W. 267 (Neb. 1890)).
n214. Judge Wilkey's argument often recurs in anti-exclusion scholarship. See, e.g., Amar II,
supra note 5, at 108 (citing Frisbie v. Collins for the proposition that "even at the height of
the exclusionary rule, an exception for unconstitutional seizures of persons was always
recognized").
n215. See David B. Kopel, The Self-Defense Cases: How the United States Supreme Court
Confronted a Hanging Judge in the Nineteenth Century and Taught Some Lessons for
Jurisprudence in the Twenty-First, 27 Am. J. Crim. L. 293, 302 (2000) (footnotes omitted) ("At
common law, it was well-settled that if a person was attacked by a peace officer, and the
person did not know that the attacker was a peace officer acting with a proper warrant, the
person could resist the attack. If necessary, deadly force was permitted."). Even fugitive
criminals who jumped bail were privileged to shoot to kill officers who employed improper
force against them. See id. at 302-03.
n216. Roots, supra note 16, at 701 (citing Coyle v. Hurtin, 10 Johns. 85 (N.Y. 1813)); see also
McGehee v. State, 26 Ala. 154, 154 (1855) (holding that resistance to fatally defective
indictment was justified); State v. Crocker, 6 Del. (1 Houst.) 434, 434-35 (1874) (exonerating a
defendant who resisted a constable "with great force and violence" when the constable
sought to arrest him without a warrant); Rex v. Gay, Quincy Mass. Rep. 1761-1772, at 91-92
(1763) (Boston, Little, Brown & Co. 1865) (acquitting defendant who battered sheriff when
sheriff attempted an arrest with a facially irregular warrant); State v. Worley, 33 N.C. (11 Ired.)
242, 243 (1850) ("If there be no seal, the precept is void and affords no protection to the
officer attempting to execute it; and, if its execution is resisted by the defendant, he is guilty of
no offence against the law, though, in doing so, the person of the officer be assaulted.");
State v. Curtis, 2 N.C. (1 Hayw.) 543, 543 (1797) ("As the officer did not tell Curtis for what he
arrested him, and the warrant he had was not under seal, Curtis who resisted, and beat
him for making the arrest, was acquitted.").
n217. See Starr v. United States, 153 U.S. 614, 623, 628 (1894) (overturning murder conviction of
bail jumper Henry Starr on grounds that the jury had not been instructed on the
privilege to resist a false arrest).
n218. See Adams v. State, 48 S.E. 910, 911-12 (Ga. 1904) (indicating third-party intermeddlers
were privileged to forcibly liberate wrongfully arrested persons from unlawful custody).
n219. See 1 William Hawkins, A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown 103-04 (John Curwood ed.,
8th ed., London, S. Sweet 1824); see also Roberts v. State, 14 Mo. 138 (1851) (reversing
murder conviction on grounds that a person killing an officer who is arresting him illegally is
guilty of only manslaughter). When a posse of marshals attempted to arrest a suspected train
robber near Checotah, Oklahoma Territory in 1895, the suspect shot and killed a Cherokee
Indian policeman. Glenn Shirley, Law West of Fort Smith: A History of Frontier Justice in the
Indian Territory, 1834-1896, at 73 (1957). At the suspect's trial for murder, Judge Isaac Parker
instructed the jury to acquit the defendant of the murder charge, based on an unlawful
arrest attempt without a warrant. Id. No verdict on the robbery charge was reported. Id.
n220. City Council v. Payne, 11 S.C.L. (2 Nott & McC.) 475, 476 (S.C. 1820).
n221. See id. at 477-79.
n222. See Andrew P. Wright, Resisting Unlawful Arrests: Inviting Anarchy or Protecting
Individual Freedom?, 46 Drake L. Rev. 383, 388 (1997) (discussing the states' gradual departure
from recognizing the right to resist unlawful arrests).
n223. Cf. State v. M'Lain, 4 S.C.L. (2 Brev.) 443, 443-44 (S.C. 1810) (quashing indictment of a
purported pig thief because the word pig does not appear in the statute criminalizing hog
stealing).
n224. See Roots, supra note 16, at 697 (emphasis omitted) (describing the "slow alteration of
the criminal courts into a venue only for the government's claims against private persons").
n225. The Magna Carta's due process clause recognized the importance of procedural sequence
as early as 1215. Authorities could move on the people only after strictly following the
law of the land; otherwise, the people had every right to resist authority and demand
restoration of the status quo ante. See Magna Carta, para. 39 (1215), available at
http://www.bl.uk/treasures/magnacarta/translation/mc_trans.html (last visited Dec. 1, 2009)
("No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possession, or
outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with
force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by
the law of the land.") (British Library translation).
n226. Entick v. Carrington, 19 How. St. Tr. 1029, 1042 (1765) (argument of plaintiff's counsel).
n227. See infra notes 239-253 and accompanying text.
n228. See Bad Elk v. United States, 177 U.S. 529, 537 (1900) (holding that an arrestee, in some
circumstances, may shoot to kill an officer who displays a gun with intent to commit a
warrantless arrest based on insufficient cause).
n229. Cf. Noles v. State, 26 Ala. 31, 40 (1855) (defense counsel citing more than a dozen cases).
The court stated that:

E
very arrest of a freeman without warrant, unless it be under a charge of felony, is unlawful,
and he may use as much force as is necessary either to prevent the arrest, or to effect his
escape if arrested; and if he cannot prevent this unlawful arrest, or regain his liberty, but by
slaying the aggressor, he has the right to do so ... .

Id.; see also Woodruff v. Woodruff, 22 Ga. 237, 241, 245-46 (1857) (standing for the general
proposition that an individual may display a firearm upon the approach of investigators and
threaten to shoot the investigators if they continue forward unless the investigators have some
lawful authority to do so).
n230. The doctrines imposed by modern courts to immunize prosecutors, police and judges
were unheard of in early America. See, e.g., Burlingham v. Wylee, 2 Root 152, 152-53 (Conn.
Super. Ct. 1794) (holding both the justice who issued a capias warrant and the constable who
arrested a Connecticut resident without proper jurisdiction civilly liable for trespass, false
imprisonment and assault and battery); Percival v. Jones, 2 Johns. Cas. 49, 49 (N.Y. 1800)
(holding justice of the peace liable for ordering imprisonment without taking proper steps,
despite the justice's claims of good faith). If an arrest warrant varied from its underlying
affidavit (or alleged a crime not justified by facts stated in the affidavit), the issuing magistrate
was liable. See Randall v. Henry, 5 Stew. & P. 367 (Ala. 1834); Bennett v. Black, 1 Stew. 494 (Ala.
1828) (involving magistrate held liable for warrant charging offense different from
offense alleged in affidavit); Grumon v. Raymond, 1 Conn. 40, 47-48 (1814) (upholding liability
of the justice of the peace who issued an imprecise warrant and the constable who
executed it); Morgan v. Hughes, 2 T.R. 225, 100 Eng. Rep. 123 (K.B. 1788) (involving magistrate
held liable for issuing a defective warrant).
n231. See Galloway, supra note 61, at 372 ("The mere evidence rule...prohibited government
seizure of objects merely because of their evidentiary value in proving an individual guilty
of a crime.").
n232. See, e.g., Cohoon v. Speed, 47 N.C. (2 Jones) 133, 135 (1855) (search warrants are valid
only when larceny is charged, and such warrants cannot be used to search for other
evidence); State v. McDonald, 14 N.C. (3 Dev.) 468, 470 (1832) ("A search warrant in this state,
is to be granted only where a larceny is charged to have been committed."); see also
Father of Candor, A Letter Concerning Libels, Warrants, and the Seizure of Papers; With a View
to Some Late Proceedings, and the Defence of Them by the Majority 47 (2d ed.,
London, J. Almon 1764) [hereinafter A Letter Concerning Libels] ("Nothing, as I apprehend, can
be forcibly taken from any man, or his house entered, without some specific charge
under oath... . It must either be sworn that I have certain stolen goods, or such a particular
thing that is criminal in itself ... . Without these limitations, there is no liberty or free
enjoyment
of person or property ... .").
n233. See Galloway, supra note 61, at 390, 390 n.100 (discussing the long history of the
constitutional ban on the seizure of private papers).
n234. Chitty's Treatise on the Criminal Law, published in various editions at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, enunciated the mere evidence rule as described in Entick v.
Carrington. See 1 Joseph Chitty, A Practical Treatise on the Criminal Law: Comprising the
Practice, Pleadings, and Evidence, which Occur in the Course of Criminal Prosecutions,
Whether by Indictment or Information: with a Copious Collection of Precedents 65 (London, n.
pub., 2d ed., corr., enlrg. 1826) (citing 11 St. Tr. 313, 321) ("But a search warrant for
libels and other papers of a suspected party is illegal; for ... the difference between seizing
stolen goods and private papers of the party accused is apparent. In the one, I am permitted to
seize my own goods ... . In the other, the party's own property would be seized ... .").
n235. See Warden v. Hayden, 387 U.S. 294, 298-301 (1967).
n236. See Thomas M. Cooley, A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest Upon the
Legislative Power of the States of the American Union 365 (Boston, Little, Brown &
Co., 5th ed. 1883) (1874) (stating that the common law "secures to the citizen immunity in his
home against the prying eyes of the government, and protection in person, property, and
papers, against even the process of the law, except in a few specified cases") (emphasis added);
see also Jeter v. Martin, 4 S.C.L. (2 Brev.) 156, 157 (S.C. 1807) (saying that account
books of common citizens were considered inadmissible due to lack of reliability).
n237. See Roots, supra note 16, at 734.
n238. It appears that Professor Davies and this author disagree over the definition of the term
"mere evidence rule." In Davies' seminal Fourth Amendment article, he suggested that the
mere evidence rule was first articulated in Boyd v. United States in 1886. See Davies, supra
note 15, at 727, 726 n.511. Davies seems to define the mere evidence rule as something akin
to the exclusionary rule itself. The distinction may not be important, except our differing views
of the Boyd decision flow from it. In my reading, the mere evidence rule was alive and
well in 1791 when the Fourth Amendment was ratified, leading American jurists down a clear
path toward the Boyd and Weeks decisions; while in the view of Davies (as I read it), Boyd
represented more of a "novel and sweeping" departure from the jurisprudence which preceded
it. Davies, supra note 15, at 726.
n239. Amar II, supra note 5, at 23.
n240. See id. at 6.
n241. See Amar I, supra note 5, at 772 (describing Wilkes v. Wood as the case "whose lessons
the Fourth Amendment was undeniably designed to embody"); see also Berger v. New
York, 388 U.S. 41, 49 (1967) (citation omitted) ("Almost a century thereafter this Court took
specific and lengthy notice of Entick v. Carrington, finding that its holding was undoubtedly
familiar to and "in the minds of those who framed the Fourth Amendment....'" (quoting Boyd v.
United States, 116 U.S. 616, 626-27 (1886))); Stanford v. Texas, 379 U.S. 476, 484
(1965) (describing Entick as a "wellspring of the rights now protected by the Fourth
Amendment"); Lopez v. United States, 373 U.S. 427, 454 (1963) (Brennan, J., dissenting)
(citation
and footnote omitted):


In the celebrated case of Entick v. Carrington, Lord Camden laid down two distinct principles:
that general search warrants are unlawful because of their uncertainty; and that searches
for evidence are unlawful because they infringe the privilege against self-incrimination. Lord
Camden's double focus was carried over into the structure of the Fourth Amendment.

Marcus v. Search Warrant, 367 U.S. 717, 728 (1961) (discussing "the great case of Entick");
Frank v. Maryland, 359 U.S. 360, 363 (1959) (citation omitted) ("In 1765, in England, what
is properly called the great case of Entick v. Carrington announced the principle of English law
which became part of the Bill of Rights...."); United States v. Lefkowitz, 285 U.S. 452,
466 (1932) (stating "Lord Camden declared that...the law of England did not authorize a search
of private papers to help forward conviction even in cases of most atrocious crime... The
teachings of that great case were cherished by our statesmen when the Constitution was
adopted."); Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 626 (1886) (calling Entick "one of the
landmarks of English liberty" and holding that the Fourth Amendment was intended to
incorporate its rulings).
n242. See Otis H. Stephens & Richard A. Glenn, Unreasonable Searches and Seizures: Rights
and Liberties Under the Law 32-34 (2006) (providing an overview of Wilkes v. Wood).
n243. Horace Bleakley, Life of John Wilkes 94 (1917) (describing the investigation as "a perfect
orgy of arrest" as authorities apprehended "no fewer than forty-nine persons, mostly
journeymen printers, in the space of three days").
n244. A general warrant is a warrant that does not sufficiently specify by name or other details
the person or persons to be arrested or the places and things to be searched or seized. See
Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 467 (1971) (saying a general warrant authorizes "a
general exploratory rummaging" through a person's property).
n245. See generally Peter D.G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (1996) (detailing the
litigation, the politics and much of the evidence involved in the Wilkes prosecution).
n246. See generally Wilkes v. Wood, 98 Eng. Rep. 489 (K.B.) (1763); see also Davies, supra note
15, at 562-64 (describing the travels of Wilkes' case).
n247. See Taslitz, supra note 44, at 21.
n248. See, e.g., Amar I, supra note 5, at 772 (describing Wilkes v. Wood as the "paradigm search
and seizure case" for the Founding generation). The Wilkes case has been cited by the
Supreme Court as providing guidance for interpreting the Fourth Amendment on many
occasions. See, e.g., Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, 532 U.S. 318, 332 n.6 (2001).
n249. Amar I, supra note 5, at 772 n.54.
n250. Galloway, supra note 61, at 369. Lord Camden, whose name was originally Charles Pratt,
authored both the Wilkes v. Wood and Entick v. Carrington decisions in his capacity as
Chief Justice of Common Pleas.
n251. Amar I, supra note 5, at 772 n.54.
n252. See Timothy Lynch, In Defense of the Exclusionary Rule, 23 Harv. J. L. & Pub. Pol'y 711,
723 n.67 (2000).
n253. This phrase is attributable to the eminent Fourth Amendment scholar Thomas Y. Davies.
See Davies, supra note 16 (documenting how the Supreme Court used false and distorted
history to uphold an arrest for a non-jailable seatbelt violation).
n254. See, e.g., Amar I, supra note 5, at 786.
n255. See Taslitz, supra note 44, at 21 (pointing out that Lord Camden drew a link between
search and seizure principles and the right against self-incrimination in Entick v. Carrington).
n256. A footnote is in order here to point out some oddities in the writing, editing and
publication of the Entick opinion. Francis Hargrave, editor of the "long version" of the Entick
opinion that was published in Volume 11 of State Trials in 1781, reconstructed the opinion from
Lord Camden's written notes. "It was not without some difficulty," Hargrave wrote in his
introduction to the case, "that the copy of this judgment was obtained by the editor." 11 Francis
Hargrave, State Trials 313 (London, T. Wright 1765). "He has reason to believe," wrote
Hargrave, "that the original, most excellent and most valuable as its contents are, was not
deemed worthy of preservation by its author [Camden] but was actually committed to the
flames." He continued: "Fortunately, the editor remembered to have formerly seen a copy of
the judgment in the hands of a friend; and upon application to him, it was immediately
obtained, with liberty to the editor to make use of it at his discretion." Id.
n257. Entick v. Carrington, 19 How. St. Tr. 1029, 1073 (1765) (emphasis added).
n258. Wilkes v. Wood, 98 Eng. Rep. 489, 490 (K.B. 1763).
n259. Entick, 19 How. St. Tr. at 1073.
n260. Davies has questioned whether the Framers of the Fourth Amendment actually read the
language in Entick, which linked search and seizure protections to silence rights. See
Davies, supra note 15, at 727. According to Davies, the Entick opinion referenced by the Boyd
Court was a longer version (Entick v. Carrington, 11 State Trials 313 (decided in 1765 but
published in 1781)) of the Entick opinion first circulated in the American colonies (2 Wils. 275,
95 Eng. Rep. 807) (published in 1770) that the Framers were more likely to have read.
See id. Only the longer version contained Lord Camden's pronouncement that "the law obligeth
no man to accuse himself ... . and it should seem, that search for evidence is disallowed
upon the same principle." Entick v. Carrington, 11 Harg. St. Tr. 313, 323 (1765) (emphasis
added). For this reason, Davies argues that the Fourth Amendment's Framers and ratifiers did
not have Entick's coupling of search and seizure protections with silence rights in mind when
they approved the Fourth Amendment. In fact, Davies suggests that the intent behind the
Fourth Amendment was essentially the same as that behind the Massachusetts Fourth
Amendment corollary - drafted by John Adams in 1780 - since the wording of the two provisions
is
quite similar. See Davies, supra note 15, at 566 n.25 ("Virtually all of the language in the Fourth
Amendment, including "unreasonable searches and seizures,' had appeared as of the 1780
Massachusetts provision; hence, it is unlikely that Camden's statements in the longer version
of Entick influenced the Framers' views.").
Such a problem of temporal order, if valid, does indeed undermine the long-held view that the
Framers in Philadelphia relied on Entick as their wellspring of principles behind the Fourth
Amendment. But Davies' argument relies on the notion that the Framers of the Fourth
Amendment were oblivious to a famous English opinion that had been published and circulated
in
1781, more than five years before the constitutional debates in Philadelphia and ten years
before ratification of the Fourth Amendment. We know that many American Founding-era
lawyers kept fairly up-to-date libraries of English cases and even spent much of their time
hand-copying legal rulings and statutes. See generally Mary Sarah Bilder, The Transatlantic
Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (2004) (documenting the informal system
of copying and transcribing laws applicable to the Colonies beginning in the 1600s).
Moreover, the set of books containing the longer version (Hargrave's A Complete Collection of
State-Trials and Proceedings For High-Treason, and other Crimes and Misdemeanours
(known as State Trials, 4th edition (1781)) was a fixture of late-eighteenth-century law
libraries. Over a hundred of these sets survive in the rare book collections of American libraries
today, and several libraries (e.g., Yale's and Harvard's) hold more than one complete set. The
notion that all of these book sets, published in 1781, crossed the Atlantic only after the
Fourth Amendment was proposed and ratified (between September 1787 and December 1791)
seems highly unlikely.
In any case, there is no denying that the conceptual link between silence rights and search and
seizure protections was enunciated in documents other than the Entick opinion and featured
in the most widely circulated pre-ratification texts that addressed search and seizure issues in
any depth. See infra notes 264-266 and their accompanying text. The Wilkes v. Wood
opinion itself, which was printed in Wilson's Reports (1770) as well as widely republished and
discussed in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, associated silence rights and search
and seizure protections. See Wilkes v. Wood, 98 Eng. Rep. 489, 490 (K.B. 1763) (referring
specifically to the seizure of Wilkes' papers: "Nothing can be more unjust in itself, than that
the proof of a man's guilt shall be extracted from his own bosom.").
n261. Commonwealth v. Dana, 43 Mass. (2 Met.) 329, 335-36 (1841) (admitting lottery evidence
on grounds that the principles of Entick "have but little bearing on the present case" and
"the warrant in this case is in conformity with all the ... [Massachusetts] declaration of
rights").
n262. See 3 Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties 1749 (Paul Finkelman ed., 2006) (calling
the Father of Candor letter "one of the more remarkable documents in all of English
political and legal thought"). "The book went through several editions," Finkelman continued,
"was read on both sides of the Atlantic," and was "well-known to Patriot leaders by the
time the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia." Id.; see also Leonard W. Levy, Origins of
the Bill of Rights 163 (1999) (saying Americans of the Founding period knew well the
arguments in the Father of Candor pamphlet); William James Smith, 3 Grenville Papers clviii
(William J. Smith ed., London, Woodfall & Kinder 1853) ("The letter concerning Libels,
Warrants, &c., was one of the most important of the political pamphlets which were written in
that very pamphlet-writing age....").
n263. A Letter Concerning Libels, supra note 232, at 44-45. Father of Candor also made the
point that:

T
he laws of England are to tender to every man accused, even of capital crimes, that they do not
permit him to be put to torture to extort a confession, nor oblige him to answer a question
that will tend to accuse himself. How then can it be supposed, that...any common fellows under
a general warrant...[may] seize and carry off all his papers; and then at his trial produce
these papers...in evidence against himself... This would be making a man give evidence against
and accuse himself, with a vengeance. And this is to be endured, because the prosecutor
wants other sufficient proof, and might be traduced for acting groundlessly, if he could not get
it; and because he does it truly for the sake of collecting evidence.

Id.
n264. Sir William Meredith, A Reply to the Defence of the Majority, on the Question Relating to
General Warrants 21-22 (1764) (emphasis added and capitalization altered).
n265. Amar II, supra note 5, at 25 (speaking of a "universal law against exclusion" that
allegedly prevailed prior to the Boyd decision).
n266. That Founding-era observers of search and seizure debates were well-versed in Entick's
and Wilkes's subtle dimensions is shown by recurring references to the Entick and Wilkes
cases when search and seizure principles were discussed. Whenever nineteenth-century courts
interpreted the Fourth Amendment (and its state corollaries), they invariably looked to
Entick and Wilkes for guidance. For example, in the case of Ex parte Field, the court explicitly
linked Wilkes' treatment of illegally seized papers to the exclusionary application of
habeas corpus discharge of persons ("If the arrest and detention in this case be sustained, it
strikes a much more deadly and fatal blow to civil liberty, than did the general warrants [in
Wilkes v. Wood]."). Id. at 6.
n267. Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630, 633 (1886).
n268. Anti-exclusion scholars claim that Boyd's "fusion" of Fourth Amendment protections and
Fifth Amendment silence principles was a "landmark" holding in 1886. See Pitler, supra
note 27, at 467 n.43 (stating Boyd's "convergence of the two amendments resulted in
exclusion").
n269. U.S. Const. amend. V.
n270. See, e.g., Pitler, supra note 27, at 467 n.43 (referring to Boyd's recognition of an intimate
relationship between the Fourth and Fifth Amendments as "convergence theory").
n271. It may be argued that the Supreme Court briefly separated the wedded Fourth and Fifth
Amendments in Adams v. New York, 192 U.S. 585 (1904), where the Court upheld the
admission of illegally seized evidence in a state trial. While the holding of Adams rejected
arguments for applying the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule, id. at 597-99, its basis for
distinguishing Boyd has been widely debated. Did Adams merely decline to incorporate the
Fourth Amendment rule into state practice under the Fourteenth Amendment? Or did Adams
make deeper cuts into the operability of exclusion? In either case, Adams turned out to be a
"wild turn in the exclusionary rule roller coaster track," according to Supreme Court Justice
Potter Stewart. Stewart, supra note 26, at 1374.
n272. The law-and-order originalists' interpretations of the Fifth Amendment
Self-Incrimination Clause are so plainly irreconcilable with the known practices and
interpretations of
earlier courts that such scholars must resort to tricks of rhetoric to sustain them. Amar, for
example, introduces the Clause as "an unsolved riddle of vast proportions, a Gordian knot in
the middle of [the] Bill of Rights." Amar II, supra note 5, at 46. While acknowledging early
precedents excluding all manner of compelled out-of-court statements, Amar paints them as
the product of confusion and illogic. See id. Much more logical, according to this view, are
interpretations that severely limit the protections of the Self-Incrimination Clause in a manner
consistent with prosecution advocacy. See generally Dripps, supra note 6 (criticizing Amar's
Fifth Amendment scholarship).
n273. 4 John H. Wigmore, A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law §
2264, at 3126 (1904) ("the radical fallacy of the [Boyd] opinion lies in its attempt to wrest
the Fourth Amendment to the aid of the Fifth").
n274. Burger drew from anti-exclusion "originalists" of his era and referred to the Fourth
Amendment exclusionary rule as a "Draconian, discredited device" and a "judicially contrived
doctrine." Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465, 500, 501 (1976) (Burger, C.J., concurring).
n275. Id. at 496, 497.
n276. Akhil Reed Amar & Renee B. Lettow, Self-Incrimination and the Constitution: A Brief
Rejoinder to Professor Kamisar, 93 Mich. L. Rev. 1011, 1013 (1995).
n277. Pitler, supra note 27, at 467. Pitler claimed that "the common law rule of nonexclusion
remained unchallenged until 1886 when the United States Supreme Court reached its
landmark decision in Boyd v. United States." Id. at 466.
n278. Amar II, supra note 5, at 23 (referencing Telford Taylor's Two Studies in Constitutional
Interpretation: Search, Seizure, and Surveillance (1969)).
n279. U.S. Const. amend. IV.
n280. As Richard A. Nagareda points out, "the most plausible construction of the phrase "to be
a witness' [in the Fifth Amendment] is as the equivalent of the phrase "to give evidence'
found in contemporaneous state sources." Richard A. Nagareda, Compulsion "To Be a Witness"
and the Resurrection of Boyd, 74 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1575, 1605 (1999). The Framers' use of
the word witness elsewhere in the Constitution likewise indicates a general evidentiary
construction rather than one limited to mere oral witnessing. See id. at 1609-15 (discussing the
meaning of the word "witness" in the Confrontation Clause, the Treason Clause and the
Compulsory Process Clause - each of which suggests an analogy to "providing evidence" rather
than mere testifying).
n281. Entick v. Carrington, 19 How. St. Tr. 1029, 1066 (1765).
n282. Entick, 19 How. St. Tr. at 1063, 1066.
n283. Id. at 1064; see also Galloway, supra note 61, at 422.
n284. William A. Alderson, A Practical Treatise Upon the Law of Judicial Writs and Process in
Civil and Criminal Cases 611 (New York, Baker, Voorhis & Co., 1895); Galloway, supra
note 61, at 335 (quoting Commonwealth v. Dana, 2 Mass. (2 Met.) 329, 334 (1841)).
n285. See Galloway, supra note 61, at 411-13 (describing the view that papers are essentially
extensions of a person and his private thoughts).
n286. Amar IV, supra note 5, at 465.
n287. Id.
n288. See infra notes 311-335 and accompanying text.
n289. See Galloway, supra note 61, at 367. Professor Russell W. Galloway, Jr. published a
fascinating article on this topic in 1982 that should be read by every Fourth Amendment
scholar.
n290. Id. at 418 ("There can be little doubt that the framers of the fourth amendment intended
the amendment's first clause to ban all searches of private papers.").
n291. Entick v. Carrington, 19 How. St. Tr. 1029, 1073 (emphasis added).
n292. See McCormick on Evidence § 72(a), at 130 (Kenneth S. Broun ed., 6th ed. 2006) ("Rules of
privilege...are not designed or intended to facilitate the fact-finding process or to
safeguard its integrity. Their effect instead is clearly inhibitive; rather than facilitating the
illumination of truth, they shut out the light."); see also id. § 87, at 151 ("None can deny the
[attorney-client] privilege's unfortunate tendency to suppress the truth...."). Wigmore
famously said of the attorney-client privilege that "its benefits are all indirect and speculative;
its
obstruction is plain and concrete." Id. (quoting 8 Wigmore on Evidence § 2291, at 554
(McNaughton rev. 1961)).
n293. See, e.g., Pitler, supra note 27, at 466 (claiming the "doctrine of nonexclusion developed
from the common law courts' paramount concern with truth-seeking and punishing the
guilty").
n294. See McCormick, supra note 292, § 71, at 126 (suggesting that evidentiary privileges and
disqualifications have waned over time); id. § 78, at 142 (indicating that the "older
branches" of the "ancient tree" of spousal privilege were more protective of secrecy than the
privilege's "late offshoot").
n295. See, e.g., John F. Archbold, The Practice of Country Attornies and their Agents, in the
Courts of Law at Westminster 102 (1838) (saying clergymen were privileged from arrest
while going to and coming from church for religious duties); 1Thomas Coventry & Samuel
Hughes, An analytical digested index to the common law reports: from the time of Henry III
to the commencement of the reign of George III 97 (Philadelphia, R.H. Small, 1832) (collecting
English cases privileging certain persons from arrest while attending and traveling to and
from court); James F. Oswald, Contempt of Court, Committal, and Attachment and Arrest Upon
Civil Process, in the Supreme Court of Judicature (London, W. Clowes and Sones 1895)
(discussing the long history of various privileges from arrest while going to and coming from
English courts).
n296. See Richards v. Goodson, 4 Va. (2 Va. Cas.) 381 (1823) (discharging prisoner because he
was privileged from arrest while attending court in his own case); Ex parte M'Neil, 6
Mass. (4 Tyng) 245 (1810) (releasing debtor who was arrested while attending court); see also
Hurd, supra note 121, at 270 (discussing privilege from arrest on Sunday, while under civil
process, etc.).
n297. Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 2331.11(A)(2) (LexisNexis 2005) (Stating that "electors, while going
to, returning from, or in attendance at elections" are privileged from arrest); see also
Hargis v. Vaughan, 1 Del. Cas. 241, 241 (1799) (ordering discharge of a man arrested while
returning from the general election on grounds he was privileged to go to and return from an
election polling station).
n298. See Hargis, 1 Del. Cas. at 241; Swift v. Chamberlain, 3 Conn. 537, 538-39 (1821) (upholding
discharge of arrestee who had been seized while awaiting election returns and
allowing an additional civil action for malicious prosecution).
n299. As a member of Parliament, John Wilkes was "privileged from arrests in all cases except
treason, felony, and ACTUAL breach of the peace...." King v. Wilkes, (1763) 95 Eng.
Rep. 737, 740 (K.B.) (argument of Wilkes' counsel). Wilkes was ordered discharged from the
Tower. Id.
n300. See U.S. Const. art. I, § 6, cl. 1.
n301. See Commonwealth v. Keeper of the Jail of Philadelphia, 4 Serg. & Rawle 505, 506 (Pa.
1818) (construing the 1802 statute).
n302. The spousal privilege alone has existed since at least 1628, when Lord Coke wrote that "A
wife [for they are two souls in one flesh], and it might be a cause of implacable discord
and dissention betweene the husband and the wife, and a meane of great inconvenience." 1
Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England; or, A Commentary upon
Littleton: Not the Name of the Author Only, but of the Law Itself xcii (16th ed., rev., corr.1809)
(Latin translation in brackets)).
n303. Pitler, supra note 27, at 466.
n304. See Amar II, supra note 5, at 66.
n305. See, e.g., Thomas D. Morris, Slaves and the Rules of Evidence in Criminal Trials, 68
Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 1209 (1993) (discussing the trend toward allowing Blacks and Indians to
provide testimony in American courts of the nineteenth century); Jonathan L. Entin,
Symposium: The Ohio Constitution - Then and Now: An Examination of the Law and History of
the
Ohio Constitution on the Occasion of its Bicentennial: An Ohio Dilemma: Race, Equal
Protection, and the Unfulfilled Promise of a State Bill of Rights, 51 Clev. St. L. Rev. 395 (2004)
(discussing the history of Ohio's rules prohibiting Blacks from testifying against Whites in
Ohio courts).
n306. See Davis v. Dinwoody, (1792) 100 Eng. Rep. 1241, 1241 (K.B.).
n307. Funk v. United States, 290 U.S. 371, 376 (1933).
n308. Id. at 376.
n309. See id. ("But the last fifty years have wrought a great change in these respects, and
to-day the tendency is to enlarge the domain of competency....") (quoting Benson v. United
States 146 U.S. 325, 336 (1892)).
n310. See Mason Ladd, Credibility Tests - Current Trends, 89 U. Pa. L. Rev. 166, 174-76 (1940)
(discussing the common law rule that a criminal defendant could not testify in his own
defense because his motive to lie was so strong).
n311. Brief for the Petitioner at 7, Hawkins v. United States, 358 U.S. 74 (1958) (No. 20).
n312. Pitler, supra note 27, at 466.
n313. Id.
n314. See Stephen A. Siegel, The Federal Government's Power to Enact Color-Conscious Laws:
An Originalist Inquiry, 92 Nw. U. L. Rev. 477, 479 (1998) (discussing the long history
of legal impediments to blacks and other minorities imposed by early legal systems).
n315. See, e.g., Amar II, supra note 5, at 154 (describing the "commonsensical point" that "the
essence of our Constitution's rules about criminal procedure" is that they "seek[] to protect
the innocent" and "lawbreaking, as such, is entitled to no legitimate expectation of privacy");
Richard A. Posner, Rethinking the Fourth Amendment, 1981 Sup. Ct. Rev. 49, 49 (1982)
(stating the premise that the Fourth Amendment does not protect the interest of a criminal in
avoiding punishment for his crime).
n316. Wilkey, supra note 196, at 267.
n317. Cf. Ex parte Richardson, 16 S.C.L. (Harp.) 308, 308 (S.C. 1824) (granting motion for
prohibition against lower court's convening without proper procedure, prohibiting trial court
from retrying defendant because of gross procedural errors in initiation of the prosecution);
The Superior Court Diary of William Samuel Johnson 1772-1773, reprinted in 4 American
Legal Records 98 (John T. Farrell ed., 1942) (discussing a "guilty" thief who sued his arrestor
over the manner of his arrest).
n318. See Roots, supra note 16, at 734 (citing the Founding-era "mere evidence" rule).
n319. See id.
n320. Warden v. Hayden, 387 U.S. 294, 304 (1967).
n321. See id. at 296 n.1.
n322. The fact that the Framers relied directly on property right values in drafting the Fourth
Amendment was disregarded. See Roots, supra note 16, at 734.
n323. See Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383, 393, 398 (1914).
n324. See id. at 389, 398.
n325. See Pitler, supra note 27, at 466.
n326. See, e.g., Norton, supra note 4, at 262 (justifying the exclusionary rule on restitution
grounds); accord Heffernan, supra note 18, at 1217.
n327. Id. at 861, 867. The opinion is somewhat confusing on the question of whether the liquor
was contraband, indicating that the "liquor was purchased by Youman or his wife at a
time when and a place where it was lawful to sell and buy intoxicating liquor, but it was
unlawful to have it in possession for purposes of sale, as charged in the warrant." Id. at 861.
n328. " The people of the States, during the existence of the confederation, suffered from the
violation of private property by their governments. In reconstituting their political system ...
they protected property from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the title from detriment,
except in the due course of legal proceeding." Dodge v. Woolsey, 59 U.S. (18 How.) 331,
378 (1855) (Campbell, J., dissenting).
n329. The recurring use of quotation marks around the terms innocent and guilty stems from
the author's cynicism toward the notion that any government authority is capable of
determining criminal guilt independent of a jury in each given case. Of course, the Framers
generally believed in the theory that every individual possesses natural rights, which are
presumed superior to the rights of the state and the power of positive law. See, e.g., Andrew P.
Napolitano, A Nation of Sheep 1-9 (2007) (describing the gradual movement of American
legal philosophy from natural-rights orientations toward more instrumentalist principles);
Robert P. George, Natural Law, the Constitution, and the Theory and Practice of Judicial
Review, in Vital Remnants: America's Founding and the Western Tradition 151, 152 (Gary L.
Gregg II ed., 1999) ("Most modern commentators agree that the American founders were
firm believers in natural law" and viewed the state's role as presumptively inferior by
comparison). Under the Framers' construction of criminal procedure, determination of
criminal
liability was the sole province of juries, who could pronounce a defendant innocent even if the
state proved him to be unquestionably "guilty" in fact. See, e.g., William E. Nelson, The
Eighteenth-Century Background of John Marshall's Constitutional Jurisprudence, 76 Mich. L.
Rev. 893, 904 (1979) ("Juries rather than judges spoke the last word on law enforcement in
nearly all, if not all, of the eighteenth-century American colonies.").
n330. See Wilkes v. Wood, (1763) 98 Eng. Rep. 489, 493-94, 497-99 (K.B.).
n331. Wells v. Jackson, 17 Va. (3 Munf.) 458, 468 (1814) (Roane, J., concurring).
n332. Id. at 468.
n333. Two curious cases illustrate this point. Long v. State involved a buggy-wheel thief who
was apprehended in 1850 by private persons purporting to act under the authority of law. 12
Ga. 293 (1852). The thief begged for release and promised to pay his arrestors a slave, some
blacksmith tools, a wagon and some other goods (in addition to the stolen buggy wheels) in
exchange for release from prosecution. See id. at 295-98. Later, the thief lodged a complaint
against his arrestors for robbery, and a Georgia grand jury indicted five men for criminal
theft of the goods in excess of the buggy wheels. See id. at 295-96. The Georgia Supreme Court
upheld robbery convictions of the vigilantes, stating that, although the buggy-wheel thief
was plainly guilty of stealing the wheels, his guilt was immaterial. See id. at 326, 328, 332.
What mattered was that the non-deputized law enforcers had failed to secure a proper warrant
or take the thief to a magistrate. See id. at 326.
The 1837 North Carolina case of Mead v. Young, 19 N.C. (2 Dev. & Bat.) 521 (1837), is another
bona fide example of a guilty man taking advantage of constitutional protections from
unreasonable search and seizure. Mead involved a complainant (Young) who obtained a
warrant from a magistrate for the arrest of Mead for beating and wounding one of Young's
slaves. Id. at 521-22. The warrant commanded a man named Boyd (who was not a public officer)
"to apprehend the said company, and them safely keep." Id. at 522. Boyd gathered a
posse and went searching for Mead. Id. Seeing the posse, Mead surrendered. Id. Subsequent
conversations between Mead and Young resulted in a payment by Mead to Young of $ 150,
possibly to compensate for injuries to the slave but also likely intended as satisfaction of an
impending criminal prosecution (which never commenced). See id. Mead later sued both
Young and Boyd for trespass and false imprisonment. Id.
The North Carolina Supreme Court held that the warrant afforded no protection for Young and
Boyd because it failed to identify Mead by name, stating that "by the best established
principles of the common law - principles deemed so important, as to be embodied in our
Constitution, and placed beyond the reach even of legislation - certainty of the person so to be
seized, is "an essential matter required,' in every warrant to apprehend a man for an imputed
crime." Id. at 526; see also Flanders v. Herbert, 1 Smith 205, 210-11 (N.H. 1808) (upholding
jury's award of damages to plaintiff who was a "wrong-doer" but who suffered an illegal
seizure by constables).
n334. See, e.g., Patrick Henry, Speech at the Virginia Ratifying Convention (June 5, 1788),
reprinted in The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates 199, 201
(Ralph Ketcham ed., 1986) (urging Americans to "suspect every one who approaches that jewel
[of liberty]" by dint of government authority); Alexander White, To the Citizens of
Virginia, Winchester Va. Gazette, Feb. 29, 1788, reprinted in The Origin of the Second
Amendment: A Documentary History of the Bill of Rights 1787-1792, at 288 (David E. Young
ed., 2d ed. 1995) ("In America it is the governors not the governed that must produce their Bills
of Right: unless they can shew the charters under which they act, the people will not yield
obedience ... ."); see also Thomas Tredwell, Debates Before the New York Convention (July 2,
1788), reprinted in The Origin of the Second Amendment: A Documentary History of the
Bill of Rights, 464, 467 (David Young ed., 2nd ed. 1995) (arguing that Federalist pleas to have
faith that political leaders will not violate the rights of citizens were alarming and that "it
is proved by all experience, - [that suspicion of those in power] is essentially necessary for the
preservation of freedom.").
n335. See Lysander Spooner, An Essay on the Trial by Jury 1, 6 (Boston, Bela Marsh 1852). The
constitutional purpose behind the grand jury process was likewise for the "protection of
the guilty." Ric Simmons, Re-Examining the Grand Jury: Is There Room for Democracy in the
Criminal Justice System?, 82 B.U. L. Rev. 1, 48 (2002).
n336. Levy, supra note 53, at 4-20. The Inquisitions "left a trail of mangled bodies, shattered
minds, and smoking flesh" in the early thirteenth century until canon law developed
procedures for dissidents - "guilty" of doctrinal disagreement - to challenge them. See id. at
19-21
n337. See Michael S. Green, The Privilege's Last Stand: The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination
and the Right to Rebel Against the State, 65 Brook. L. Rev. 627 (1999).
n338. E.g., Amar II, supra note 5, at 25.
n339. ( Need citation to Mass and New Hampshire Case here). The strong constitutional
foundations of the exclusionary rule also seem to be supported by legal developments in other
countries whose court systems evolved from English common law. It was once common for
anti-exclusion scholars to state that the United States was alone in the world in its adoption of
exclusion. Chief Justice Burger, for example, claimed so in his famous dissent in Bivens v. Six
Unknown Named Agents of Fed. Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388, 415 (1971) (Burger,
C.J., dissenting) ("This evidentiary rule is unique to American jurisprudence."). Of course, the
unique nature of American constitutional sovereignty - being held by the individual rather
than the state - makes comparisons between America's constitutional order and that of other
countries somewhat inappropriate. Even so, it is evident that Burger's argument has been
undermined in recent decades. English, Scottish, Canadian and Australian courts have all
independently applied versions of the exclusionary rule in the past 30 years, although not
consistently. See Stribopoulos, supra note 32, at 87, 89-92, 118-19 (describing Britain's tortured
application and prohibition of the rule). At present, England, Scotland, Canada and
Australia all use exclusion at the discretion of judges in various circumstances. See id. Scotland
has adopted something of a rule of discretionary exclusion, generally admitting
inadvertently seized evidence and excluding evidence seized with deliberate illegality. Id. at
89-90. These foreign systems have adopted exclusion - by court discretion in specific
circumstances rather than by rule - upon general principles of fundamental fairness. See id. at
87, 89, 120 (describing the justification for a discretionary exclusion rule in England,
Scotland, and Canada).
The law of Great Britain never did have a fully settled common law rule of nonexclusion as
anti-exclusion scholars sometimes allege. Telford Taylor pointed out in 1969 that "English
case law in this field is sparse, but in both of the only two important post-Entick decisions,
seizures of purely evidentiary documents were sustained." Telford Taylor, Two Studies in
Constitutional Interpretation: Search, Seizure, and Surveillance and Free Trial and Fair Press
61 (1969). Going back in time yields English cases of habeas corpus discharge for search
and seizure violations similar to early decisions in the United States. See 3 The Legal Guide
122-23 (London, Richards & Co. 1840) (reporting a case in which inmates arrested
unlawfully were discharged from custody and granted damages); The King v. White, 20 How.
St. Tr. 1376, 1380-81 (1771) (ordering inmate discharged on grounds that he had no other
remedy under the impressment [statute).
n340. For a detailed discussion of apposite state cases immediately preceding the Boyd
decision, see Donald E. Wilkes, Jr., A Critique of Two Arguments Against the Exclusionary
Rule:
The Historical Error and the Comparative Myth, 32 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 881, 891-92 (1975).
n341. See Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography: An Introduction ix (1999).
n342. See generally Arthur Best, Wigmore on Evidence (4th ed. 1995).
n343. See Wilkes, supra note 346, at 896-97.
n344. Wigmore, supra note 74, at 479 (claiming "it has long been established that the
admissibility of evidence is not affected by the illegality of the means through which the party
has
been enabled to obtain the evidence").
n345. Anti-exclusion scholars occasionally cite dicta in an 1822 federal circuit case, United
States v. La Jeune Eugenie, 26 F. Cas. 832 (C.C.D. Mass. 1822) (No. 15,551), as supporting
the proposition that a common law rule of nonexclusion prevailed in the early Republic. See,
e.g., O'Laughlin, supra note 6, at 708 (footnote omitted) (claiming "La Jeune Eugenie is
illustrative of the state of the exclusionary rule in the antebellum era."). La Jeune Eugenie was
an admiralty case involving the capture of a French slave ship (La Jeune Eugenie) by an
American-flagged vessel on the high seas. 26 F. Cas. at 833. The case had ramifications in many
areas of law, including admiralty law, international law and the law of the slave trade,
and it ultimately led to a ruling by the Supreme Court, in 1825, that the United States
government had no authority to intervene in slave shipments under the flags of other nations.
See
The Antelope, 23 U.S. (10 Wheat.) 66, 101-02 (1825).
The opinion in La Jeune Eugenie states that "the right of using evidence does not depend, nor,
as far as I have any recollection, has ever been supposed to depend upon the lawfulness or
unlawfulness of the mode, by which it is obtained." 26 F. Cas. at 843. While this language does
appear to support the alleged "doctrine of nonexclusion," it hardly illustrates "the state of
the exclusionary rule in the antebellum era." Compare La Jeune Eugenie, 26 F. Cas. at 833 with
O'Laughlin, supra note 6, at 708. For one thing, the court in Le Jeune Eugenie addressed
the law of tort in admiralty jurisdictions rather than making pronouncements about the scope
of the Fourth Amendment. See Davies, supra note 15, at 664 n.320 (discussing the
"widespread misperception that Justice Story addressed and rejected exclusion under the
Fourth Amendment in dicta in his 1822 circuit court opinion" in La Jeune Eugenie). In Davies's
words, "all Story's dictum stands for is the unexceptional proposition that exclusion is not
appropriate when evidence has been obtained through an unlawful private arrest and search -
a
view which has never been seriously challenged." Id. at 665 n.320.
n346. Dana, 43 Mass. (2 Met.) at 336.
n347. Id. at 337. There is contradictory language in the Dana opinion. On one hand, the
decision held that the warrant and seizure in the case were lawful. See id. On the other hand,
there
is language in the opinion, "admitting that the lottery tickets and materials were illegally
seized...." Id. This author reads this language as offering the hypothetical scenario that an
illegal
search and seizure occurred for purposes of speculating as to the admissibility of evidence.
Wigmore apparently interpreted the same language as a holding and consequently construed
Dana as establishing an exclusionary ruling. See Wigmore, supra note 74, at 479 & n.1.
Professor Donald Wilkes has suggested that the Dana Court meant "assuming" rather than
"admitting." See Wilkes, supra note 341, at 894. Readers are urged to consult the opinion and
form their own conclusions.
n348. State v. Flynn, 36 N.H. 64 (1858).
n349. Id. at 68-69. The facts in Flynn are described without much detail, and, apparently, the
officer saw liquor or evidence of liquor but did not seize it. Id. at 68 (counsel for the State
said "there was no seizure"). Moreover, the court apparently sustained the legality of the
search and seizure (if any), meaning Flynn (like the Dana case in Massachusetts) offered mere
dicta in favor of nonexclusion: "The objection made in this case ... is, rather, that information
obtained by means of a search-warrant ... is not competent to be given in evidence, because
it has been obtained by compulsion ... ." Id. at 70. While the court apparently did not rule on
whether there had been any search and seizure violation (or held that any search or seizure
was lawful), it held that the objection was unsustainable. See id.
n350. Id. at 72. Flynn also cited a previous New Hampshire case, State v. McGlynn, 34 N.H. 422
(1857), for support. Id. at 66-67. In McGlynn, the court found "upon general principles"
that a constable who assisted in an arrest and search of a suspect and a search of his premises
need not swear before testifying in court that the "proceedings had been legal and regular."
McGlynn, 34 N.H. at 425, 424.
n351. State v. Agalos, 107 A. 314 (N.H. 1919) (citing Flynn, 36 N.H. 64).
n352. 110 Mass. 359, 360 (1872) (citing a civil forfeiture case, Commonwealth v. Intoxicating
Liquors, 4 Allen 593 (1862)).
n353. See Commonwealth v. Tibbetts, 32 N.E. 910, 911 (Mass. 1893) (citing Dana, Certain
Lottery Tickets, Certain Intoxicating Liquors, and Taylor for proposition that "evidence
which is pertinent to the issue is admissible, although it may have been procured in an
irregular or even illegal manner"); Commonwealth v. Henderson, 5 N.E. 832, 833 (Mass. 1885)
(upholding admission of evidence obtained by officer pursuant to search and stating "it is
immaterial whether the proceedings of the officer in serving the search warrant were regular
and
lawful or not"); Commonwealth v. Taylor, 132 Mass. 261, 262-63 (1882) (stating that testimony
of medical examiner who performed autopsy without authority admissible);
Commonwealth v. Welsh, 110 Mass. 359, 360 (1872) (citing Certain Intoxicating Liquors for
proposition that evidence found under erroneous warrant "would not thereby be rendered
incompetent as evidence"); Commonwealth v. Certain Intoxicating Liquors, 86 Mass. (4 Allen)
593, 597-600 (1862) (citing Dana and upholding civil forfeiture of liquor seized pursuant
to flawed and fabricated paperwork); Certain Lottery Tickets, 59 Mass. (5 Cush.) 369, 374
(1850); Commonwealth v. Dana, 43 Mass. (2 Met.) 329, 337 (1841).
n354. After much searching, the author has identified only two pre-Boyd decisions that plainly
upheld the admission of illegally seized physical evidence (or at least officer testimony
that such evidence had been found) in criminal prosecutions over objections based on
constitutional search and seizure protections. See Commonwealth v. Welsh, 110 Mass. 359, 360
(1872) (upholding the admission into evidence of seized liquor in a criminal trial and citing
Intoxicating Liquors for the proposition that any defects in the search would not render the
evidence inadmissible); Commonwealth v. Henderson, 5 N.E. 832, 833 (Mass. 1885) (upholding
conviction and stating "it is immaterial whether the proceedings of the officer in serving
the search-warrant were regular and lawful or not"). The other pre-1886 cases cited by
Wigmore and mentioned in this discussion either were not criminal cases (e.g., Certain Lottery
Tickets, supra note 353), involved only questions of testimony as opposed to physical evidence
(e.g., McGlynn, supra note 350, and Flynn, supra p. 56-57), or offered mere dicta as
opposed to actual holdings (e.g., Dana, supra p. 106-07). Even Welsh did not state that its
seizure had been illegal, but assumed hypothetically that it was. See Welsh, 110 Mass. at 360.
n355. Williams v. State, 28 S.E. 624, 625 (Ga. 1897).
n356. State v. Madison, 122 N.W. 647, 650-51 (S.D. 1909).
n357. See, e.g., State v. Sheridan, 96 N.W. 730, 731 (Iowa 1903) (excluding goods unlawfully
taken); Blum v. State, 51 A. 26, 28-30 (Md. 1902) (holding illegally seized evidence
inadmissible); People ex rel. Ferguson v. Reardon, 90 N.E. 829, 833 (N.Y. 1910) (closely
following Boyd and upholding habeas corpus discharge of a businessman arrested for refusing
to show his stock transfer record books upon demand); State v. Slamon, 50 A. 1097, 1098-99 (Vt.
1901) (following Boyd).
n358. John H. Wigmore, A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law § 2183,
at 2956-57 n.1 (1905).
n359. Id. § 2264, at 3125-26.
n360. Id. § 2264, at 3124-25 n.2.
n361. Wigmore, supra note 74, at 479-83 n.1.
n362. John H. Wigmore, Using Evidence Obtained by Illegal Search and Seizure, 7 Mass. L.Q.,
Aug. 1922, at 33, 36 (reprinting essentially the same citations).
n363. See, e.g., Chastang v. State, 3 So. 304, 304 (Ala. 1887) (allowing admission of a gun seized
during a search-incident-to-arrest by warrant - and explicitly distinguishing its holding
from Boyd while agreeing with Boyd's analysis).
n364. See id.; State v. Laundy, 204 P. 958, 974-76 (Ore. 1922); State v. Mausert, 95 A. 991, 992-93
(N.J. 1915); Younger v. State, 114 N.W. 170, 172 (Neb. 1907).
n365. See Faulk v. State, 90 So. 481, 481 (Miss. 1922); State v. Fuller, 85 P. 369, 370-71 (Mont.
1906) (holding that defendant had consented to a comparison of his shoes with shoe
prints found at the crime scene and had thus waived his objection); State v. Fowler, 90 S.E. 408,
410-11 (N.C. 1916).
n366. See Wood v. McGuire, 21 Ga. 576, 582 (1857).
n367. See State v. Gorham, 65 Me. 270, 271-73 (1876) (erroneously cited in Wigmore, supra note
74, at 481 n.1).
n368. See Commonwealth v. Taylor, 132 Mass. 261, 262-3 (1882).
n369. See Faunce v. Gray, 38 Mass. (21 Pick.) 243, 245-46 (1838).
n370. See, e.g., Stevison v. Earnest, 80 Ill. 513, 516-17 (1875) (upholding the admission of loose
papers over a party's objection); State v. Sawtelle, 32 A. 831, 833 (N.H. 1891)
(involving a telegram, claimed by a company to be privileged, which was ordered to be
produced).
n371. See People v. Margelis, 186 N.W. 488, 489 (Mich. 1922) (excluding a pint of whiskey which
fell out of a suspect's pocket during an illegal arrest).
n372. Wigmore collected his set of precedents in a traveling footnote that was published in
various publications, including several editions of his evidence treatise and a 1922 ABA
Journal article, Using Evidence Obtained by Illegal Search and Seizure. Wigmore, supra note
74, 479-83 n.1. This citation string first appeared in Wigmore's 1904 treatise and remained
essentially unchanged, except for the addition of new cases as they developed. Wigmore, supra
note 368, § 2183, at 295-57 n.1.
n373. Even some fairly populous states with well-developed case law, such as Florida, Ohio,
Virginia and Wisconsin, had no published cases on the question. See Wigmore, supra note
74, at 479 n.1.
n374. For example, Wigmore cited Utah as one jurisdiction supportive of a rule of nonexclusion.
See Wigmore, supra note 74, at 483 n.1 ("search without a warrant, held admissible; the
offense being committed in [the officers'] presence"). Yet, the Supreme Court of Utah actually
declined to rule on the issue at all and suggested that exclusion would be the appropriate
remedy if the question were presented. See Salt Lake City v. Wight, 205 P. 900, 903 (Utah 1922).
The Court stated that:


It may well be that under some circumstances, in a proper case, the trial court would be
justified in making an order suppressing evidence ... so as to preclude its being used as evidence
against one who is criminally accused, but no such case is presented upon this record for our
consideration and determination.

Id.
Wigmore's footnote omitted one jurisdiction with an exclusionary rule, Wyoming, even though
he must have come across references to its cases in Wight, which he cited. See State v.
Peterson, 194 P. 342, 344, 350, 354 (Wyo. 1920) (imposing the rule of exclusion for search and
seizure violations); Wight, 205 P. at 903; Wigmore, supra note 74, at 483 n.1.
n375. Compare Blum v. State, 51 A. 26, 28-30 (Md. 1902), with Lawrence v. State, 63 A. 96,
102-03 (Md. 1906). Blum reversed a trial court's admission of books and papers on grounds
that the introduction of such evidence violated Maryland's Fourth and Fifth Amendment
corollaries. Blum, 51 A. at 28-30. The Lawrence decision (upholding admission of illegally
seized evidence) overturned earlier precedents on Maryland's books (e.g., Blum), which had
recognized an exclusionary rule. Lawrence, 63 A. at 102-03. Wigmore cited the Lawrence
case in his search and seizure footnote but did not mention Blum. Wigmore, supra note 74, at
481 n.1.
n376. In his notes on Michigan cases alone, Wigmore failed to list several cases supporting
exclusion, which were referenced in cases he did cite. See, e.g., People v. Halveksz, 183 N.W.
752, 753 (Mich. 1921) (excluding evidence and discharging defendant on grounds that "no power
exists at common law to make a search and seizure without a warrant"); People v. Le
Vasseur, 182 N.W. 60, 61 (Mich. 1921) (excluding evidence and discharging defendant); People v.
Vander Veen, 182 N.W. 61, 62 (Mich. 1921) (upholding exclusion); People v.
Woodward, 183 N.W. 901, 901-02 (Mich. 1921) (upholding exclusion).
Wigmore's Michigan citations make it appear that Michigan had started with a strict
nonexclusionary rule and then moved toward an exclusionary rule in the wake of the unsound
reasoning of Boyd and Weeks. See Wigmore, supra note 74, at 481 n.1 (citing Cluett v.
Rosenthal, 100 Mich. 193, 197 (1894) as Michigan's first case validating the admission of
testimony regarding the contents of an illegally seized book). In fact, Michigan courts had been
discharging illegally seized persons for generations. See, e.g., In re May, 1 N.W. 1021,
1021-24 (Mich. 1879) (ordering release of improperly arrested vagrant and stating it is
irrelevant whether she is guilty); People v. Crocker, 57 Mich 31 (1869) (ordering discharge of
suspect who was arrested by an unsigned warrant).
Moreover, the court in Rosenthal v. Muskegon Circuit Judge, which preceded the Cluett ruling
and was not cited by Wigmore, ordered civil plaintiffs in possession of illegally seized
books and papers to surrender them immediately to their owners (the defendants) and not to
"use such original books and papers, or use or disclose the contents of such copies, in any
manner whatsoever...." 57 N.W. 112, 115 (Mich. 1893) (quoting Hergman v. Dettlebach, 11 How.
Pr. 46, 48 (N.Y. 1855)). Wigmore also failed to mention another early Michigan
exclusion case, Newberry v. Carpenter, 65 N.W. 530, 531-32 (Mich. 1895) (holding that
government agents may not seize an entire building with a search warrant solely for purposes
of
seeking evidence against a criminal defendant, and releasing the building to its owner and
recognizing the mere evidence rule of Hibbard v. People, 4 Mich. 125 (1856)).
Michigan's true exclusion-rule history is almost precisely the opposite of the history told by
Wigmore and later described in Wolf v. Colorado's famous tables of state cases. See 338 U.S.
25, 33-34, 36 (1949) (listing Michigan as a state that "opposed the Weeks doctrine before the
Weeks case had been decided," and which, after Weeks, "overruled or distinguished prior
contrary decisions"). In reality, Michigan can be viewed as a jurisdiction that originally
recognized exclusion but moved toward nonexclusion in the wake of Wigmore's "research" and
then flip-flopped to follow Weeks, perhaps after Michigan judges scrutinized Wigmore's
citations. See infra notes 388-389 and accompanying text.
n377. Compare State v. Strait, 102 N.W. 913, 913-15 (Minn. 1905) (holding that parties have no
right of exclusion before grand juries, thus distinguishing its facts from those of Boyd
while implicitly following it), with State v. Hoyle, 107 N.W. 1130, 1130 (Minn. 1906) (upholding
admission of evidence from a warrantless search).
Other state courts also flip-flopped on the issue. Compare State v. Harley, 92 S.E. 1034, 1035
(S.C. 1917) (admitting illegally seized articles on grounds that illegality was immaterial),
and State v. Atkinson, 18 S.E. 1021, 1024-25 (S.C. 1894) (stating papers were admissible
regardless of how they were found so long as the defendant was not made to produce them),
with Blacksburg v. Beam, 88 S.E. 441, 441 (S.C. 1916) (excluding liquor obtained illegally).
n378. Wigmore, supra note 74, at 480.
n379. Compare Blum, 51 A. at 30 (following Boyd and excluding evidence of an inspection of
business records), with Lawrence, 63 A. at 102-03 (citing "the recent and valuable work on
Evidence of Professor Wigmore" and its "exhaustive and discriminating review of the
authorities" and stating that evidence will be admitted regardless of the legality of its seizure).
The
"valuable work on Evidence of Professor Wigmore" language continues to justify Maryland's
nonexclusionary "rule" (which is actually an abandonment of Maryland's original
exclusionary rule described in Blum) to this day. See Ford v. State, 967 A.2d 210, 230 (Md. Ct.
Spec. App. 2009) (citing the language as support for the proposition that Maryland
recognizes no exclusionary rule); Marshall v. State, 35 A.2d 115, 117 (Md. 1943) (citing
Wigmore's "valuable work" to show that illegally taken evidence may be admitted); Meisinger
v.
State, 141 A. 536, 537-38 (Md. 1928) (citing Wigmore's "valuable work" for the proposition that
"when evidence offered in a criminal trial is otherwise admissible, it will not be rejected
because of the manner of its obtention"); Archer v. State, 125 A. 744, 749-50 (Md. 1924) (citing
Wigmore's "valuable work"); see also Cohn v. State, 109 S.W. 1149, 1150-51 (Tenn.
1908) (citing 4 Wigmore on Evidence §§2183, 2264 and a dozen of Wigmore's inclusionary cases
for the proposition that although evidence was produced by illegal spying, "it would not
be rejected by the court as relevant to the issue"). Cf. State v. Anderson, 174 P. 124 (Idaho 1918)
(split decision with majority upholding admission of liquor seized without warrant).
Wigmore cited Anderson with the claim that it "flatly approved the orthodox principle, and [did
not take] the trouble to notice Weeks v. U.S." Wigmore, supra note 74, at 480-81 n.1.
Yet, Wigmore failed to report that the Anderson decision was so close that three justices on the
Idaho Supreme Court each held separate positions, and that the case was originally
decided in favor of exclusion. Anderson, 174 P. at 126. A lengthy dissent by Justice Morgan
revealed the conflict among the panelists:

Some
time
ago
I

was
assigned
the
task
of
preparing
the
opinion
of
the
court
in
this
case.
A

draft
of
an
opinion
was
prepared,
but
my
utmost
efforts
have
not
convinced the
other
justices
of the soundness of my logic, nor of the wisdom of the decisions of the Supreme Court of the
United States, ably expressed, in similar cases.

See id. (Morgan, J., dissenting). Wigmore's exaggerated claims may have played a role in
altering the outcome of the decision during its drafting stage. See id. at 125 (the majority citing
Wigmore as support for the false claim that the "doctrine [of nonexclusion] has received the
approval of the courts of a majority of the states").
Morgan's dissent also questioned the notion that the nonexclusion cases cited by Wigmore
were not merely procedural. Morgan pointed out that some of the holdings, presented as being
on the merits of exclusion, were in fact rulings on the appropriate procedure for challenging
illegally seized evidence. See id. at 126 (Morgan, J., dissenting) ("Some of the decisions
above cited," wrote Morgan, "announce the rule that a court will not pause in the trial of a
criminal case to frame and try a collateral issue to determine the means by which evidence
against the defendant was obtained."). According to Morgan, even Adams v. New York, 192 U.S.
585 (1904), can be read as merely holding that a suppression motion should not be
made during a criminal trial, but should be a pretrial motion. See Anderson, 174 P. at 128.
n380. Amar II, supra note 5, at 25 (speaking of a "universal law against exclusion" that
allegedly prevailed in the nineteenth century).
n381. See supra notes 345-356 and accompanying text.
n382. See supra notes 345-356 and accompanying text.
n383. Professor Davies observes that neither of the two English cases cited by the Dana Court,
Legatt v. Tollervey, (1811) 104 Eng. Rep. 617 (K.B.), and Jordan v. Lewis, (1740) 104
Eng. Rep. 618 (K.B.), "were germane to an alleged violation of a constitutional standard[]"
because "they each involved an attempt by a defendant officer to prevent a plaintiff-victim in a
false prosecution case from admitting unofficially obtained court records as evidence of the
false prosecution - the reverse of the setting involved in the constitutional argument for
exclusion." See Davies, supra note 15, at 664 n.318.
n384. See Wilson Huhn, The Stages of Legal Reasoning: Formalism, Analogy, and Realism, 48
Vill. L. Rev. 305, 305 (2003) (suggesting that stare decisis develops chronologically
through the stages of formalism, analogy, and realism, especially in resolving difficult
questions of law, and roughly corresponding to the stages of cognitive and moral
development).
n385. Amar II, supra note 5, at 25 (speaking of a "universal law against exclusion" that
allegedly prevailed in the nineteenth century).
n386. Wigmore, supra note 74, at 479.
n387. See id.
n388. See Wilkes, supra note 346, at 884 (saying defenders of the exclusionary rule were
caught unprepared in the 1970s by Chief Justice Burger's claim that the exclusionary rule was
without constitutional support).
n389. See Osmond K. Fraenkel, Concerning Searches and Seizures, 34 Harv. L. Rev. 361, 367 &
n.35 (1921) (criticizing Wigmore's assertions).
n390. People v. Marxhausen, 171 N.W. 557, 560-1 (Mich. 1919) (emphasis added) (citations
omitted).
n391. Fraenkel, supra note 399, at 367.
n392. Id. at 367 n.35.
n393. See Note, Evidence Obtained by Illegal Search and Seizure, 14 Colum. L. Rev. 338, 338
(1914) (stating "it seems clear that the Fourth Amendment was intended" to "impede
prosecutions irrespective of the guilt or innocence of the accused").
n394. Stewart, supra note 26, at 1372.
n395. See id.
n396. Pitler, supra note 27, at 479; cf. Donald A. Dripps, Justice Harlan on Criminal Procedure:
Two Cheers for the Legal Process School, 3 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 125, 136 (2005)
("Justice Harlan's dissent in Mapp is as noteworthy for what it did not say as for what it did
say. Harlan did not invoke the original understanding of either the Fourth Amendment or the
Fourteenth."). A caveat is merited here because the Supreme Court's opinion in Adams v. New
York did state that a vast majority of cases on the issue went against exclusion. See 192
U.S. 585, 598 (1904) ("But the English and nearly all of the American cases have declined to
extend this doctrine to the extent of excluding testimony which has been obtained by such
means, if it is otherwise competent"). Yet, Adams stopped short of claiming that nonexclusion
was a settled rule, as many anti-exclusionists claim today.
n397. See, e.g., California v. Minjares, 443 U.S. 916, 920 (1979) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting from
denial of stay) (criticizing the Weeks Court for its "almost casual[]" holding that
exclusion was required by the Fourth Amendment); Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465, 497 (1976)
(Burger, C.J., concurring) (in which Chief Justice Burger referred to the Court's
exclusionary rule regime as a "remarkable situation - one unknown to the common-law
tradition"); Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Fed. Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388,
415-16 (1971) (Burger, C.J., dissenting) (criticizing the application of the exclusionary rule).
n398. See, e.g., Wesley W. Horton, The Connecticut State Constitution: A Reference Guide 50
(1993) (stating that Connecticut search and seizure law is still "mostly virgin territory"
except for a handful of decisions).
n399. See Ex parte Burford, 7 U.S. (3 Cranch) 448, 451 (1806); Ex parte Bollman, 8 U.S. (4
Cranch) 75, 110-11 (1807).
n400. See Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 638 (1886).
n401. See Frisbie v. Butler, 1 Kirby 213, 215 (Conn. 1787).
n402. See supra notes 118-90 and accompanying text.
n403. See supra notes 239-276 and accompanying text.