Is the Fourth Amendment a Great Twit?

There's a Monty Python sketch that shows the "Upper Class Twit of the Year" competition, in which five inbred upper crust Brits struggle to complete menial tasks before blowing their brains out in the finale. One of the twits, Oliver St John-Mollusc, trails at the back of the pack and appears to be confounded by an obstacle consisting of two rows of matchbooks stacked on top of one another, to which the commentator beams:

here's Oliver now, he's at the back. I think he's having a little trouble with his old brain injury, he's going to have a go, no, no, bad luck, he's up, he doesn't know when he's beaten, this boy, he doesn't know when he's winning either. He doesn't have any sort of sensory apparatus known to man.

Oliver is eventually eliminated from competition by running himself over ("what a great twit!").

We Americans tend to like that kind of never say die attitude, so I hope that there's a little bit of Oliver in the Fourth Amendment, 'cause if it has any sensory apparatus whatsoever it knows that there is very little left to keep on fighting. The Supreme Court's given it two body blows in the past week, as the Court closes out its term for the year.

First, the Court handed down a decision last week in which it held that evidence seized following an illegal entry of a home, because the police failed to obey the Fourth Amendment's requirement to knock and announce their presence, could not be suppressed in a criminal prosecution. The Court decided that certain non-criminal procedures (civil lawsuits and "more professional" police forces) would adequately deter police from violating the rule. That, of course, flies in the face of traditional Fourth Amendment law and, troublingly, may signal a willingness of the Court to retreat further from the exclusionary rule in other illegal search cases. I tend to agree with the dissenters, who argue that the knock and announce rule is now a dead letter in American law without the threat of suppression to back it up.

Then today the Court handed down a decision in a California case in which it held that police may search a person on parole without any suspicion of wrongdoing whatsoever. In the case, a police officer saw a man walking down the street he knew was on parole and suspected was the target of an outstanding arrest warrant. He stopped the man, who denied he had a warrant out for him and volunteered that he was on good terms with his parole officer. The cop confirmed that information, but nevertheless searched the man, solely because he was on parole. The search uncovered a small amount of methamphetamine, which led to the prosecution. The Court basically concluded that parolees have no reasonable expectation of privacy anywhere while on parole and therefore the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to them. It leaves an entire population at the tender mercies of the police, who may search them for no reason at all anytime they like. Again, I'm with the dissenters on this one.

The Fourth Amendment has been repeatedly hit and hit hard during the "war on drugs." It may still take similar blows in the name of the "war on terra." Let's hope, like poor hapless Oliver, it's too stupid to realize it's been beaten.