cover image THE INTRUDERS: Unreasonable Searches and Seizures from King John to John Ashcroft

THE INTRUDERS: Unreasonable Searches and Seizures from King John to John Ashcroft

Samuel Dash, . . Rutgers Univ., $22.95 (172pp) ISBN 978-0-8135-3409-1

Dash is well suited to discuss the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures—now a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, he was chief counsel to the Senate committee that investigated Watergate, a scandal in which President Nixon was accused of violating just that guarantee. And he agrees with Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman on one point—that this right "has been considerably eroded" in the last few decades, most recently by the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act. Yet, as Dash points out, such struggles have existed from the time of the Magna Carta. With a lawyer's zeal for complex argument and detail, Dash looks at 18th-century England, for example, where the court convicted a printer and writer named John Wilkes based on the illegal seizure of many of his private papers; by the time a judge overturned the verdict on appeal, Wilkes had died from catching pneumonia in prison. More recently, Dash tells of Dollree Mapp, an African-American woman whose apartment was forcibly searched in 1957 by a police sergeant who said, "We didn't think we needed [a warrant]." Dash traces the erosion of the exclusionary rule (which says illegally obtained evidence must be excluded in court) by the Supreme Court under Warren Burger. The USA Patriot Act, Dash says, "dangerously eliminates" citizens' protection against government surveillance. These issues have been, and will continue to be, debated by civil libertarians. Dash has the authority to bring the discussion to a larger audience, and his ideas will no doubt be much discussed in the media. (May)