NCJ Number
142397
Journal
Law and Human Behavior Volume: 17 Issue: 2 Dated: (April 1993) Pages: 183- 200
Date Published
1993
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This article presents the results of a survey that asked 217 subjects to rate the "intrusiveness" of 50 different types of law enforcement investigative techniques, taken primarily from actual U.S. Supreme Court cases.
Abstract
Subjects were undergraduate students just beginning a University of Southern California course in law and society (79), University of Florida law students (52), citizens from the general community in Gainesville, Fla. (25), and Australian law students from Monash University in Melbourne (61). The results revealed significant differences between the four groups of subjects. Citizens from the general community and American law students had higher ratings of intrusiveness than undergraduate students and Australian law students. Younger persons were less likely than older persons to find the search and seizure scenarios intrusive. Overall, the findings indicate that the U.S. Supreme Court's conclusions about "reasonable expectations of privacy" or "restraints on freedom" are often not in tune with commonly held values. The Court could either ignore public opinion or admit that much of its current search-and-seizure jurisprudence is based on flawed assumptions about society's perspective on privacy and autonomy values and change its caselaw accordingly. It might have to require warrants in a number of nonemergency situations where it currently does not and require probable cause or at least some degree of suspicion in a number of situations where it currently does not. 2 tables and 41 references