How the U.S. Constitution has Influenced the Criminal Justice
The United States Constitution provides the foundation for all of the laws in the United States. Therefore, all aspects of the criminal justice are governed and controlled by the guarantees in the U.S. Constitution. However, the early history of criminal justice system was relatively free from interference by the Supreme Court, even when it appeared that individual jurisdictions were engaging in behavior that may have violated the Constitutional rights of suspects or criminal defendants. During the past 50 years, the court has become more active and involved in the process of protecting Civil Rights and giving teeth to the rights guaranteed in the Constitution. This activism has led to three substantial changes in the criminal justice system. The first change is that criminal suspects must now be given verbal warnings, referred to as Miranda warnings, prior to custodial interrogation. The second change is that evidence obtained as a result of an illegal search, although not from the illegal search itself, is excluded under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine. The third major change is that the Constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment has been construed to prohibit the execution of juvenile defen
The second way that the U.S. Constitution has helped change the face of law in America is the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against illegal search and seizure. Many western countries prohibit the admission in court of evidence that was obtained in violation of local search and seizure laws. The United States has expanded the protection against illegal searches to the next logical step; evidence obtained as a result of an illegal search, though not found during that illegal search, is not admissible. This doctrine is referred to as the fruit of the poisonous tree. In addition, the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against illegal searches, as construed in the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, is related to other constitutional protections. For example, if a confession is obtained in violation of a suspect's Fifth Amendment right to silence or Sixth Amendment right to counsel, and then used to locate incriminating evidence, that evidence is not admissible in court. This doctrine is important because without it, the constitutional protections guaranteed under the Bill of Rights would be meaningless, since law enforcement could violate one of the Amendments, as long as the subsequent discovery did not violate an Amendment. The third way that the Constitution has changed the face of criminal justice is with the Eighth Amendment and its prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. Because the death penalty was in use at the time the Constitution was written, for many years it was assumed
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Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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