Fourth Amendment Case Study

The fourth amendment protects all citizens from illegal searches and seizure of their possessions and property. The Weeks v. United States case law was established in 1914, which consisted of police entering Fremont Weeks home and illegally seizing evidence of Weeks transporting lottery tickets through the mail. This case is what brought forth the exclusionary rule, which makes any evidence obtained during an illegal search and seizure possibly inadmissible in court. To uphold the fourth amendment, officers need a probable cause to justify the search of someone’s home and other property. To establish probable cause, officers need factual evidence that leads them to believe that the suspect has committed a crime. Without probable cause, a search warrant cannot be obtained. Since the suspect in question has been arrested and interrogated, probable cause has been established, and a search is warranted. The suspect’s laptop is confiscated and brought to the investigation department for data analysis. Since the offender communicated via chat messaging, checking the instant message logs would be the first place to search for e-evidence. The …show more content…
Not only will the messages provide crucial information that was exchanged between the participants, but an IP trace could be performed on the other participants of the chat sessions. If the suspect deleted the messages prior to the confiscation, gaining any e-evidence may be somewhat more difficult. Instant messaging programs can often be setup to not store exchanged messages. If the suspect used these settings while messaging the participants, it may be possible to obtain the messages from the RAM instead. At the very least, the timeline of the exchange may be recovered from the program, in the absence of messages. It may also be possible to recover the names of the participants and their IP