Supreme Court Bill of Rights Case

Terry v. Ohio introduce the Terry frisk into police procedure, allowing officers to have the right to stop and frisk or do a surface search of individuals on the street even without probable cause. All the officer would need would be to have a reasonable suspicion that the person being searched had committed, was about to commit or was in the act of committing a crime. The Supreme Court stated that the officer's suspicion had to be "specific" and able to be put into words -- that is to say, the officer could not just say he had a "hunch" that the person searched was about to violate the law: the officer would have to be able to point to a specific characteristic that made him suspect the individual in question.

However, this Supreme Court case eventually led to the allowance of the detainment of persons -- of searches and seizures such as traffic stops -- or the kinds of searches that one must undergo when flying. The Terry frisk initiated a snowball effect of more and more leeway on the part of law enforcement and security personnel to be able to detain persons, search them and their belongings, and seize items that may be constituted a threat. What Terry v. Ohio allowed the Court to do was to reinterpret the meaning of the "exclusionary rule" as pertaining to the Fourth Amendment's guarantee to citizens against unlawful searches and seizures (Maclin, 2014). The... Implicit in this concept is the idea that unlawful searches cannot and should not be performed by law enforcement. The Court, in Terry v. Ohio, essentially reversed the exclusionary rule principle, said it applied only to the gathering of evidence and that when it came to keeping people safe or protecting people, law enforcement agents could search/frisk because they were not attempting to "gather evidence" but rather to prevent a crime or stop a criminal. This was, of course, mere wordplay. The Court gave law enforcement the right to stop and search anyone and everyone so long as they could later "state in words" their reason (easily contrived) for doing so. In other words, this case overrode the Fourth Amendment and effectively ended the peoples' guarantee of protection against unlawful searches.
In this case, Terry and two other individuals were identified by officer Mcfadden on a Cleveland street in what appeared to be an instance of the three men casing a storefront in order to perform a robbery. Mcfadden approached the three individuals, identified himself as an officer, patted down Terry, found a gun in his coat pocket, patted down the second individual, found another gun and patted down the third but found nothing.…