Another landmark figure in U.S. legal history has died. Dollree Mapp was an Ohio citizen who, in 1957, denied police entry to search her home without a valid search warrant. The officers thereafter brandished a fake warrant and made entry into her home, where they found “lewd and lascivious materials” as defined under Ohio law and arrested her. Mapp was convicted of the charges, but challenged the case on the grounds of the warrant and appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
The landmark Supreme Court case, Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961), resulted in a 6-3 decision in which Ms. Mapp’s conviction was overturned when the Court recognized that the products of warrantless searches should be excluded as inadmissible evidence. In doing so, the Court extended the exclusionary rule for warrantless searches to state actions. In the decades since then, a great number of appeals have ensued to define the exclusionary rule and its limitations. For further reading on the case, the exclusionary rule, and Ms. Mapp, see the New York Times article Dollree Mapp, Who Defied Police Search in Landmark Case, Is Dead.
NOLA Contendere 