Reasonable expectation of privacy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Reasonable expectation of privacy - Essay Example It is also the starting point of analysis in determining whether or not a violation of the Fourth Amendment has occurred (Jones, 1997). The Constitutional principle reposed in the Fourth Amendment that protects the right to privacy of a citizen against unreasonable searches and seizures is triggered when (1) the citizen has a manifested subjective expectation of privacy, (2) and one that society is willing to accept as objectively reasonable. California v. Greenwood (486 U.S. 35 [1988]). However, the Supreme Court has come up with a long line of cases carving out exceptions to the rule and stating the circumstances where no search occurred as there is no violation of reasonable expectation of privacy. One of the first circumstances is that of â€Å"false friends†. This is embodied in the case of Hoffa v. United States (385 U.S. 293 [1966]), where the defendant had made some disclosures to a person he thought to be a union official, but was in fact a government agent. Hoffa claimed that it was an illegal search and claimed his reasonable expectation of privacy. The argument did not hold, however, as the Supreme Court found that the government agent â€Å"was in the suite by invitation and every conversation which he heard was either directed to him or knowingly carried on in his presence.† (page 302). The second circumstance given by the Supreme Court is abandoned property, meaning that there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy where the evidence has been dumped in a public place and law enforcement agents have managed to retrieve it. A good example is a gun that has been thrown in a garbage bin, and thus leaving it exposed to the general public or to a definite third party. That evidence can be rightly used against him. The third circumstance is physical attributes on display. The courts have held that there cannot possibly be an expectation of privacy when what is sought to be excluded as evidence is physical characteristics that