Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment Rights and USA Patriot Act Assignment

Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment Rights and USA Patriot Act - Assignment Example According to the research findings, in the case Katz V. United States the petitioner was disturbed by the following two issues: 1) The Court was asked to determine whether a public telephone booth is a constitutionally protected area so that evidence acquired by attaching an electronic listening recording gadget to the top of such a booth is done in a violation of the right to privacy of the user of the booth. 2) In addition, the Court was to consider whether physical penetration of a constitutionally protected area is required before a search and seizure is said to be in violation of Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In their rulings, the Judges declined to adopt the formulation of the issues. In the first formulation, the Judges held that the correct solution to the Fourth Amendment challenge is not necessarily promoted by incantation of the phrase, ‘constitutionally protected area.’ In addition, the Fourth Amendment cannot be translated into a genera l constitutional ‘right to privacy.’ The Fourth Amendment is solely meant to safeguard individual’s privacy against some kinds of governmental intrusion with its privacy stretching and has no attachment to privacy. The governmental invasion of individual privacy is protected against by other provisions in the Constitution. However, the protection of a person’s general right to privacy alludes to the protection of one’s right to his property and his life that solely determined by the law of the individual States. The issues were formulated in a misleading manner, and hence the parties attributed great significance to the characterization of the telephone booth from which the petitioner placed his calls. The strenuously suggested that the booth was a constitutionally protected area while the government held that booth was not a constitutionally protected area. The government activities in electronically listening to and recording the petitionerâ€℠¢s words violated the privacy upon which the defendant justifiably relied while using the telephone booth and hence constituted as search and seizure as regard to the Fourth Amendment. The concern is to determine whether the search and seizure conducted complied with the constitutional standards. The Court found it plausible to argue that language aimed particularly during searches and seizures of things that can be searched and seized might safeguard privacy by being employed to eavesdropped evidence of conversations that can neither be searched nor seized.