Due Process, Truth, and the Term Paper

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The goal of modern constitutional criminal procedure is to define principles of law enforcement that protect citizens from government intrusions that are unreasonable in their effect on personal liberties, while simultaneously facilitating the reasonable enforcement of law and protection of society by prosecuting and punishing criminal conduct.

One of the first principles in early American constitutional history was the idea that it was more beneficial to society and its citizens to protect the rights of the innocent than to ensure the apprehension, prosecution, and punishment of every perpetrator of criminal conduct. This is often expressed as the notion that it is "better to let 100 guilty men go free than to punish a single innocent man" (Dershowitz, 2002). In many other countries, the balance between freedom and law enforcement is shifted much more toward the other end of the spectrum, and as a result, citizens of those countries are subject to investigative detention, arrest, and post-arrest interrogation based on suspicion alone, and even to long-term incarceration before any adjudication of guilt in any judicial proceeding (Schmalleger, 1997).

When viewed from the perspective of the innocent citizen, it is easy to see the importance of valuing individual liberty and the rights against unjustified police intrusions.

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However, it becomes much more difficult where the procedural rules of due process and related rights intended to protect the innocent produce the unintended result of allowing the guilty to escape prosecution. Improper police searches (i.e. without a warrant), interrogation without Miranda warnings, and arrest without probable cause (and other procedural violations of due process) sometimes have the unfortunate but unavoidable result that truthful testimony, confessions, and other overwhelming and conclusive evidence of guilt must sometimes be excluded from trial altogether.

Conclusion:

Because it is one of the only ways to ensure the rights of the innocent from unconstitutional police action, the constitutional law of criminal procedure sometimes requires that crucial evidence of obvious guilt be excluded from trial, even where doing so makes prosecution impossible. Ultimately, this is more of a reason for ensuring that proper training in law enforcement includes the accurate understanding and application of constitutional limits on enforcement than a reason to question the underlying social value of procedural due process......

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