Constitutionality of Stop and Frisk Essay Example for Free

Constitutionality of Stop and Frisk Essay The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. It also states that no warrants shall be issued without a probable cause. Modern jurisprudence has afforded police officers an incentive to respect the amendment. The Stop and Frisk law allows police officers to stop someone and do a quick search of their outer clothes for weapons if the officer has a reasonable suspicion that a crime has or is about to take place and the person stopped is armed or dangerous. The reasonable suspicion must be based with specific articulable facts and not on just an officer’s hunch. The Stop and Frisk law balances crime control, protects an individual’s right, and prevents unreasonable searches. The Fourth Amendment states, â€Å"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be seized (Lehman 471-476). This amendment can be broken into 2 distinct parts the reasonableness clause and the warrant clause. In the beginning, the U. S. Supreme Court adopted the conventional Fourth Amendment approach, which says the warrant and reasonableness clauses are firmly connected. The reasonableness clause protects the people’s right against unreasonable searches and seizures. The reasonable clause has to pass the reasonableness test, which consists of two elements that the government has to prove; balancing element and objective basis. The balancing element is the need to search and/or seize outweighs the invasion of liberty and privacy rights of the individuals. The objective basis is when there are enough facts to back up the search and/or seizure. The warrant clauses states that only warrants and probable cause are reasonable. It was not until the 1960’s when the Supreme Court shifted from the conventional approach to the reasonableness Fourth Amendment approach. It states that the 2 clauses are separate, and address separate problems. The warrant clause tells us what the Fourth Amendment requires only when law nforcement officers want to obtain warrants. Since a small percentage of searches and seizures are made with warrants and many searches and seizures don’t require probable cause either, the warrant clause isn’t very important. Today’s stop and frisk law grow out of the practical problems police officers face in preventing and investigating crime on the streets and other public places in our largest cities. In investigations, officers are usually dealing with people they don’t know or probably won’t ever see again. Usually these stranger’s suspicious behavior doesn’t add up to the probable cause needed to arrest them. An example would be that officers don’t have enough facts and circumstances viewed through their professional experience and training to arrest two men, who peer into a store window, look around to see if anyone’s watching them and pace up and down repeating the pattern for 10 minutes. What should the officers do at this point? Keep watching? Do nothing about the situation? Detain the men and pat the down for weapons? Take them to the police station? These issues were raised in the famous Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1 (1968) case. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1 (1968), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court which ruled that the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures on unreasonable searches and seizures was not violated when a police officer stopped a suspect on the street and search him without probable cause. On October 31, 1963, a Cleveland police detective named Martin McFadden saw two men, John W.  Terry and Richard Chilton, standing on a street corner looking suspicious. One would walk by a certain store window, stare in, and walk back to the other to confer. This was repeated several times, and the detective believed that they were plotting to do a store robbery. The officer approached the men and addressed himself as a policeman, and asked their names. When the men appeared suspicious in their answers, Officer McFadden patted them down and discovered that both men were armed. He proceeded to remove their guns and arrested them for carrying concealed weapons. Terry was sentenced to three years in prison. Terry appealed the case, claiming that the guns found should be inadmissible as evidence since his Fourth Amendment rights were violated. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, where it was it was ruled that his rights had not been violated. In an 8-to-1 decision, the Court held that the search undertaken by the officer was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment and that the weapons seized could be introduced into evidence against Terry. The Court found that the officer acted on more than a â€Å"hunch† and that â€Å"a reasonably prudent man would have been warranted in believing Terry was armed and thus presented a threat to the officer’s safety while he was investigating his suspicious behavior. † The Court found that the searches undertaken were limited in scope and designed to protect the officer’s safety incident to the investigation. In reference to the Fourth Amendment searches and seizures, officers need to prove fewer suspicions facts and circumstances to back up stops and frisks than they do arrests and full-blown searches. Stops and frisks represents the beginning of a chronological path through the criminal process from more frequent and more visible searches and seizures in public to more intrusive searches and seizures out of sight in police stations. Stop and frisks aren’t just fine points for constitutional lawyers and courts to debate. They also reflect broad public policies aimed at balancing the values of crime control and individual liberty and privacy. Since stop and frisks take place in public, the display of police power is there for everybody to see. Because of this visibility, stops and frisks probably shape public opinion of police power more than the greater invasions of arrest and searches that we never see. Deciding which is more important in a constitutional democracy – crime control by means of less intrusive public stops and frisks affecting more people or often invisible arrests and searches affecting fewer people – is both a constitutional and public policy question. The key facts are: 1) Officers are going to stop many people who haven’t done anything wrong; and they’ll frisk lots of people who aren’t armed. 2) Most of the same people want police protection and (at least in high-crime neighborhoods) need it more than people who live in safe neighborhoods. 3) Both lawbreakers and law abiders in high-street-crime neighborhoods from lasting opinions about the police from street encounters they’ve watched or experienced.

Sports, Athletes, and Weight Loss: Health Concerns Essay -- Health Nut

Weight Loss by Athletes and Health Concerns Waking up, sophomore Mike Fumagalli would peel off the garbage bags and layers of clothing he had worn to bed the night before hoping to "sweat away" some extra weight. Throughout the day, he would ask teachers to use their trashcans and would spit constantly. Sometimes, he would even cut his hair or sit in a sauna, all to lose a couple more pounds. Many people may wonder why someone would go to such extreme measures just to lose a few pounds. For Fumagalli, the answer was simply: "Everyone likes to win. That's why you cut weight." "Cutting weight" is a term that refers to a wrestler's attempt to lose a certain amount of weight in order to compete in a particular weight category in wrestling competitions. Some wrestlers choose to lose weight so they can find a spot on the team, said Keith Healy, varsity wrestling coach of the nationally ranked team at Smallville High School. Since only a certain number of slots are open per weight class, a wrestler may be beat out of a spot at one weight but perhaps can drop down to a lower weight where more openings are available. Junior Sean Randich said that cutting weight also could be important because as one moves down in weight classes it is easier to win. A common weight-loss method among the athletes is to wrap their body in garbage bags during exercise to maximize sweat loss, said Randich. He added that while the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) prohibits this method, it is still commonly practiced. JT wrestling coach "Mac" McLaughlin said that although he could not control what athletes did at home, at practice, garbage bags are not allowed. He added that most of his wrestlers, in fact, wear onl... ... children's bodies," said Haas. McLaughlin said that he tells parents, "If your kid looks like he's getting tired, souped out, stop." Healy also consults parents about their child's weight loss and said that before any wrestler on his team makes the decision to cut a large amount of weight, he first consults the parents. "Because of cutting weight, my mom doesn't like the whole sport," said Fumagalli. He said that while his mom was supportive in helping him cut weight by doing such things as making salads, she drew the line when he began to get sick. Fumagalli, who said he frequently cut weight in junior high, said he lost 12 pounds before this season but stopped when he started to get light-headed and dizzy. "There is a fine line between determination of sport and health," said Fumagalli. "Strength is more important than losing two pounds."

Government cut-backs

High youth unemployment and cutbacks in government funding for post-secondary education are the new realities confronting students. The implications for most working and middle class students are either to abandon education altogether and to accept a future of McJobs and unemployment, or to be saddled with a lifetime of debt. Since the end of WW II, science and technology have been playing a dramatically increased role in the process of capitalist production in Canada. As a result, there has been an increase in the demand for a more highly educated labour force. For example, between 1971 and 1986, jobs primarily concerned with the creation and utilization of data and technical knowledge have represented two-thirds of net job growth. This has led to a rapid expansion in school enrolment. Between 1951 and 1993, the number of full-time post-secondary students has increased over tenfold, growing from 91,000 to almost 1 million. However, accompanying the scientific and technological revolution, is a tremendous growth in productivity that has led to higher levels of unemployment. Between 1980 and 1993, youth unemployment increased from 12% to 17.5, leaving many with no other alternative but to remain in or return to school. Since 1984-85, tuition fees have more than doubled across Canada, pushing more students into the labour market in search of income. While in 1980, 31% of full-time students, aged 15-24, held jobs during the school year; by 1989, this number had reached 41%. This worsening economic situation has also seriously interfered with the studies of college and university full-time students, as almost a third of them were forced to work 20 or more hours per week during the school year. Another reflection of the economic hardship of students is their growing debt burden. In 1984, 114,000 Ontario students received around $4000 million in student aid, by 1993-94, as tuition continued to increase, about 180,000 students (representing almost half of full-time students) took out over $1 billion in loans. The average value of loans in 1994-95 was around $6800. By 1998, the federal government is scheduled to eliminate a total of $7 billion in transfer payments to the provinces for medicare, social assistance, and post-secondary education. The expected effect on Ontario university students is a doubling of their tuition. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Ontario's education minister, John Snobelen, has already made clear his government's intention to move toward a â€Å"market-based tuition fee†. If both levels of government abandon their financial support for Ontario universities, tuition will reach minimum levels of $7500-$8000. To counter the danger of a dramatic growth in defaults as it increases tuition fees, the federal government has transferred liability for student loans to the private banks. While increasing the role of the private banks in the short term, these changes set the pace for the full privatization of the student loan system. Another plan, currently under discussion, proposes collecting the loan repayments through the taxation system, i.e., Revenue Canada, through an Income Contingent Loan Repayment Plan (ICLRP). If the direction of government â€Å"reforms† is not reversed, it is only a matter of time before students who are at a high risk of unemployment (disproportionately women) or who are expected to have a low income after graduation (again disproportionately women) are refused access to loans, while most of the rest are burdened with a lifetime of debt. But the class nature of the privatization process has already become apparent. For 1995-96, the demand for first-year places is down by 5% in Ontario–20% in some faculties–leading many schools to turn toward recruiting drives and to lowering their admission requirements. Evidently, higher tuition is an obstacle for better qualified, poorer students, while offering an opening to less qualified, richer students. Cut the deficit by taxing the big corporations By focusing attention on expenditure reduction, the big corporations and the right-wing aim to deflect attention from the cause of the national debt: the decreasing tax revenues from corporations, which have declined from 20% of total federal revenues to only 7% in the last 20 years. Canada continues to have one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the industrialized world. Even the same level of corporate taxation as in the U.S. would provide an additional $9 billion a year–more than enough to cover all the cuts in social spending scheduled by the federal government. The ongoing cutbacks to education follow more than a decade of political and financial pressures promoted by federal and provincial governments in relation to social spending in general. Indeed, the education crisis cannot be separated from the overall crisis of the capitalist economy in Canada. The critical challenge before us today is to bring together all the social elements that are hurt by the implementation of the big corporate agenda: to build wide coalitions of youth and students, workers, women, seniors, environmentalists, peace groups, farmers, aboriginal people, immigrants, and many others–in support of a genuine â€Å"People's Alternative† program. This program would provide for decent wages, stronger public health and child cares systems, job creation programs, while restoring and increasing public funding for education. Reversing the current cut-backs and building the people's alternative depend on escalating the student protests. As a first step, we must build strong grassroots organizations on campuses which can ensure wide student involvement in the mobilizations. Students and working people have fought a long battle to win the right to higher education, health care, UI, and other social programs. Today, we have to build the fightback against those who are bent on destroying our social programs and our right to a quality, accessible education.

Analysing Good Literature - 1850 Words

Analyzing the Literature A literature class, of course, has to require that the students to read a lot of different examples so they will understand the elements of the different types of writing. Unfortunately, many of the works selected will seem archaic and outdated. They may demonstrate a specific method or element that a student needs to understand, but the works themselves do not seem to hold interest or fit a modern style. However, it has been a surprise that the stories, poems and plays have actually been entertaining. Good writing is not difficult to find because there have been so many people who have been writing for so long. The purpose of this course was to demonstrate what good writing is and the elements that make up a good piece of writing regardless of type. It is the purpose of this paper to look at the writing sample that were required to be read for this class and examine them for the elements they contained, and to especially notice the morals and values presente d. Short Stories The authors use of the elements of fiction seems to be the most important way to judge whether it is a good work or not. Setting is important because it is the foundation of the story. The reader has to have some point of reference for the work to ground the reading of it. Hawthornes story says He had left his laboratory to the care of an assistant (Hawthorne, 1851, 32) which may not seem to tell the reader anything about the story, but it actually sets up all of theShow MoreRelatedRelationship Between Employees And Business1189 Words   |  5 PagesIntroduction Research is about systematically obtaining and analysing data to increase our knowledge about a topic in which we are interested (Saunders et al. 2010). 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