Due Process Essay Example

The U.S. government strives to establish justice, but can’t always achieve that. To establish justice is to make sure people who have committed crimes get fitting punishments. One of the ways justice should be implemented is through due process. Due process is the judicial system protecting and honoring the rights you were given as you make your way through court cases. Due process is important because without it, a lot of people wouldn’t have fair trials and the judicial system would be out of order. Does the U.S government necessarily follow due process? Let’s find out.

The due process protection I will be assessing is the 4th amendment- no unreasonable searches and seizures. This should be protecting people's privacy, making it so that police need a warrant to search your house or car. A warrant is a document that lets the police search a specific area, even without the owner’s consent. Police also need reasonable suspicion, or probable cause,  in order to get a warrant. Although this has been an amendment for many, many years, a lot of law enforcement officers choose not to follow it. A good example of this due process protection being defied is this next case. 

A veteran, Stephen Lara, was on his way to visit his two daughters who lived across the state. He had his life savings ($87,000) with him, which he never kept in a bank due to personal reasons. He was on the highway and was stopped for following a truck too closely, which he later claims he wasn’t. The police officers questioned him on his whereabouts, possession of drugs, etc. They found the money in his trunk after he consented to a search, and even though he had all of his pay stubs and receipts to prove that it was his money, the police claimed that they had reason to think the money was from drug trafficking. So the police seized the money and left with it. In this case, the seizure was absolutely unreasonable, as the veteran had evidence that the money was indeed from working and not drug trafficking. Luckily, after eight months, Lara was able to get his money back- but not without a fight. An expert that worked on this case alongside Lara mentioned that things like this happen all the time, but most of the time are only set back a few hundred dollars, “making it impossible for somebody to hire a lawyer to fight the power of the government.” This is just one of many cases where government officials have disregarded the fourth amendment, and this still happens today. 

Another good example of where cops are obeying the fourth amendment and keeping people safe is something called a “stop and frisk”. Stop and frisks are when cops randomly stop suspects either in a car or on foot to do a non intrusive search - keeping the neighborhood safe by nipping issues in the bud. Many people, even people that have experienced this, have said they felt it made their environment more secure, which is great! Since in this situation, police officers are doing non intrusive searches, they are perfectly following due process. Hopefully, all law enforcement officers start doing this more.

In my opinion, with only the fourth amendment in mind, our government does not establish justice, at least not well. There are so many cases where law enforcement officers disregard the fourth amendment that get overlooked, and that’s not fair to the person who unfairly lost personal items, money, or whatever it may have been in that case. The U.S. government needs to start improving their actions taken in order to establish justice, because the job they do currently is not enough.