Carolyn Long

She had some real concern about whether or not she would get treated fairly in the justice system.

She was facing a one-to-seven-year sentence, and she was devastated.

She was living with her young teenage daughter, and she was terrified that she had been so easily convicted.

She just felt like the Damocles sword was over her head, that there was going to come a point when she was going to have to serve a sentence.

And so she told me, you know, she had two plans, and one of the plans was to flee.

She didn't want it to have to come to that, but she also, you know, refused to be imprisoned for something that she did not do.

So the Fourth Amendment is sort of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights that deals with criminal procedure.

And the Fourth Amendment does two things.

It has a clause that protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures.

And then there's another clause which requires that if police are going to engage in a search, that they have to get a warrant based upon probable cause that is presented before a neutral magistrate.

The Fourth Amendment primarily applies to people, their homes, and their effects or their papers.

And it is an amendment that the framers felt very strongly needed to be in the Constitution because some of the abuses that happened during colonial times.

And a writ of assistance is nothing like a warrant.

It's actually far more alarming.

A writ of assistance is essentially a general writ that allows custom officers unlimited power to search people, their homes, and their effects.

And it would stay in place, meaning that writ was active until the sovereign who had issued the writ had died.

And there was a lot of pushback because of the nature of these searches.

And there's a moment when an attorney in Boston, James Otis, he was giving these fiery speeches about how they were really intruding upon our rights to be free from the government engaging in these general pervasive searches.

It sort of stirred the people in the audience.

And one member in the audience was John Adams.