Carolyn Long

It really came to the attention of the public in a case in 1949 called Wolfe v. Colorado.

It was a tremendously important decision because he, as well as many, knew of the abuses of power in law enforcement.

And so the declaration that it was now applied to state and local officials was a really big deal.

What happens when law enforcement engages in an unreasonable or an illegal search?

On that question, Frankfurter sort of very much refused to say that the exclusion of that illegally seized evidence should be discarded.

It got a lot of attention.

Mapp ended up having a level of notoriety because people were watching this case.

Issues of obscenity were on people's minds.

Nobody thought that it would involve the exclusionary rule.

The evidence that they seized was ill-gotten because law enforcement had not had a warrant.

It meant that the arrest was invalid and any of the evidence, these dirty books, would be excluded from trial.

So it meant that she was free.

So it was a very big deal.

Judicial scholars call it as sort of the first shot across the bow in the incorporation of criminal procedure protections, because what we saw happening was the court starting to pay attention to criminal procedure rights.

It subsequently led to decisions like Miranda v. Arizona, which are protection against the right to self-incrimination, exclusionary rules extended there.

And so you had this cascading effect where the court starts to see that some of these other constitutional protections are also fundamental.

You get decisions like the Fifth Amendment right to be protected against self-incrimination, that if you are interrogated and you give a confession that's been coerced, that that would be excluded from trial.

Later, you know, the constitutional right to confront your witnesses, constitutional protections against double jeopardy.

There's just a whole slew of cases that came after MAP, which just extended these protections, the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

In Gideon v. Wainwright, all of these decisions happened because MAP v. Ohio paved the way by showing the court that these protections need to be extended to protect against state and local law enforcement practices.