Criminal Procedure/Search and Seizure

Abstract

INTRODUCTION|In United States v. Roberts the Eighth Circuit concluded that private individuals, when they effectively barred the defendant from retrieving possession of his property, had completed a search and seizure of defendant's property without any governmental involvement and that a subsequent police seizure was not protected by the fourth amendment. As the following discussion will show, this decision is a departure from Supreme Court decisions which have defined the scope of the fourth amendment in terms of an individual's legitimate expectation of privacy in the items searched or seized. This article will explore the issues involved in determining when governmental participation is sufficient to trigger the application of the fourth amendment and when such governmental action constitutes a search and seizure within the meaning of the fourth amendment. These issues will be discussed with respect to the impact which recent case law has had in redefining the scope of the fourth amendment...