The U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution in many cases; indeed, that is its primary task (Hall, 1992). Emerging from such interpretations are various doctrines said to be embedded or explicitly stated in the Constitution, such as the "Plain View" and "Open Fields" doctrines that address an aspect of the question of whether or not evidence recovered by a police officer is admissible in a court case. The Plain View Doctrine (Plain View Doctrine, 2007), essentially holds that law officers must first possess the authority to seize property believed to belong to a suspect, be present in a place where he or she has a right to be, the discovery of the evidence must be inadvertent, and it must be immediately apparent that the items discovered are evidence related to a case at hand. It is the Plain View Doctrine, as opposed to the Open Fields doctrine (to be delineated below), that is operative in the present case analysis.
The Plain View Doctrine is not without limits. First, while a warrant is not required if the conditions listed above are met, the Probable Cause Exception to warrantless searches and seizures of the Fourth Amendment must be met (Friedrichs, 2006). An officer lacking a warrant for an authorized search and seizure may have probable cause to believe that evidence relevant to a particular case that is in plain view is relevant.
The case involved Officers Nelson and Mahoney, who witnessed a male carrying a purse while running down a street. He was being pursued by a woman yelling at him to stop and give her purse back to her. The police, comprehending that a purse snatching had occurred, gave chase through a nearby neighborhood where fenced houses lined the street. The suspect, turning a corner, ran through a public alley used for garbage pickup and dropped the purse which fell to the ground and spilled most of its contents. Although the police continued to pursue the suspect, they lost him....