What are Plain View and Open Fields

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

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Category: Misc - W