Amendment 4 (as well as other amendments) has been largely ignored and emasculated by our courts all the way up to the Supreme Judicial Court.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
There are thousand page tomes in the legal libraries that describe Supreme Court findings about this Amendment. The Supreme Court findings exploit the vagueness of the words “unreasonable” and “probable”. It’s easy to see that if a person has white flour or powdered sugar, a cop, in his police report, could write that he reasonably concluded the power was cocaine, and, therefore, entered a house without a warrant under the Supreme Court provisions of “exigent circumstances” or “hot pursuit”.
Once a cop figured he was in “hot pursuit” of my son because my son protested his girlfriend’s traffic ticket. The cop broke down the door of the house and, according to his police report, “would have shot my son had not another in the house stood behind my son. My son got off after spending $20,000 on a lawyer to prove that the cop entered the house illegally in violation of amendment 4. Because my family has never owned a gun or used drugs, the cop couldn’t find reason to justify entering the house or making an arrest without a warrant.
Crack 8 in the Liberty Bell is that people have to pay a lot of money to lawyers in order to get the protection of their amendments.