Search Warrants for the Home

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The fourth amendment protection given your home is important to know. Before a judge issues a warrant for a search or arrest, the judge must be satisfied that there exists probable cause. The police officer seeking the search warrant must in writing present the facts establishing probable cause and sign the document. The 4th amendment requires that a warrant must contain a particular description of the premises to be searched and items that will be seized. The description must be specific enough that the police officer executing the warrant knows where to search. The warrant must be very specific with areas that will be searched. The police officer cannot search areas not specified in the warrant.
If for example, the warrant described that the contraband can be found in the Living Room, the police cannot search your bedrooms or your bathrooms. First, they will ask you if it ok to search these areas. Tell them no. Now they have to get a second warrant for those areas of the house.
If the police have only a arrest warrant not an search warrant, they cannot search people on the premises. They can only search a person if that person was specified in the warrant. The police must confine their search in areas specified in the warrant.
The police can open closet doors looking for the suspect, but they cannot riffle through the boxes in the closet looking for more evidence. However if the incriminating nature of the items seized must be "immediately apparent". To put it another way, the police must, at the time they first see the item in plain view, have probable cause to believe that the object is incriminating. Finally, the officer must have a lawful right of access to the object itself.
The smartest move is to put your contraband in a safe. Throw in crumpled newspapers to fill the safe. The police need a second search warrant to open the safe and if they have not found any evidence of wrong doing in their initial search, then their probable cause to secure a second warrant probably won’t be issued. Get a safe where the only way the police can open it is with a welding gun. The resulting flame from that gun will ignite the newspapers and will destroy all the evidence inside the safe. No evidence No arrest. [/font]