ABSTRACT
The US Supreme Court in Rochin v. California, 342 US 165 (1952), established that some law enforcement methods can be so intrusive that they are irreconcilable with the requirements of due process guaranteed under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution. By 1952, the Supreme Court had required that federal courts apply the exclusionary rule to illegally obtained evidence for almost forty years. The Court was then presented with the egregious police misconduct that was the basis of a constitutional challenge in Rochin. Justice Felix Frankfurter, the author of the Wolf opinion, relied on a Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process argument in concluding that the individual's conviction must be set aside. Nine years later in 1961, the Court overruled Wolf in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 US 643, and held that evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment was inadmissible in state court.
