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the exclusionary rule is fundamentally sound, but for

somewhat different reasons than liberal legal scholars typ-

ically offer.

Before addressing the constitutional merits of the

exclusionary rule, however, it is important to emphasize

that the Fourth Amendment was designed to shield the citi-

zenry from unbridled police power.  No power of govern-

ment, short of arrest and incarceration, has such a direct

impact on the life, liberty, and property of individual

citizens.  As Fourth Amendment scholar John Wesley Hall

Jr. observes,

The raw power held by a police officer con-

ducting a search is enormous.  An officer wield-

ing a search warrant has the authority of law to

forcibly enter one's home and search for evi-

dence.  The officer can enter at night and wake

you from your sleep, roust you from bed, rummage

in your drawers and papers, and upend your

entire home.  Even though the particularity

clause of the warrant defines the scope of the

search, the search, as a practical matter, will

be as intense as the officer chooses to make it.1

Indeed, when the police come to a house or business and

demand entrance, the individual citizen has only a moment

to decide whether to risk violence by withholding consent

or, alternatively, to yield to one or more strangers.  If

police officers gain entrance and then abuse their search

authority--such as by using profanity in front of young

children, by pointing their weapons at nonthreatening occu-

pants, by damaging family belongings, by detaining resi-

dents for inordinate periods of time, by spreading innuen-

do to neighbors or local news reporters, or by using

excessive force against the individual or his family--the

individual citizen can only stand by helplessly until such

time as the police decide to leave.  An aggrieved citizen

might later hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit, but his suc-

cess would be far from certain and it could take years to

secure any compensation or vindication for such abuse.

Many citizens have lost their very lives during

police searches.  Here are a few recent examples of the

tragic consequences of police searches:

· In 1995 sheriff's deputies in Beaver Dam, Wiscon-

sin, burst into a trailer home to execute a search

warrant as part of a drug investigation.  Moments

after the deputies entered the trailer, one of them

shot and killed 29-year-old Scott Bryant.  Bryant,