In this episode we re-argue the Supreme Court case Wolf v. Colorado.

One evening the police received a call about an ill woman in a hotel room. They arrived to find a woman who admitted to receiving an illegal abortion and shared the names of her doctors. Without first obtaining a search warrant, the police searched their offices and took a book of patients and care provided maintained by one of the doctors, JW. After interviewing JW's patients, they arrested him, along with some of his colleagues. At their trials, the book that the police took without a search warrant, and the interviews they conducted from the information in the book, were used to convict JW and the other doctors. JW appealed his conviction to the Colorado Supreme Court, arguing that the use of evidence seized without a search warrant violated his 4th and 5th Amendment rights, but the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that evidence obtained without a search warrant was not automatically excluded from trial in state courts. JW then appealed this decision to the United States Supreme Court.

The question before the court: while federal trials require evidence obtained without a search warrant to be excluded to protect a defendent's 4th and 5th Amendments rights in accordance with the ruling in Weeks v. United States, does the same apply to state courts, or do they get to make their own rules?

This is episode 2 of a 3-part series on the development of the Exclusionary Rule.