Paul Bender

The Retroactive Effect of an Overruling Constitutional Decision: Mapp v. Ohio

The decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Mapp v. Ohio, suddenly overruling Wolf v. Colorado, has created an interesting problem regarding the retroactive effect of an overruling decision. Wolf held that the Constitution does not impose upon the states the same obligation imposed upon the national government in Weeks v. United States to exclude evidence from criminal trials when it is the fruit of an unreasonable search and seizure. Mapp holds instead “that all evidence obtained by searches and seizures in violation of the Constitution is, by that same authority, inadmissible in a state court.” The ordinary assumption in the Court has been that a decision determining the meaning of the Constitution must be retroactive, even if it is an overruling decision. However, the Court has more recently declared that there are appropriate limits to treating unconstitutional federal law “as though it had never been passed.” With regard to the particular past circumstances in which a constitutional overruling decision will not be given full retroactive application though, the Court has given no general guidelines. The purpose of this article is to examine what seems relevant in determining the proper retroactive effect of Mapp. This article argues that the retroactive effect of Mapp ought to be quite limited because the purposes of the new law do not seem to be meaningfully served by applying it to the past.