Understanding Search Warrants: Protecting Your Fundamental Rights
What are search warrants, and why are they important to you? Hi, I’m Tulsa criminal attorney Carl Birkhead. I’m an attorney with Wirth Law Office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve been practicing family and criminal law for almost eight years now, and I want to help you make law easy by talking a little bit about why search warrants are so important to your rights and kind of how they operate.
They’re very important because law enforcement doesn’t have the right or the authority to just bust into your house whenever they want to and go through your stuff. That’s not a thing. Our ancestors fought a whole war over that a couple of hundred years ago.
How Search Warrants Protect Your Rights
If you’re suspected of a crime, law enforcement can go through the proper channels to get a warrant to go to your home or wherever they think the evidence of the crime is and look for that evidence, but it has to be very specific. So, let’s say for instance, let’s say for instance you’re accused of possessing child pornography.
The warrant is going to be tailored to that. It’s going to be looking for computers with that type of data on them, phones with that type of data on them, drawers of pictures and photos, things like that. So, they can go through your house and look for that.
Limits of Law Enforcement During Searches
Let’s just say, for instance, they happen to come across a pair of gardening shears in your garage that you used to stab somebody three days ago. As long as there’s no blood on them or anything that looks suspicious or weird, they don’t get to just grab those shears and take them with them. They don’t get to grab your favorite coffee mug and take…
Those aren’t items that get to be seized under that warrant because that warrant is specifically tailored to what you’re suspected of, possession of illicit pornographic material. So, that’s one of the things that you need to be looking out for in these types of situations.
What to Do If Law Enforcement Has a Warrant
If law enforcement shows up at your door with a warrant in hand, make sure you get a copy of it. Make sure you read it and make sure you keep a very close eye on where they’re going, what they’re doing, and what they’re taking. It might not even be a bad idea to have your phone out and record them as they’re going through this because you want to make sure that your rights are being protected here and they’re not overreaching the extent of what they’re able to do as far as searching through your property or seizing your things.
If you have questions about this or you’re in a situation where they’ve already shown up, they’ve already taken everything out of the home, and it was all for just a simple misdemeanor search warrant or something like that, definitely give us a call. We want to make sure that your rights are protected.
Schedule a Low-Cost Initial Strategy Session
We want to make sure that law enforcement is going through the proper channels. We want to make sure that the system is working the way that it’s supposed to work. So, give me a call and let’s talk about it. My name is Carl Birkhead. I’m a Tulsa misdemeanor defense attorney with Wirth Law Office, and I want to help you make law easy. Contact us at 918-879-1681.
