Unwarranted

On the morning of May 20, 1957, a bomb exploded under Don King’s front porch. Police got a tip that they should search the home of someone he knew - a woman named Dollree Mapp. But when they got there, she refused to let them in. Soon, her case would go all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court. Carolyn Long’s book is Mapp v. Ohio: Guarding Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:14Speaker 02

  On the morning of May 20th in 1957, a man named Don King was alone at home. Don King wasn't famous yet as a boxing promoter, but in Cleveland, he was known as "The Numbers Czar."

• 1:30Speaker 03

  Don King was about 25, so fairly young. He was starting to also become very active in the boxing community.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  This is Professor Carolyn Long. When Don King was 10, his father was killed in an accident at his job at a steel factory. Don King and his brother started running an illegal lottery, known as "The Numbers." They would sell peanuts to the gambling houses in town. Each bag of nuts contained a square paper with lottery numbers on it. They would shout, "Get your hot roasted peanuts and your lucky number."

• 2:07Speaker 02

  By the time he was 25, he was well-known for running illegal gambling in Cleveland. At one point, he was making $15,000 a day from his gambling operation.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  The people who were involved were primarily from the African-American community, and they were very much targeted by law enforcement because of the assumption that it was connected to organized crime, which is why the Vice Squad always went after them.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  In Cleveland, vice crimes were handled by a unit called the Special Bureau of Investigation. One officer there was Sergeant Carl Delau. He'd arrested Don King for illegal gambling in 1954. But afterwards, Don King and Carl Delau became friendly, and sometimes Don King told Carl about rival gambling operations, and that he had to pay money to local gangsters for protection. And then, on the morning of May 20, 1957, a bomb exploded under Don King's front porch.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  It was not a big bomb, but it was enough to scare someone. So it destroyed part of King's porch. It was obviously intentionally set, and he believed that people who were involved in gambling had set the bomb as a warning to him. And he immediately called Carl Delau and this Bureau of Special Investigations because he was concerned about his own safety.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  A few days later, Carl Delau got an anonymous tip about the bomb. The tip said that a man named Virgil Ogletree, another numbers game operator, knew something about it, and that he was hiding at a house nearby. It belonged to someone Don King knew, a woman named Dolary Mapp.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Dolary Map was born on October 30th, 1923. She grew up in a small town in Mississippi. Carolyn says that Dolary told her that she was "strong-willed" as a child. She told her parents that, quote, "she wanted to live her life her own way." When she was 10, they let her move in with her aunt in Cleveland. When she was 15, she got pregnant and had a daughter. She stayed in Cleveland and later dropped out of school. When Dolary was 21, she got engaged to a boxer named Jimmy Bivins. Dolary said it was an abusive relationship.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  She told Carolyn, "I had to leave him or kill him, and I wasn't ready to kill him." But she didn't want to say much else.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  She said, "You know, I'm not going to talk about that. I don't need to talk about that. He's a non-entity. He's irrelevant to my life."

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Dolary later dated another boxer, Archie Moore. They got engaged when she was 31, but broke up about a year later.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  So she was really well-known in the community because not only of these relationships, but because of who she was. She was socializing with people, and her name was well-known in the area. What did she look like? Well, at the time, she was strikingly attractive. She was in her early 30s. She was very slender, high cheekbones, and an incredible fierce gaze that just captured you. You could tell how confident she was as a young woman, and also how defiant she was.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Dolary Map was stopped often by the police on suspicion of being involved in illegal gambling.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  She had not been arrested at this point, but she certainly had been detained and questioned, and in her mind, harassed by law enforcement. They seemed to look for ways to confront her. Carl DeLau referred to her as his arch-enemy. And I think that was less because she was some prominent criminal and more that she was a young black woman who really pushed back and was oftentimes... accusing them of of targeting her and the people she knew because of their race and that it was unnecessary and that it was really brutal to her and to her friends to be under this constant scrutiny by police.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  And, you know, Carl DeLau, he was unapologetic about his job. He had been tasked to look into illegal gambling. I remember speaking to him and he said, you know, we were well trained, you know, we were aggressive, but we were doing what the community wanted. We had a lot of wins, meaning there were a number of arrests that they were able to make to show their progress in cracking down on this behavior. The dynamic between an all white police force, sort of going after people in these communities who are predominantly black, was not really of concern to them because they were so certain that what they were doing was right.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  On May 23rd, 1957, three days after the bomb went off, under Don King's porch, Carl DeLau and two other officers went to Dolary Map's house.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  It was early afternoon and Dolary heard her door knock and she looked out her second story window and saw three officers sort of pounding on the door. And she yelled out the window, you know, what are you doing here? And they said, you know, we just want to talk to you, Dolly. And she said, well, what do you want to talk to me about? And they refused to tell her. And she said, well, I'm not going to let you in, in my home.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Dolary Map called her lawyer's office and they told her she didn't have to let the police come in.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  And that if they wanted to speak to her about anything, they would have to produce a warrant which granted them access to her house. And so after speaking to her attorney, she yelled out the window a second time that she wasn't going to speak to them until they had a warrant. And then she closed the window and hoped that they would leave.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  The police officers went back to their car and drove a block away where Sergeant DeLau called his boss.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  And his supervisor said, you know, go back and talk to her. And DeLau said that they needed to get a warrant. The supervisor said, you know, we'll look into it.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Their lieutenant called Dolary Map. She also told him she wouldn't let the officers in without a warrant. When she hung up, she saw Carl Delau and the other officers outside again.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  She called her lawyer's office again and asked if someone could come to her house. A lawyer named Walter Green drove over. When he got there, it was around 4:30. He saw several police cars and about 15 police officers, all outside Dolary Map's house. People next door were coming outside to see what was going on.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Walter Green later said, "It looked like something out of the movies."

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Her attorney, he noticed that three of the officers were trying to pry open her door with some sort of a tool, an instrument, like a crowbar.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Walter Green asked if they had gotten a search warrant. He said if they showed it to Dolary Map, she would let them in. They wouldn't need to force their way in.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Another officer arrived at the house. And Carl Delau told Dolary's lawyer that now they had a warrant. Walter Green says he wasn't allowed to see it. One of the officers got the screen door open and broke a glass pane in the door to open it.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  And so, right when they've broken into the house, broken the pane of glass, she starts to walk down her staircase to confront the officers. And she asks for a warrant. She said, "Where's your warrant?" And one of the officers sort of waved a piece of paper.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Dolary Map asked to see the search warrant.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  An officer named Lieutenant White showed her a piece of paper that he said was the warrant. When she asked to read it, he refused.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  And so, she grabbed it and then put it down the front of her dress. The officer who had the alleged warrant said, "Well, what are we gonna do now?" And Carl Delau said, "Well, I'm going after it." And then he reached, you know, into the dress by her bosom and then retrieved the piece of paper. And at no point during this short interaction did they show the piece of paper to Map. They just insisted that they had, you know, a search warrant.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Police handcuffed Dolary Map to an officer, while about a dozen other officers continued to search her home.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  She was calling out to her lawyer. Her lawyer had been denied access to see her or even speak to her.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Police went to the apartment in the basement that Dolary Map rented out to another woman. Inside, they found Virgil Ogletree, the man who the anonymous tip said was connected to the bombing at Don King's house.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  And they found him and they arrested him because, of course, he had been named as a potential suspect in the bombing. And for all intents and purposes, the search should have ended there. But they were already in the house. They had an enormous police presence in the area. So they looked at everything. They looked in her basement. They looked in her kitchen drawers, her drawers of her bedroom dresser, the closet. She said, "I had some diet pills and they were looking in the package of my diet pills." So it was a very intensive search. And at that point, I would suggest, as would Map, they were looking for anything that might implicate her in some sort of criminal activity.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  But why if they had found the man they were there for?

• 11:58Speaker 03

  This Bureau of Special Investigations was explicitly formed by law enforcement to go after vice crimes. And so I think that they used this as an opportunity to find whatever we can to pin on her. They also had done searches like this with other people, meaning that they had searched other homes without police warrants. They had detained other people without, you know, just cause. So for them, it was just another day. But for Map, of course, it was just a tremendous intrusion into her personal life.

• 12:30Speaker 02

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• 15:07Speaker 02

  What do they end up finding?

• 15:10Speaker 03

  They did find evidence of the numbers game. So there are slips of paper. It was in a trunk in the basement. And then when they searched her bedroom, they said they had found other material. And they came to her with a paper bag, and it had four books that they believed were obscene.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  The books were titled London Stage Affairs, The Affairs of a Troubadour, Memories of a Hotel Man, and Little Darlings. They also found a new drawing. Dalry Mapp said that the officers, quote, "seemed to enjoy them immensely."

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Police took Dalry Mapp to the station. Carl Delau questioned Dalry about the bomb at Don King's house. Dalry Mapp said that she knew Don King. They were acquaintances. But she didn't know anything about the bombing.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Sergeant Delau said Dalry was very evasive in her answers, and that she was not making an effort to help the police.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Police asked her about the four books they had found at her home. Dalry said they belonged to a former tenant who had moved out over a month earlier.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Officers questioned Virgil Ogletree, who told them he had arrived at Dalry Mapp's house just before the police. He said he had once been involved with a gambling operation, but wasn't currently. He said he'd been at home when the bomb went off at Don King's house and didn't know anything about it.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Virgil Ogletree was eventually released with no charges.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Dalry Mapp was charged with possession of gambling paraphernalia. She spent the night in jail. But the next morning, a judge dismissed the charges, and Dalry Mapp went home.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  A local newspaper ran a story on the front page about her arrest. Police told the reporter that Ms. Map was stubborn about letting them inside. And then, a few days later, police filed new charges for possession of obscene materials.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  The law was written in such a way that even if you did not know you had material that was potentially obscene, if it was in your possession, as in in your house, law enforcement was able to make the argument that she had it in her possession and was therefore in violation of Ohio law. So they rearrested her on violations of the obscenity statute, which actually was a felony in the state of Ohio. You can get up to seven years of prison.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  The trial was scheduled for the next year, on September 3, 1958.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  You know, her interaction with law enforcement was tense. She had some real concern about whether or not she would get treated fairly in the justice system.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  As Dolrie Map's lawyers were preparing for the trial, they requested to see the warrant police had brought to Dolrie's house multiple times. The prosecution never sent a copy. Dolrie Map's lawyers filed a motion to suppress the books found at Dolrie Map's house. They didn't think the search was legal. They believed that there was no warrant. But a judge dismissed the motion. On the first day of the trial, an officer named Michael Haney testified that he was there when Carl Delau found the books in Dolrie's bedroom. And then Dolrie Map's lawyers asked him where the search warrant was now.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Haney said, "I don't know." Dolrie's lawyer asked if he could remember what the warrant said. Michael Haney said he could not. He said that Dolrie had voluntarily welcomed the police inside.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Carl Delau testified next. He said that the police did break into the house. He also said that another officer brought him the warrant right before that. Dolary Map told the jury that she had grabbed the piece of paper that the police had said was a warrant, but she had not been able to see or read it. The prosecutor questioned her about the books and if they were really hers. Dolary said again, they didn't belong to her. At the end of the trial, the jury deliberated for 20 minutes. They found Dolary Map guilty of possession of, quote, "certain lewd and lascivious books."

• 19:49Speaker 03

  She was facing a one to seven-year sentence, and she was devastated. She was living with her young teenage daughter, and she was terrified that she'd been so easily convicted.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Dolary Map and her lawyers decided to try and appeal her conviction. Her lawyers wrote in their appeal that they believed that the obscenity law in Ohio violated Dolary's constitutional rights. The Supreme Court had just ruled the year before, in 1957, on how to define obscene material. Before that, the standard had been to define something as obscene if even a part of it was considered lewd. Now, the court said that to be obscene, the material taken as a whole had to appeal to "purient interest." Later that year, in the summer of 1957, two men were put on trial in San Francisco for obscenity.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  They ran a bookstore and had been charged for selling Allen Ginsberg's book, Howl. A judge found them not guilty. He wrote that he found the book had some, quote, "redeeming social importance." Dolary Map's lawyers also wrote to the Ohio Court of Appeals that she was never allowed to see the police's search warrant, and that it was also never shown to her lawyers or shown in court.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Dolary was allowed to be at home while the court was considering her appeal. It went on for months and eventually went to the Ohio State Supreme Court.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  She just felt like the Damocles sword was over her head, that there was going to come a point when she was going to have to serve a sentence. And so she told me, you know, she had two plans and one of the plans was to flee. She didn't want it to have to come to that, but she also, you know, refused to be imprisoned for something that she did not do.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  On March 23rd, 1960, the State Supreme Court handed down their decision on Dolary Mapp's case.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Four of the seven justices said that Ohio's obscenity law was unconstitutional and that Dolary's conviction should be reversed. But Ohio's constitution required a supermajority. Six of the seven judges had to agree to declare a law unconstitutional. But all the justices had agreed that the search had been done without a warrant. One wrote that after looking at the evidence and trial testimony that, quote, "No warrant was offered in evidence. There is no testimony as to who issued any warrant or as to what any warrant contained, and the absence from evidence of any such warrant is not explained or otherwise accounted for in the record."

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Her lawyers filed a petition to the US Supreme Court. A friend loaned her $8,000 to pay for the legal fees. They believed that focusing their arguments on the illegal search could help Dolary's case.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  In October of 1960, the Supreme Court agreed to hear her case.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  And then, the American Civil Liberties Union contacted Dolery's lawyers. They asked to file an amicus brief, or a friend of the court brief. They said that they thought the police search had violated her Fourth Amendment rights.

• 23:20Speaker 03

  So, the Fourth Amendment is sort of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights that deals with criminal procedure. And the Fourth Amendment does two things. It has a clause that protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures. And then there's another clause which requires that if police are going to engage in a search, that they have to get a warrant based upon probable cause that is presented before a neutral magistrate. The Fourth Amendment primarily applies to people, their homes, and their effects or their papers. And it is an amendment that the framers felt very strongly needed to be in the Constitution because some of the abuses that happened during colonial times.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  In the 1700s, British officers would frequently search people's homes, looking for smuggled goods. They would say that they had the right to enter because of a document called a writ of assistance.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  And a writ of assistance is nothing like a warrant. It's actually far more alarming. A writ of assistance is essentially a general writ that allows custom officers unlimited power to search people, their homes, and their effects. And it would stay in place, meaning that writ was active, until the sovereign who had issued the writ had died. And there was a lot of pushback because of the nature of these searches. And there's a moment when an attorney in Boston, James Otis, he was giving these fiery speeches about how they were really intruding upon, you know, our rights to be free from the government, you know, engaging in these general pervasive searches.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  It sort of stirred the people in the audience. And one member in the audience was John Adams.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  John Adams was a young lawyer at the time. He later wrote that James Otis was "a flame of fire" and that his speech was when "American independence was then and there born."

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Many years later, when John Adams was vice president, he would sign off on the Bill of Rights. It included several amendments about your rights if you're arrested. Over the past 140 years, the Supreme Court ruled on many cases about the Fourth Amendment, like if evidence collected on wiretaps needed a warrant or not, and whether copies made of illegally obtained evidence could be used in court. Carolyn says the Fourth Amendment is sometimes known as one of the most litigated provisions of the Bill of Rights. By 1914, the Supreme Court had ruled that the federal government could not use evidence

• 26:07Speaker 02

  seized without a valid warrant. But it wasn't until almost 1950 that the Supreme Court ruled on whether that should apply to state governments and police.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  It really came to the attention of the public in a case in 1949 called Wolf versus Colorado.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Julius Wolf was a doctor who'd been arrested for performing abortions. At the time, it was illegal in Colorado. Police charged him based on patient records they found in his office. But they had taken the papers without a warrant. The case went to the Supreme Court, and the justices all agreed that the search had been illegal. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that "the security of one's privacy against arbitrary intrusion by the police is basic to a free society."

• 27:01Speaker 03

  It was a tremendously important decision because he, as well as many, knew of the abuses of power of law enforcement. And so the declaration that it was now applied to state and local officials was a really big deal.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  But Carolyn says that Justice Frankfurter left open the question of what to do with evidence if it was found in an illegal search.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  What happens when law enforcement engages in an unreasonable or an illegal search? On that question, Frankfurter sort of very much refused to say that the exclusion of that illegally seized evidence should be discarded.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  He said that the states would have to decide on their own if they wanted to throw out evidence obtained in an illegal search, known as the exclusionary rule. Dolery Mapp's case was in the news a lot. The newspapers were mostly interested because of Ohio's obscenity law.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  It got a lot of attention. Mapp ended up having a level of notoriety because people were watching this case. Issues of obscenity were on people's minds. Nobody thought that it would involve the exclusionary rule.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Dolery Mapp drove to Washington for the first day of oral arguments at the Supreme Court on March 29, 1961. She arrived a day early and visited the Supreme Court Building. She met a bailiff there who answered her questions about how the Supreme Court worked, and later, how she could find out when a decision had been made on her case. Dolery Mapp's lawyer, Alexander Kearns, argued the case along with a lawyer from the ACLU. Alexander Kearns began his oral arguments by going step by step over when police broke into Dolery's home. He went on for more than 16 minutes before Justice Frankfurter interrupted him.

• 29:00Speaker 05

  Mr. Kearns. Yes, Your Honor. May I trouble you to tell us what you deem to be the questions that are open before this court? The far as I read the syllabi, I can tell that any of these questions about search and seizure. On lawful search and seizure, yes. Are you asking us to overrule the Wolf case in this court?

• 29:25Speaker 02

  The lawyer from the ACLU said yes. They wanted the court to reconsider Wolfie, Colorado, the case about the doctor whose papers had been taken without a warrant. They thought that the evidence in Dolery's case, the four books, should have been thrown out because the search was illegal.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  After the end of oral arguments, Dolary Map went home. She asked the bailiff, who she'd spoken to earlier, if he would call her to let her know if a decision had come down yet. So he did. He called her every week for months. We'll be right back.

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  Support for Criminal comes from Talkiatory. Mental health support can come in many forms, but it's not always easy to access. Talkiatory is different. It can help you find a psychiatrist, and it makes the experience simpler and more flexible. You can find someone who takes the time to get to know you and provides a clear, personalized treatment plan. Talkiatory is 100% online psychiatry practice. They provide comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and more.

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  Unlike therapy-only platforms, Talkiatory is psychiatry. That means your medical provider is qualified to diagnose mental health conditions and prescribe medication whenever it's appropriate. Head to talkiatory.com/criminal to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's T-A-L-K-I-A-T-R-Y.com/criminal to get matched in minutes. Talkiatory.com/criminal. On June 19, 1961, Dalry Mapp got a phone call from the bailiff at the Supreme Court. He said, "You don't have to go to jail. It's all over."

• 32:31Speaker 02

  The Supreme Court had ruled that the police search on Dalry Mapp's home had been illegal under the Fourth Amendment.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  The evidence that they seized was ill-gotten. Because law enforcement had not had a warrant, it meant that the arrest was invalid and any of the evidence, these dirty books, would be excluded from trial. So it meant that she was free.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Dalry told Carolyn, "It was a great relief that I didn't have to flee, that I didn't have to lose my daughter." At the time, about half the states in the country allowed for illegally seized evidence in state trials. The Supreme Court's decision made it so that every state in the country had to exclude illegally obtained evidence.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  So it was a very big deal. Judicial scholars call it as sort of the first shot across the bow in the incorporation of criminal procedure protections. Because what we saw happening was the court starting to pay attention to criminal procedure rights. It subsequently led to decisions like Miranda versus Arizona, which are protection against the right to self-incrimination, exclusionary rules extended there. And so you had this cascading effect where the court starts to see that some of these other constitutional protections are also fundamental.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Over the next decade, the court began ruling on several cases on the rights of criminal defendants. Some legal scholars have called it "the due process revolution."

• 34:05Speaker 03

  You get decisions like the Fifth Amendment right to be protected against self-incrimination, that if you are interrogated and you give a confession that's been coerced, that that would be excluded from trial. Later, you know, the constitutional right to confront your witnesses, constitutional protections against double jeopardy. There's just a whole slew of cases that came after MAP, which just extended these protections. The Sixth Amendment right to counsel, Ngidian versus Wainwright. All of these decisions happened because MAP v. Ohio paved the way by showing the court that these protections need to be extended to protect against state and local law enforcement practices.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Carl Delau, one of the officers who had arrested Dalry MAP in Cleveland, said the decision was devastating. He told Carolyn that he thought the decision would tie our hands in law enforcement.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Part of their reaction was shock because they did not think they were doing anything wrong because they had repeatedly engaged in these types of searches without a warrant. And there was quite an uproar of how it would coddle criminals, allow criminals to go free. There's a quote about, "Is the criminal to go free because the constable has blundered?" The argument being, you know, why would we free criminals because law enforcement made a minor mistake? Well, the reason, of course, is that they shouldn't be engaging in these types of searches in the first place.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Decades after searching Dalry MAP's home, Carl Delau admitted to a law professor that he had not had a warrant when he entered.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Since the Supreme Court ruled on Dolery Mapp's case, they've also decided on cases that would allow for police to do searches without warrants in certain circumstances.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  If somebody consents to a search, they don't need to get a warrant. If there are exigent circumstances, meaning police don't have time to get a warrant because maybe they're on a footrace chasing somebody, they don't need a warrant. That if you have a lower expectation of privacy, for instance, in your car or where you're at, you don't need a warrant. So what happened subsequent to Mapp, as some people have said, is if the Fourth Amendment looked like Swiss cheese. And so that's where we are at now, where warrants are required in certain circumstances, as long as it doesn't fall into these exceptions.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  And then in many other circumstances, law enforcement just has to behave reasonably, which of course is a fairly subjective standard.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Dolery Mapp eventually moved from Ohio to New York City. She lived in Queens and ran a used furniture store in Harlem. She hired a man to manage it for her. Police soon learned that they were selling drugs together. They were eventually arrested for possession of heroin.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  It was a legitimate arrest. It was a legitimate search. She was ultimately convicted. And it's important to note that at this time, New York was taking a very firm stance against drugs, especially if you're trafficking drugs. And she was given a 20-year sentence in prison.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  She spent a lot of time in the prison's law library. She helped other people get their visitation rights. Dolery served almost 10 years before her sentence was commuted in 1980.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  As she's leaving, she's been released, one of the guards said, "Ms. Mapp, I'll never forget you." And her response was, "I've forgotten you already."

• 37:55Speaker 02

  When she got out, she worked for a nonprofit that gave legal assistance to people in prison.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Carolyn Long wrote a book about MAP v. Ohio. When she interviewed Dolary Map for it, Dolary was in her 80s.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  She lived by herself in her home in Queens, sort of a modest house. She took care of herself. She ate a vegetarian diet. You know, she was walking around the neighborhood often. But she didn't sort of put herself out there as, you know, the champion of the Fourth Amendment. She just sort of lived her own life.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Dolary Map died in 2014 on Halloween, just after her 91st birthday. Her great niece said, "My great aunt was very, very, very strong willed. She didn't prepare for death. I think Aunt Dolly thought she was going to live forever."

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susannah Robertson, Jackie Zajico, Lilly Clark, and Lena Silison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Sederborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. Carolyn Long's book is MAP v. Ohio: Guarding Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures.

• 39:49Speaker 02

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• 40:29Speaker 02

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