GANGSTERS & OUTLAWS > COPS & OTHER CHARACTERS

Dolly Mapp

Dolly Goes to Washington

Attorney Kearns announced his intention to challenge Mapp's conviction, and Judge Lybarger granted her continued freedom on a $2,500 bond during the appeal process.

Defense Attorney Alexander Kearns

Kearns appealed to higher Ohio courts on a number of counts, including the validity of the state's obscenity law. The appeals failed in two lower courts, and Kearns turned to the Ohio Supreme Court.

There, the state justices sorted out the mysterious search warrant once and for all. The cops had no warrant. The document that Sgt. Delau showed Mapp was a police affidavit used to secure a warrant, but he had not gone the next step of gaining a judge's signature to authorize the search.

The Ohio court ruled, however, that the evidence seized was valid even if the search warrant was not—the essence of the exclusionary rule. The justices pointed out that Ohio did not exclude such evidence.

Mapp lost again, but she decided to press on, at a cost of $8,000, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Her attorney filed the notice of appeal on June 15, 1960, three years after the police raid.

In his summary of appeal issues, Kearns wrote that Mapp's constitutional rights under the Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth amendments had been violated by the Cleveland police department's "shocking disregard for human rights."

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief supporting Mapp's appeal.

In 1960, the Supreme Court received 2,313 appeal petitions. The justices agreed to hear fewer than one in 25 of the appeals.

Yet they agreed to consider Dollree Mapp's case, with its search-and-seizure issues that had been left unresolved for decades in American criminal justice.

The Supreme Court scheduled oral arguments in Mapp v. Ohio for March 29, 1961.