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The plain view doctrine has also been expanded to include the subdoctrines of plain feel, plain smell and plain hearing. [18] These doctrines are also limited to seizing an item when its nature as contraband or evidence of a crime is "immediately apparent."
The plain meaning rule, also known as the literal rule, is one of three rules of statutory construction traditionally applied by English courts. [1] The other two are the "mischief rule" and the "golden rule". The plain meaning rule dictates that statutes are to be interpreted using the ordinary meaning of the language of the statute.
In its most extreme form the plain meaning rule does not look outside of the statutory text at any additional sources to find the legislative intent if the rule is "plain" from the text. Critics of using the plain meaning rule argue that a court may find or not find an ambiguity in a statute depending on the result that a court sees fit.
The plain meaning rule gained popularity during the 18th and 19th centuries as the courts took an increasingly strict view of the words within statutes. Under the plain meaning rule, courts give the words of a statute their natural or ordinary meaning. The plain meaning rule of statutory interpretation should be the first rule applied by judges.
Horton v. California, 496 U.S. 128 (1990), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the warrantless seizure of evidence which is in plain view. The discovery of the evidence does not have to be inadvertent, although that is a characteristic of most legitimate plain-view seizures.
This means that the plain meaning rule (and statutory interpretation as a whole) should only be applied when there is an ambiguity. Because the meaning of words can change over time, scholars and judges typically will recommend using a dictionary to define a term that was published or written around the time the statute was enacted.
However, pursuant to the plain-feel doctrine (similar to the plain-view doctrine), police may seize contraband discovered in the course of a frisk, but only if the type of contraband is immediately apparent. [10] The Supreme Court has placed very liberal requirements on what is "immediately apparent" regarding contraband.
The Fourth Amendment guards against unreasonable "searches" and "seizures." The Court first ruled that when the police officer moved the stereo equipment to record the serial numbers, he conducted a Fourth Amendment "search," unrelated to the initial reason the police were in Hicks's apartment, to search for weapons and the person who fired the bullet through the floor of the apartment.