Rochin V. California Case Study

The Supreme Court case, Rochin v. California, was a case that had shocked the conscience. The brutality and laziness of the police left the petitioner, Richard Rochin, violated of his fourth, fifth, and fourteenth amendments. The ignorance of unreasonable search, self-incrimination, and due process led this case to be a landmark of police work and processes paralleling with the rights of the Constitution.

On July 1st, 1949, three Los Angeles police officers entered Richard Rochin’s residence after a tip came through their police hotline. Rochin had been a suspected narcotics trafficker, and the local California police’s zealous nature had led them to illegally enter Rochin’s house without a search warrant, and forcibly entered the second floor,

When asking Rochin who’s pills they were, Rochin immediately swallowed the capsules. Panicking, the deputies punched and pummeled Rochin in a vain attempt to retrieve the pills. After failing in doing so, they handcuffed him and took him to the local hospital, in which the doctor was forced to give Rochin an emetic by forcing a stomach pump into his stomach, and made him vomit. He was then convicted based on the contents of his stomach, in which morphine was found (Oyez, 2017).

The case was moved to a California appellate court, in which Richard Rochin was found guilty by the court of possession of narcotics. In the state of California in the 1950’s, when this crime occurred, the use of illegally obtained evidence was still legal. The landmark case of Mapp v. Ohio in 1960 was yet to be heard, and the Exclusionary Rule

Due Process errs more on the vague side, so the Supreme Court has been able to decipher exactly what elements are needed to establish due process, or the lack thereof. For instance, the lack of the search warrant and the forced removal of the defendant’s stomach proved to completely obstruct justice due to the ignorance of the Due Process Clause. The evidence was obtained illegally, and the officers had held the defendant, handcuffed, in the hospital, and the forced extraction of the stomach contents was seen as torture in the eyes of the California Appeals Court and the Supreme Court. In addition, the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits the use of coerced confessions. There is no distinction between a coerced verbal confession and a coerced physical confession. To hold otherwise would be to sanction police brutality in obtaining physical evidence, while prohibiting police brutality in obtaining a verbal confession (Case Briefs, 2017). Rochin’s evidence obtained from his stomach was a coerced physical evidence and could be categorized as police brutality. The violation of all these rights had created a mantra that was repeated during the decision; this case had shocked the conscience. (Rochin