The goal of modern constitutional criminal procedure is to define principles of law enforcement that protect citizens from government intrusions that are unreasonable in their effect on personal liberties, while simultaneously facilitating the reasonable enforcement of law and protection of society by prosecuting and punishing criminal conduct.

One of the first principles in early American constitutional history was the idea that it was more beneficial to society and its citizens to protect the rights of the innocent than to ensure the apprehension, prosecution, and punishment of every perpetrator of criminal conduct. This is often expressed as the notion that it is "better to let 100 guilty men go free than to punish a single innocent man" (Dershowitz, 2002). In many other countries, the balance between freedom and law enforcement is shifted much more toward the other end of the spectrum, and as a result, citizens of those countries are subject...
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