Archive for December 10th, 2014

Obit watch: December 10, 2014.

Wednesday, December 10th, 2014

Dollree Mapp.

You may remember Ms. Mapp from the landmark court case, Mapp v. Ohio, in which the Supreme Court extended the exclusionary rule to the states.

I noted previously that Ms. Mapp apparently led a hard but interesting life:

Even though Ms. Mapp’s name is etched in legal history, she had lived quietly in recent years, and besides a brief notice on a funeral home website, it took more than a month for her death to be reported. She was believed to be 90 or 91 when she died on Oct. 31, in or near Conyers, Ga.

Her conviction in the Ohio case was overturned. She later moved to New York, where she was convicted of narcotics possession:

…she pursued a series of appeals, claiming that the search warrant used in her arrest had been wrongly issued and that the police had targeted her because of her role in Mapp v. Ohio.
The drugs seized in the case were found at an apartment that Mr. Lyons apparently rented from Ms. Mapp. She lived several miles away. The police searched her home and found rent receipts that prosecutors argued established her as having aided and abetted Mr. Lyons. The officer who had applied for the warrant to search Ms. Mapp’s home was later dismissed from the police force after he was determined to have accepted about $3,500 from a narcotics dealer.

She served 19 years in prison before the governor commuted her sentence.