The Exclusionary Rule requires that any evidence taken into custody that is obtained by the police using methods that violate an individual's constitutional rights must be excluded from use in a criminal proceeding against that individual . This rule is judicially enforced and emerged relatively recently in the development of the US legal system. Under common law, the seizure of evidence by illegal means does not affect its admission in court. Any evidence, however obtained, was admitted as long as it met other evidentiary admissibility criteria, such as relevance and reliability. The exclusionary rule was developed in 1914 and applied to Weeks v. United States, 232 US 383, and merely prohibited the use of evidence obtained illegally by federal law enforcement agencies. Only in 1949, in the Wolf v. Colorado, 38 US 25, 27-28, the United States Supreme Court took the first step toward applying the exclusionary rule to the states by ruling that the Fourth Amendment was applicable to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment which states: the security of one's privacy against arbitrary police intrusion - which is at the heart of the Fourth Amendment - is fundamental to a free society. It is therefore implicit in the "concept of ordered freedom" and as such opposable to States through the Due Process Clause. However, wolf left the application of the Fourth Amendment to the discretion of individual states and did not specifically require application of the exclusionary rule. That mandate came only in 1961, in the landmark decision of Mapp v. Ohio, 367 US 643, 655, in which the court said: Since the Fourth Amendment right to privacy was enacted... mid-paper. .....trial someone decided to take the easy way out to obtain evidence, hindering the prosecution of common criminals in the process. Nowadays, officers need to know the law inside out to prevent criminals from getting away with crime. This makes it more difficult for the prosecution to do an effective job and bring criminals to justice. This impacts victims because evidence thrown out of court makes it easier for criminals to get deals for less time than they actually deserve. At the moment officers have to be very educated to perform at an acceptable level, for officers there is no excuse a judge can give as to why they conducted an illegal search and seizure. Furthermore, it should be an incentive for officers to conduct searches according to the law, since they can be criminally prosecuted due to an incorrect search and seizure.