stating:
For it was such excesses as the use of general warrants and the writs of assistance that led to the ratification of the Fourth Amendment. In Entick v. Carrington (citation omitted), decided in 1765, one finds a striking parallel to the executive warrants utilized here. The Secretary of State had issued general executive warrants to his messengers authorizing them to roam about and to seize libelous material and libellants of the sovereign. Entick, a critic of the Crown, was the victim of one such general search during which his seditious publications were impounded. He brought a successful damage action for trespass against the messengers. The verdict was sustained on appeal. Lord Camden wrote that if such sweeping tactics were validated, then the secret cabinets and bureaus of every subject in this kingdom will be thrown open to the search and inspection of a messenger, whenever the secretary of state shall think fit to charge, or even to suspect, a person to be the author, printer, or publisher of a seditious libel.' (citation omitted) In a related and similar proceeding, Huckle v. Money (citation omitted), the same judge who presided over Entick's appeal held for another victim of the same despotic practice, saying '(t)o enter a man's house by virtue of a nameless warrant, in order to procure evidence, is worse than the Spanish Inquisition...' See also Wilkes v. Wood (citation omitted), ... [t]he tyrannical invasions described and assailed in Entick, Huckle, and Wilkes, practices which also were endured by the colonists, have been recognized as the primary abuses which ensured the Warrant Clause a prominent place in our Bill of Rights. U.S. v. U.S. District Court, 407 U.S. at 328-329 (Douglas, J., concurring).
Justice Powell, in writing for the court in the Keith case also wrote that:
Over two centuries ago, Lord Mansfield held that common-law principles prohibited warrants that ordered the arrest of unnamed individuals who the officer might conclude were guilty of seditious libel. 'It is not fit,' said Mansfield, 'that the receiving or judging of the information should be left to the discretion of the officer. The magistrate ought to judge; and should give certain directions to the officer.' (citation omitted).
Lord Mansfield's formulation touches the very heart of the Fourth Amendment directive: that, where practical, a governmental search and seizure should represent both the efforts of the officer to gather evidence of wrongful acts and the judgment of the magistrate that the collected evidence is sufficient to justify invasion of a citizen's
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