The Constitutional Validity of Search and Seizure Powers in South African Criminal Procedure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An important part of crime investigation is the obtaining of evidence through the search and seizure of persons and things. The South African Constitution[1] recognises that state authorities should not be permitted untrammelled access to search and seize. It is a necessary incident to democracy that citizens must be protected from unjustified intrusions of privacy and property by agents of the state. Otherwise, arbitrary state actions could severely affect the personal freedom and associated fundamental rights that are intended to be a predominant feature of democratic society. In this article I consider whether or not certain provisions contained in the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977 and the South African Police Service Act 68 of 1995 (hereafter the Criminal Procedure Act and the South African Police Service Act respectively) are in conflict with the Constitution. The provisions deal with search and seizure. I will also turn to the laws of foreign jurisdictions, specifically of the United States and Canada, for guidance and comparison. At the outset it should be pointed out that this article does not argue for the abolition of the search and seizure provisions contained in the Criminal Procedure Act and the South African Police Service Act. It is acknowledged albeit reluctantly, that there may still be a need for some of them. It is the investigative and enforcement measures provided for by these provisions, rather than the objectives, which are in issue here. It is submitted that there are search and seizure provisions contained in the Criminal Procedure Act and the South African Police Service Act, which are inconsistent with the spirit, purport and object of the Constitution.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".