Exclusionary rule gets narrowed considerably

A Supreme Court decision yesterday didn’t get much attention, but it may have an enormous impact on prosecutions in the future.  On a 5-4 vote, with Anthony Kennedy providing the swing vote yet again, the court ruled that the exclusionary rule doesn’t apply to clerical or computer errors within state and local police departments.  This eliminates a technicality for defendants for dismissal, and also provides another look at the impact of the presidency on a wide range of judicial issues, and not just abortion:

The Supreme Court limited the use of the so-called “exclusionary rule” today and said that evidence seized by the police need not be thrown out if officers later learn their search warrant was faulty because of a computer mistake.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the exclusionary rule was intended to deter the police from conducting illegal searches of homes and cars. It was not intended to give criminals a free pass if officers search the wrong house or car because of a computer error at police headquarters, he said.

In a 5-4 ruling, the court upheld the drug and gun charges against an Alabama man who was stopped on a highway by an officer who had been told there was an outstanding arrest warrant for his arrest. It turns out that was a mistake.

The officer, Mark Anderson, had called and been told by a clerk in a neighboring county that Bennie Dean Herring had failed to appear on a felony charge. But minutes after Officer Anderson stopped Herring and found methamphetamine and a pistol in his car, the clerk called back to say the arrest warrant had been withdrawn. This fact had not entered into the department’s computer.

At issue for the court was whether the exclusionary rule required the evidence to be thrown out.

The dissenters said that further weakening of the exclusionary rule would allow innocent people to get convicted, but that’s a stretch.  This doesn’t allow false evidence to be admitted at trial, it keeps good evidence from being excluded as a result of benign error.  The exclusionary rule dates back to 1914 and intended to keep the government from conducting illegal searches by essentially rendering anything gleaned in one inadmissible in court.

The rule exists for good reason.  Without an exclusionary rule, the state or federal government would have little reason to obey the Fourth Amendment.  Illegal searches would result in wristslaps while the evidence collected from the violation of the Constitution would still get used in court.  The only counterbalance to the overwhelming advantage in force of the government over the individual citizen is the threat that evidence gained through illegal means cannot ever be used.

However, courts took the exclusionary rule too far, and in the last generation they have begun correcting from the extreme.  If a police officer conducts a lawful search based on the information he has at hand, clearly any evidence gleaned from that search should be lawful.  As Roberts wrote, the exclusionary rule intended to penalize the state for deliberate rights violations, not for clerical errors or data-entry delays.  Too many criminals get freed over silly technicalities such as these, and that denies justice to the People, who have the same stake in complaints as the defendants.

The 5-4 vote on this shows the wisdom of the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito.  Will we get similarly common-sense constructionists from Barack Obama when openings occur on the federal bench, and especially the Supreme Court?  Somehow, I doubt it.

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