The United States Supreme Court affirmed an Eleventh Circuit Court opinion today finding that police negligence which lead to the arrest of a person without probable cause or a valid warrant was not grounds to exclude the discovered gun and drugs. In short, a person with a prior record who was mistakenly arrested will face felony charges based upon what he was carrying when wrongly arrested.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures. The Constitution does not provide any protection against the use of the improper search/seizure. A judicially-created “exclusionary” rule, however, does exist — favoring both criminals and tv crime show writers.
In this case, an astute investigator learned that a known criminal was coming to the police station and asked the clerk to check if there were any warrants out for the known criminal’s arrest. None were found in the county but the clerked called the neighboring county, which reported there was a felony warrant. The defendant was arrested on that information. Within minutes, it was established that the other county had a clerical error and there was no warrant. But the police had already found a gun (our known criminal was a felon) and meth. Criminal defense counsel sought to suppress/exclude the evidence since it was improperly obtained.
The High Court played a bit of a cat and mouse game as to whether there was a 4th Amendment violation; nonetheless, since the parties had agreed there was a violation, the question was whether the exclusionary rule applied. If you watch a lot of tv, you would think it was automatically excluded.
Yanking us back to reality, Chief Justice Roberts wrote in Bennie Dean Herring v. United States that the exclusionary rule “has been our last resort, not our first impulse.” It is not an individual right and, instead, only applies when it results in some appreciable detterence of constitutional violations by the police. The Court used the “objectively reasonable” standard (a good faith/knew or should have known approach) in evaluating the conduct here — which, admittedly, does seem free of any intentional misdoing by the police.
The dissent complained that there was not a sufficient rule in place to determine where/when exclusion would apply.
I’m not a criminal lawyer but the facts of this particular case seem extreme in terms of showing this was “simple negligence” in otherwise good faith law enforcement. That said, this was a 5-4 decision. As such, while the wording of the Opinion is quite strong, one might guess that muddier facts in future cases may yield the opposite outcome.