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524US2

Unit: $U90

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372

PENNSYLVANIA BD. OF PROBATION
AND PAROLE v. SCOTT
Souter, J., dissenting

In Janis, for example, we performed incremental beneﬁt
analysis by focusing on the two classes of law enforcement
ofﬁcers affected. We reasoned that when the offending of-
ﬁcial was a state police ofﬁcer, his “zone of primary interest”
would be state criminal prosecution, not federal civil pro-
ceedings; accordingly, we said, “common sense dictates that
the deterrent effect of the exclusion of relevant evidence is
highly attenuated when the ‘punishment’ imposed upon the
offending criminal enforcement ofﬁcer is the removal of that
evidence from a civil suit by or against a different sover-
eign.”
428 U. S., at 457–458. Stone v. Powell was another
variant on the same theme, where we looked to the collateral
nature of the habeas proceedings in which the rule might be
applied: “The view that the deterrence of Fourth Amend-
ment violations would be furthered rests on the dubious
assumption that law enforcement authorities would fear
that federal habeas review might reveal ﬂaws in a search or
seizure that went undetected at trial and on appeal.”
428
U. S., at 493. And in United States v. Calandra we ob-
served that excluding such evidence from grand jury pro-
ceedings “would deter only police investigation[s] consciously
directed toward the discovery of evidence solely for use in a
grand jury investigation,” 414 U. S., at 351; an investigation
so unambitious would be a rare one, we said, since prosecu-
tors are unlikely to seek indictments in the face of dim pros-
pects of conviction after trial, ibid.

In a formal sense, such is the reasoning of the Court’s ma-
jority in deciding today that application of the exclusionary
rule in parole revocation proceedings would have only an in-
signiﬁcant marginal deterrent value, “because application of
the rule in the criminal trial context already provides sig-
niﬁcant deterrence of unconstitutional searches.” Ante, at
364.
In substance, however, the Court’s conclusion will not
jibe with the examples just cited, for it rests on erroneous
views of the roles of regular police and parole ofﬁcers in rela-
tion to revocation proceedings, and of the practical signiﬁ-
cance of the proceedings themselves.