Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 419.0

524US2

Unit: $U90

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

parolee’s apartment); see also Pennsylvania Board of Proba-
tion and Parole, Police Procedures in the Handling of Parol-
ees 16 (rev. 1974) (parole agent has a responsibility to inform
police in the area where parolee will be living and to provide
“full cooperation to the police”).

As these cases show, the police very likely do know a pa-
rolee’s status when they go after him, and (contrary to the
majority’s assumption) this fact is signiﬁcant for three rea-
sons. First, and most obviously, the police have reason for
concern with the outcome of a parole revocation proceeding,
which is just as foreseeable as the criminal trial and at least
as likely to be held. Police ofﬁcers, especially those em-
ployed by the same sovereign that runs the parole system,
therefore have every incentive not to jeopardize a recom-
mitment by rendering evidence inadmissible. See INS v.
Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U. S., at 1043 (deterrence especially ef-
fective when law enforcement and prosecution are under one
government). Second, as I will explain below, the actual
likelihood of trial is often far less than the probability of a
petition for parole revocation, with the consequence that the
revocation hearing will be the only forum in which the evi-
dence will ever be offered. Often, therefore, there will be
nothing incremental about the signiﬁcance of evidence of-
fered in the administrative tribunal, and nothing “marginal”
about the deterrence provided by an exclusionary rule op-
erating there. Ante, at 368. Finally, the cooperation be-
tween parole and police ofﬁcers, as in the instances shown in
the cases cited above, casts serious doubt upon the aptness
of treating police ofﬁcers differently from parole ofﬁcers,
doubt that is conﬁrmed by the following attention to the
Court’s characterization of the position of the parole ofﬁcer.
The Court recalls our description of the police as “engaged
in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime,”
which raises the temptation to cut constitutional corners
(which in turn requires the countervailing inﬂuence of the
exclusionary rule). United States v. Leon, 468 U. S., at 914.