Source: http://supreme.nolo.com/us/524/357/case.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-18 14:52:46+00:00

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A condition of respondent's Pennsylvania parole was that he refrain from owning or possessing weapons. Based on evidence that he had violated this and other such conditions, parole officers entered his home and found firearms, a bow, and arrows. At his parole violation hearing, respondent objected to the introduction of this evidence on the ground that the search was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. The hearing examiner rejected the challenge and admitted the evidence. As a result, petitioner parole board found sufficient evidence to support the charges and recommitted respondent. The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania reversed, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the reversal, holding, inter alia, that although the federal exclusionary rule, which prohibits the introduction at criminal trial of evidence obtained in violation of a defendant's Fourth Amendment rights, does not generally apply in parole revocation hearings, it applied in this case because the officers who conducted the search were aware of respondent's parole status. The court reasoned that, otherwise, illegal searches would be undeterred when officers know that their subjects are parolees and that illegally obtained evidence can be introduced at parole hearings.
probative evidence. Leon, 468 U. S., at 907. Recognizing these costs, the Court has repeatedly declined to extend the rule to proceedings other than criminal trials. E. g., id., at 909. It again declines to do so here. The social costs of allowing convicted criminals who violate their parole to remain at large are particularly high, see Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U. S. 471, 477, 483, and are compounded by the fact that parolees (particularly those who have already committed parole violations) are more likely to commit future crimes than are average citizens, see Griffin v. Wisconsin, 483 U. S. 868, 880. Application of the exclusionary rule, moreover, would be incompatible with the traditionally flexible, nonadversarial, administrative procedures of parole revocation, see Morrissey, supra, at 480, 489, in that it would require extensive litigation to determine whether particular evidence must be excluded, cf., e. g., Calandra, supra, at 349. The rule would provide only minimal deterrence benefits in this context, because its application in criminal trials already provides significant deterrence of unconstitutional searches. Cf. United States v. Janis, 428 U. S. 433, 448, 454. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court's special rule for situations in which the searching officer knows his subject is a parolee is rejected because this Court has never suggested that the exclusionary rule must apply in every circumstance in which it might provide marginal deterrence, e. g., Calandra, supra, at 350; because such a piecemeal approach would add an additional layer of collateral litigation regarding the officer's knowledge of the parolee's status; and because, in any event, any additional deterrence would be minimal, whether the person conducting the search was a police officer or a parole officer. pp. 362-369.
THOMAS, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which REHNQUIST, C. J., and O'CONNOR, SCALIA, and KENNEDY, JJ., joined. STEVENS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, post, p. 369. SOUTER, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GINSBURG and BREYER, JJ., joined, post, p. 370.
D. Michael Fisher, Attorney General of Pennsylvania, argued the cause for petitioner. With him on the briefs were John G. Knorr III, Chief Deputy Attorney General, and Gregory R. Neuhauser and Calvin R. Koons, Senior Deputy Attorneys General.
torney General Keeney, Deputy Solicitor General Dreeben, and Vicki Marani.
Leonard N. Sosnov argued the cause for respondent.
This case presents the question whether the exclusionary rule, which generally prohibits the introduction at criminal trial of evidence obtained in violation of a defendant's Fourth Amendment rights, applies in parole revocation hearings. We hold that it does not.
Grant Woods of Arizona, M. Jane Brady of Delaware, Robert Butterworth of Florida, Margery S. Bronster of Hawaii, Alan G. Lance of Idaho, Jeff Modisett of Indiana, Tom Miller of Iowa, Carla J. Stovall of Kansas, Richard P. Ieyoub of Louisiana, Andrew Ketterer of Maine, J. Joseph Curran, Jr., of Maryland, Scott Harshbarger of Massachusetts, Frank J. Kelley of Michigan, Hubert H. Humphrey III of Minnesota, Mike Moore of Mississippi, Joseph P. Mazurek of Montana, Don Stenberg of Nebraska, Frankie Sue Del Papa of Nevada, Philip T. McLaughlin of New Hampshire, Peter Verniero of New Jersey, Dennis C. Vacco of New York, Michael F. Easley of North Carolina, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Drew Edmondson of Oklahoma, Hardy Myers of Oregon, Jeffrey B. Pine of Rhode Island, Mark Barnett of South Dakota, John Knox Walkup of Tennessee, Jan Graham of Utah, Wallace J. Malley of Vermont, and William U Hill of Wyoming; for Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, Inc., et al. by Wayne W Schmidt, James P. Manak, Richard M. Weintraub, and Bernard J. Farber; for the Center for the Community Interest by Andrew N Vollmer and Roger L. Conner; and for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation by Kent S. Scheidegger.
Tracey Maclin, Steven R. Shapiro, Stefan Presser, and Lisa B. Kemler filed a brief for the American Civil Liberties Union et al. as amici curiae urging affirmance.
"I expressly consent to the search of my person, property and residence, without a warrant by agents of the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole. Any items, in [sic] the possession of which constitutes a violation of parole/reparole shall be subject to seizure, and may be used as evidence in the parole revocation process." Id., at 7a.
About five months later, after obtaining an arrest warrant based on evidence that respondent had violated several conditions of his parole by possessing firearms, consuming alcohol, and assaulting a co-worker, three parole officers arrested respondent at a local diner. Before being transferred to a correctional facility, respondent gave the officers the keys to his residence. The officers entered the home, which was owned by his mother, but did not perform a search for parole violations until respondent's mother arrived. The officers neither requested nor obtained consent to perform the search, but respondent's mother did direct them to his bedroom. After finding no relevant evidence there, the officers searched an adjacent sitting room in which they found five firearms, a compound bow, and three arrows.
ons and alcohol charges and recommitted respondent to serve 36 months' backtime.
1 The court also held that the Board of Probation and Parole erred by admitting hearsay evidence regarding alcohol consumption and a separate incident of weapons possession.
2 While this case was pending in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the Commonwealth Court filed an en banc opinion in another case that overruled its decision in respondent's case and held that the exclusionary rule does not apply in parole revocation hearings. Kyte v. Pennsylvania Bd. of Probation and Parole, 680 A. 2d 14, 18, n. 8 (1996).
search were aware of respondent's parole status, 548 Pa., at 428-432, 698 A. 2d, at 37-38. The court reasoned that, in the absence of the rule, illegal searches would be undeterred when officers know that the subjects of their searches are parolees and that illegally obtained evidence can be introduced at parole hearings. Ibid.
3 We also invited the parties to brief the question whether a search of a parolee's residence must be based on reasonable suspicion where the parolee has consented to searches as a condition of parole. Respondent argues that we lack jurisdiction to decide this question in this case because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held, as a matter of Pennsylvania law, that respondent's consent to warrantless searches as a condition of his state parole did not constitute consent to searches that are unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Petitioner and its amici contend that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's opinion was at least ambiguous as to whether it relied on state or federal law to determine the extent of respondent's consent, and that we therefore have jurisdiction under Michigan v. Long, 463 U. S. 1032 (1983). We need not parse the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's decision in an attempt to discern its intent, however, because it is clear that we have jurisdiction to determine whether the exclusionary rule applies to state parole revocation proceedings, and our decision on that issue is sufficient to decide the case. We therefore express no opinion regarding the constitutionality of the search.
(White, J., dissenting)). The exclusionary rule is instead a judicially created means of deterring illegal searches and seizures. United States v. Calandra, 414 U. S. 338, 348 (1974). As such, the rule does not "proscribe the introduction of illegally seized evidence in all proceedings or against all persons," Stone v. Powell, supra, at 486, but applies only in contexts "where its remedial objectives are thought most efficaciously served," United States v. Calandra, supra, at 348; see also United States v. Janis, 428 U. S. 433, 454 (1976) ("If ... the exclusionary rule does not result in appreciable deterrence, then, clearly, its use in the instant situation is unwarranted"). Moreover, because the rule is prudential rather than constitutionally mandated, we have held it to be applicable only where its deterrence benefits outweigh its "substantial social costs." United States v. Leon, 468 U. S., at 907.
in this country and noting the incompatibility of the rule with the civil, administrative nature of those proceedings. Id., at 1050.
As in Calandra, Janis, and Lopez-Mendoza, we are asked to extend the operation of the exclusionary rule beyond the criminal trial context. We again decline to do so. Application of the exclusionary rule would both hinder the functioning of state parole systems and alter the traditionally flexible, administrative nature of parole revocation proceedings. The rule would provide only minimal deterrence benefits in this context, because application of the rule in the criminal trial context already provides significant deterrence of unconstitutional searches. We therefore hold that the federal exclusionary rule does not bar the introduction at parole revocation hearings of evidence seized in violation of parolees' Fourth Amendment rights.
4 As discussed above, we have generally held the exclusionary rule to apply only in criminal trials. We have, moreover, significantly limited its application even in that context. For example, we have held that the rule does not apply when the officer reasonably relied on a search warrant that was later deemed invalid, United States v. Leon, 468 U. S. 897, 920-922 (1984); when the officer reasonably relied on a statute later deemed unconstitutional, Illinois v. Krull, 480 U. S. 340, 349-350 (1987); when the defendant seeks to assert another person's Fourth Amendment rights, Alderman v. United States, 394 U. S. 165, 174-175 (1969); and when the illegally obtained evidence is used to impeach a defendant's testimony, United States v. Havens, 446 U. S. 620, 627-628 (1980); Walder v. United States, 347 U. S. 62, 65 (1954).
urging application of the rule. United States v. Payner, 447 U. S. 727, 734 (1980).
The costs of excluding reliable, probative evidence are particularly high in the context of parole revocation proceedings. Parole is a "variation on imprisonment of convicted criminals," Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U. S. 471, 477 (1972), in which the State accords a limited degree of freedom in return for the parolee's assurance that he will comply with the often strict terms and conditions of his release. In most cases, the State is willing to extend parole only because it is able to condition it upon compliance with certain requirements. The State thus has an "overwhelming interest" in ensuring that a parolee complies with those requirements and is returned to prison if he fails to do so. Id., at 483. The exclusion of evidence establishing a parole violation, however, hampers the State's ability to ensure compliance with these conditions by permitting the parolee to avoid the consequences of his noncompliance. The costs of allowing a parolee to avoid the consequences of his violation are compounded by the fact that parolees (particularly those who have already committed parole violations) are more likely to commit future criminal offenses than are average citizens. See Griffin v. Wisconsin, 483 U. S. 868, 880 (1987). Indeed, this is the very premise behind the system of close parole supervision. Ibid.
States, including Pennsylvania, see 548 Pa., at 427-428, 698 A. 2d, at 36; Rivenbark v. Pennsylvania Bd. of Probation and Parole, 509 Pa. 248, 501 A. 2d 1110 (1985), have adopted informal, administrative parole revocation procedures in order to accommodate the large number of parole proceedings. These proceedings generally are not conducted by judges, but instead by parole boards, "members of which need not be judicial officers or lawyers." Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U. S., at 489. And traditional rules of evidence generally do not apply. Ibid. ("[T]he process should be flexible enough to consider evidence including letters, affidavits, and other material that would not be admissible in an adversary criminal trial"). Nor are these proceedings entirely adversarial, as they are designed to be "'predictive and discretionary' as well as factfinding." Gagnon v. Scarpelli, 411 U. S. 778, 787 (1973) (quoting Morrissey v. Brewer, supra, at 480).
does not attach to such proceedings because the introduction of counsel would "alter significantly the nature of the proceeding," Gagnon v. Scarpelli, 411 U. S. 778, 787 (1973).
such litigation, such a change would transform those proceedings from a "predictive and discretionary" effort to promote the best interests of both parolees and society into trial-like proceedings "less attuned" to the interests of the parolee. Gagnon v. Scarpelli, supra, at 787-788 (quoting Morrissey v. Brewer, supra, at 480). We are simply unwilling so to intrude into the States' correctional schemes. See Morrissey v. Brewer, supra, at 483 (recognizing that States have an "overwhelming interest" in maintaining informal, administrative parole revocation procedures). Such a transformation ultimately might disadvantage parolees because in an adversarial proceeding, "the hearing body may be less tolerant of marginal deviant behavior and feel more pressure to reincarcerate than to continue nonpunitive rehabilitation." Gagnon v. Scarpelli, supra, at 788. And the financial costs of such a system could reduce the State's incentive to extend parole in the first place, as one of the purposes of parole is to reduce the costs of criminal punishment while maintaining a degree of supervision over the parolee.
The deterrence benefits of the exclusionary rule would not outweigh these costs. As the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania recognized, application of the exclusionary rule to parole revocation proceedings would have little deterrent effect upon an officer who is unaware that the subject of his search is a parolee. 548 Pa., at 431, 698 A. 2d, at 38. In that situation, the officer will likely be searching for evidence of criminal conduct with an eye toward the introduction of the evidence at a criminal trial. The likelihood that illegally obtained evidence will be excluded from trial provides deterrence against Fourth Amendment violations, and the remote possibility that the subject is a parolee and that the evidence may be admitted at a parole revocation proceeding surely has little, if any, effect on the officer's incentives. Cf. United States v. Janis, 428 U. S., at 448.
search knows that the subject of his search is a parolee. We decline to adopt such an approach. We have never suggested that the exclusionary rule must apply in every circumstance in which it might provide marginal deterrence. United States v. Calandra, supra, at 350; Alderman v. United States, 394 U. S. 165, 174 (1969). Furthermore, such a piecemeal approach to the exclusionary rule would add an additional layer of collateral litigation regarding the officer's knowledge of the parolee's status.
In any event, any additional deterrence from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's rule would be minimal. Where the person conducting the search is a police officer, the officer's focus is not upon ensuring compliance with parole conditions or obtaining evidence for introduction at administrative proceedings, but upon obtaining convictions of those who commit crimes. The noncriminal parole proceeding "falls outside the offending officer's zone of primary interest." Janis, supra, at 458. Thus, even when the officer knows that the subject of his search is a parolee, the officer will be deterred from violating Fourth Amendment rights by the application of the exclusionary rule to criminal trials.
that the harsh deterrent of exclusion is unwarranted, given such other deterrents as departmental training and discipline and the threat of damages actions. Moreover, although in some instances parole officers may act like police officers and seek to uncover evidence of illegal activity, they (like police officers) are undoubtedly aware that any unconstitutionally seized evidence that could lead to an indictment could be suppressed in a criminal trial. In this case, assuming that the search violated respondent's Fourth Amendment rights, the evidence could have been inadmissible at trial if respondent had been criminally prosecuted.
We have long been averse to imposing federal requirements upon the parole systems of the States. A federal requirement that parole boards apply the exclusionary rule, which is itself a "'grud[g]ingly taken, medicament,'" United States v. Janis, supra, at 455, n. 29, would severely disrupt the traditionally informal, administrative process of parole revocation. The marginal deterrence of unreasonable searches and seizures is insufficient to justify such an intrusion. We therefore hold that parole boards are not required by federal law to exclude evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Accordingly, the judgment below is reversed, and the case is remanded to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
JUSTICE SOUTER has explained why the deterrent function of the exclusionary rule is implicated as much by a parole revocation proceeding as by a conventional criminal trial. I agree with that explanation. I add this comment merely to endorse Justice Stewart's conclusion that the "rule is constitutionally required, not as a 'right' explicitly incorporated in the fourth amendment's prohibitions, but as a remedy necessary to ensure that those prohibitions are observed in fact."
Stewart, The Road to Mapp v. Ohio and Beyond: The Origins, Development and Future of the Exclusionary Rule in Search-and-Seizure Cases, 83 Colum. L. Rev. 1365, 1389 (1983). See also Arizona v. Evans, 514 U. S. 1, 18-19, and n. 1 (1995) (STEVENS, J., dissenting); Segura v. United States, 468 U. S. 796, 828, and n. 22 (1984) (STEVENS, J., dissenting); United States v. Leon, 468 U. S. 897, 978, and n. 37 (1984) (STEVENS, J., dissenting).
The Court's holding that the exclusionary rule of Mapp v.
Ohio, 367 U. S. 643 (1961), has no application to parole revocation proceedings rests upon mistaken conceptions of the actual function of revocation, of the objectives of those who gather evidence in support of petitions to revoke, and, consequently, of the need to deter violations of the Fourth Amendment that would tend to occur in administering the parole laws. In reality a revocation proceeding often serves the same function as a criminal trial, and the revocation hearing may very well present the only forum in which the State will seek to use evidence of a parole violation, even when that evidence would support an independent criminal charge. The deterrent function of the exclusionary rule is therefore implicated as much by a revocation proceeding as by a conventional trial, and the exclusionary rule should be applied accordingly. From the Court's conclusion to the contrary, I respectfully dissent.
tional right of the party aggrieved," United States v. Leon, 468 U. S. 897, 906 (1984) (internal quotation marks omitted), "[w]hether the exclusionary sanction is appropriately imposed in a particular case ... is 'an issue separate from the question whether the Fourth Amendment rights of the party seeking to invoke the rule were violated by police conduct.'" Ibid. (quoting Illinois v. Gates, 462 U. S. 213, 223 (1983)). The exclusionary rule does not, therefore, mandate the exclusion of illegally acquired evidence from all proceedings or against all persons, United States v. Calandra, supra, at 348, and we have made clear that the rule applies only in "those instances where its remedial objectives are thought most efficaciously served," Arizona v. Evans, 514 U. S. 1, 11 (1995). Only then can the deterrent value of applying the rule to a given class of proceedings be seen to outweigh its price, including "the loss of often probative evidence and all of the secondary costs that flow from the less accurate or more cumbersome adjudication that therefore occurs." INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U. S. 1032, 1041 (1984); see also United States v. Janis, 428 U. S. 433, 454 (1976); United States v. Calandra, supra, at 349-350.
Because we have found the requisite efficacy when the rule is applied in criminal trials, see Elkins v. United States, 364 U. S. 206 (1960); Mapp v. Ohio, supra; Weeks v. United States, 232 U. S. 383 (1914), the deterrent effect of the evidentiary limitation upon prosecution is a baseline for evaluating the degree (or incremental degree) of deterrence that could be expected from extending the exclusionary rule to other sorts of cases, see INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, supra. Thus, we have thought that any additional deterrent value obtainable from applying the rule in civil tax proceedings, see United States v. Janis, supra, habeas proceedings, see Stone v. Powell, 428 U. S. 465 (1976), and grand jury proceedings, see United States v. Calandra, supra, would be so marginal as to be outweighed by the incremental costs.
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 official was a state police officer, his "zone of primary interest" would be state criminal prosecution, not federal civil proceedings; 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 sovereign." 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 Amendment 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 observed that excluding such evidence from grand jury proceedings "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 prosecutors are unlikely to seek indictments in the face of dim prospects of conviction after trial, ibid.
In a formal sense, such is the reasoning of the Court's majority in deciding today that application of the exclusionary rule in parole revocation proceedings would have only an insignificant marginal deterrent value, "because application of the rule in the criminal trial context already provides significant 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 relation to revocation proceedings, and of the practical significance of the proceedings themselves.
As to the police, the majority says that regular officers investigating crimes almost always act with the prospect of a criminal prosecution before them. Their fear of evidentiary suppression in the criminal trial will have as much deterrent effect as can be expected, therefore, while any risk of suppression in parole administration is too unlikely to be on their minds to influence their conduct.
parolee's apartment); see also Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, Police Procedures in the Handling of Parolees 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 parolee's status when they go after him, and (contrary to the majority's assumption) this fact is significant for three reasons. 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 employed by the same sovereign that runs the parole system, therefore have every incentive not to jeopardize a recommitment by rendering evidence inadmissible. See INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U. S., at 1043 (deterrence especially effective 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 evidence will ever be offered. Often, therefore, there will be nothing incremental about the significance of evidence offered in the administrative tribunal, and nothing "marginal" about the deterrence provided by an exclusionary rule operating there. Ante, at 368. Finally, the cooperation between 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.
As against this picture of the police, the Court paints the parole officer as a figure more nearly immune to such competitive zeal. As the Court describes him, the parole officer is interested less in catching a parole violator than in making sure that the parolee continues to go straight, since" 'realistically the failure of the parolee is in a sense a failure for his supervising officer.'" Ante, at 368 (quoting Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U. S. 471, 485-486 (1972)). This view of the parole officer suffers, however, from its selectiveness. Parole officers wear several hats; while they are indeed the parolees' counselors and social workers, they also "often serve as both prosecutors and law enforcement officials in their relationship with probationers and parolees." N. Cohen & J. Gobert, Law of Probation and Parole § 11.04, p. 533 (1983); see also Minnesota v. Murphy, 465 U. S. 420, 432 (1984) (probation officer "is a peace officer, and as such is allied, to a greater or lesser extent, with his fellow peace officers" (internal quotation marks omitted)); T. Wile, Pennsylvania Law of Probation and Parole § 5.12, p. 88 (1993) (parole officers "act in various capacities, supervisor, social worker, advocate, police officer, investigator and advisor, to the offenders under their supervision"). Indeed, a parole officer's obligation to petition for revocation when a parolee goes bad, see Cohen & Gobert, supra, § 11.04, at 533, is presumably the basis for the legal rule in Pennsylvania that "state parole agents are considered police officers with respect to the offenders under their jurisdiction," Wile, supra, § 5.12, at 89.
Private Typings and Official Designations, 40 Federal Probation 51 (Mar. 1976). And as for competitiveness, one need only ask whether a parole officer would rather leave the credit to state or local police when a parolee has to be brought to book.
Just as the Court has underestimated the competitive influences tending to induce police and parole officers to stint on Fourth Amendment obligations, so I think it has misunderstood the significance of admitting illegally seized evidence at the revocation hearing. On the one hand, the majority magnifies the cost of an exclusionary rule for parole cases by overemphasizing the differences between a revocation hearing and a trial, and on the other hand it has minimized the benefits by failing to recognize the significant likelihood that the revocation hearing will be the principal, not the secondary, forum, in which evidence of a parolee's criminal conduct will be offered.
lar arrestee will end up challenging the lawfulness of his arrest in a formal deportation proceeding." Id., at 1044. As the instant case may suggest, there is no reason to expect parolees to be so reticent.
2 On the subject of cost, the majority also argues that the cost of applying the exclusionary rule to revocation proceedings would be high because States have an "'overwhelming interest'" in ensuring that its parolees comply with the conditions of their parole, given the fact that parolees are more likely to commit future crimes than average citizens. Ante, at 365. I certainly do not contest the fact, but merely point out that it does not differentiate suppression at parole hearings from suppression at trials, where suppression of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution's case in chief certainly takes some toll on the State's interest in convicting criminals in the first place. The majority's argument suggests not that the exclusionary rule is necessarily out of place in parole revocation proceedings, but that States should be permitted to condition parole on an agreement to submit to warrantless, suspicionless searches, on the possibility of which this case has no bearing. See infra, at 379-380.
ago when we observed in Morrissey v. Brewer that a parole revocation proceeding "is often preferred to a new prosecution because of the procedural ease of recommitting the individual on the basis of a lesser showing by the State." 408 U. S., at 479; see also Cohen & Gobert, §8.06, at 386 ("Favoring the [exclusionary] rule's applicability is the fact that the revocation proceeding, often based on the items discovered in the search, is used in lieu of a criminal trial").
The reasons for this tendency to skip any new prosecution are obvious. If the conduct in question is a crime in its own right, the odds of revocation are very high. Since time on the street before revocation is not subtracted from the balance of the sentence to be served on revocation, Morrissey v. Brewer, 408 U. S., at 480, the balance may well be long enough to render recommitment the practical equivalent of a new sentence for a separate crime. And all of this may be accomplished without shouldering the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt; hence the obvious popularity of revocation in place of new prosecution.
The upshot is that without a suppression remedy in revocation proceedings, there will often be no influence capable of deterring Fourth Amendment violations when parole revocation is a possible response to new crime. Suppression in the revocation proceeding cannot be looked upon, then, as furnishing merely incremental or marginal deterrence over and above the effect of exclusion in criminal prosecution. Instead, it will commonly provide the only deterrence to unconstitutional conduct when the incarceration of parolees is sought, and the reasons that support the suppression remedy in prosecution therefore support it in parole revocation.
and Parole." App.7a. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held the consent insufficient to waive any requirement that searches be supported by reasonable suspicion,3 and in the absence of any such waiver, the State was bound to justify its search by what the Court has described as information indicating the likelihood of facts justifying the search. Griffin v. Wisconsin, 483 U. S. 868 (1987) (dealing with the analogous context of probation revocation). The State makes no claim here to have satisfied this standard. It describes the parole agent's knowledge as rising no further than "the possibility of the presence of weapons in Scott's home," Brief for Petitioner 7, and rests on the argument that not even reasonable suspicion was required.
Because the search violated the Fourth Amendment, and because I conclude that the exclusionary rule ought to apply to parole revocation proceedings, I would affirm the decision of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
3 See 548 Pa. 418, 426, 698 A. 2d 32, 35-36 (1997) (" '[T]he parolee's signing of a parole agreement giving his parole officer permission to conduct a warrantless search does not mean either that the parole officer can conduct a search at any time and for any reason or that the parolee relinquishes his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches. Rather, the parolee's signature acts as acknowledgement that the parole officer has a right to conduct reasonable searches of his residence listed on the parole agreement without a warrant''') (quoting Commonwealth v. Williams, 547 Pa. 577, 588, 692 A. 2d 1031, 1036 (1997)). Since Pennsylvania has not sought review of this conclusion, I do not look behind it, or offer any opinion on whether the terms and sufficiency of such a waiver are to be scrutinized under state or federal law.

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