Source: http://burneylawfirm.com/blog/tag/search-and-seizure/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 10:26:02+00:00

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SCOTUS makes a mistake anybody would have made. So it’s okay, right?
The Fourth Amendment established one of our most important protections against government power: if the police search you or your stuff for evidence, their search must be ‘reasonable’; and if they do get a warrant then it has to be specific, and they’ll need probable cause. In writing, it couldn’t be more straightforward.
In practice, however, its meaning is anything but. Over the years, the courts have dramatically muddied the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Not as badly as the Fifth, perhaps, but badly enough to severely erode the Fourth’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. The courts certainly weren’t trying to undermine the Amendment (well, not most of the time, anyway). It’s been a long series of discrete errors, gradually chipping away at what counts as an “unreasonable” search, and what can be done about it. And so legal types have long complained that the courts have been “eroding” our Fourth Amendment protections.
Sometimes this happens because the legally correct outcome sometimes seems so… wrong. What judge wants to let some vile nasty inhuman threat to society go free, on a mere “technicality?” Very often, this sense of “doing the right thing” in fact leads judges to make errors in law — waving away the protections this one bad guy had, and thereby creating a precedent that erases everyone else’s. It’s the “hard cases make bad law” principle, and it’s very real.
Sometimes this erosion happens because the courts simply don’t understand the law they themselves have created! Even the Supreme Court does this. It happens more often than you might think.
And yesterday, the Supreme court did it again.
The case is Heien v. North Carolina, and in a nutshell the Supremes said this: If a police officer mistakenly thinks something you’re doing is against the law, and if it’s a mistake any reasonable person would have made, then it’s okay if he stops you to investigate. The Court broadened the definition of “reasonable suspicion” so that now an officer can be wrong about what your were doing, and whether it was even illegal in the first place, and he’ll still be allowed to stop and frisk you. Based on the justices’ own understanding of the law, it’s okay, they say.
Actually, it’s not okay. The Supremes themselves were mistaken about the law.
Was it a “reasonable” mistake?
It looks like, at the heart of this mistake, we’ll find the “Exclusionary Rule.” This is law invented by the courts, specifically for the purpose of enforcing the Fourth Amendment. If you’re charged with a crime, and the police have evidence they unlawfully seized from you, your only protection is the Exclusionary Rule: if the police got evidence by violating your rights, then that evidence cannot be used against you at trial. The officers are not themselves penalized in any way; all we do is take away the evidence that they shouldn’t have had in the first place.
This is a very civilized rule, if you think about it. In any situation, there’s a line the police cannot cross. Every situation is different, and the rules aren’t always clear. If the police themselves might be punished for inadvertently crossing that line, then they’re going to avoid going anywhere near it. Society would lose a lot of evidence that the police could have lawfully obtained. Guilty people whom society really wants to punish will get away with it. That’s bad. A rule meant to deter police conduct is not what we want. Instead, however, the Exclusionary Rule lets police go right up to the line, without fear of repercussion if they mistakenly cross it. All the rule does is take away the evidence they get from crossing the line if that happens. It merely excludes what they shouldn’t have had anyway. The rule has zero deterrent effect on police personally, and only serves as an incentive to collect evidence lawfully if they want to ensure its use at trial. It’s really quite elegant: the lawful evidence is maximized, the unlawful evidence is eliminated. What more could society want?
The problem comes when judges are mistaken about the law. When they say the Exclusionary Rule is all about deterrence. Which is precisely what the Rule isn’t about. They get the whole purpose of the Rule wrong, and then they base the rest of their reasoning off of that wrong premise. And they reach a result that’s not only wrong, but inconsistent, confusing, overcomplicated, and unjust. There’s some satisfaction in the guilty being punished, but in so doing they’ve made things worse for everyone else.
So say the police got a bad warrant, but they didn’t know it was bad. Acting in good faith, they seize evidence the Fourth Amendment absolutely forbids them from having. But they didn’t know it was bad. They sincerely and reasonably thought it was good. There’s no way to deter people against being reasonably mistaken. You just can’t. So if you think the Exclusionary Rule is about deterrence, you’ll have to conclude that it’s literally pointless if the police were acting in good faith. And if you’re a court, you carve out an exception to the Fourth Amendment — a “Good Faith” exception –and our protections are eroded just a little bit more.
It happens all the time, and it happened yesterday.
As one might expect when a court is arguing from a mistaken premise, the Court’s justification was convoluted and strange. In an area where one would expect the law to be fairly current and on point, the Supreme Court had to reach way back to its earliest cases, especially about international-border customs seizures as opposed to Fourth Amendment seizures, to find something to justify itself. You can read the case itself here, and Scotusblog has a typically excellent analysis here.
The legal issue is whether “reasonable suspicion” is still “reasonable” if the police officer is wrong on the law. “Reasonable suspicion” itself is about the police officer’s assessment of the facts on the ground, whether he’s seeing someone casing a bank to rob it, or someone who’s just pacing back and forth in front of it lost in thought. Police officers aren’t mind readers, and so their suspicion can be reasonable even if their conclusion turns out to be wrong. The whole point of “reasonable suspicion” is to allow the police to investigate whether their suspicion is correct.
It’s never been about whether the officer’s understanding of the law was correct. We want to let the officer stop you to investigate whether his assessment of the facts was correct. An officer doesn’t need to stop you to investigate whether his understanding of the law is correct. It doesn’t even make sense to say reasonable suspicion is reasonable if the officer was wrong on the law.
The Court’s ruling essentially broadens the definition of reasonable suspicion so that an officer can be wrong about what your were doing, and whether it was even illegal in the first place, and he’s still allowed to stop and frisk you.
Though it didn’t say so explicitly, the Court was essentially making the same “good faith” mistake all over again. A police officer is mistaken on the law. Not because he didn’t study it carefully, or because he was sloppy — no, it’s an error that any reasonable person would have made. Anyone would have thought you were breaking the law, despite the fact that what you were doing was technically legal. The officer’s mistaken belief wasn’t his fault. It was objectively reasonable. And there’s no way you can deter people from being reasonably mistaken. You just can’t. And so if the Exclusionary Rule is about deterring police conduct, it’s simply pointless to apply it here. So we have to carve out an exception — a “Reasonably Mistaken” exception — and our protections are eroded just a little bit more.
It would be a mistake to argue that the Court was wrong because its reasoning was convoluted and it relied on irrelevant case law, however. That’s not the problem with the decision. It’s only an outcome, a symptom, of the underlying error. Once again, they presumed that the Exclusionary Rule is something it categorically is not. That’s their error. And our cherished Fourth Amendment probably means just a little bit less now, as a result.
So they were mistaken on the law. But it’s a mistake lots of judges, even those on the Supreme Court, have made before. It’s an “objectively reasonable” mistake.
But that doesn’t make it okay.
Today, ECPA is a law that is often hampered by conflicting privacy standards that create uncertainty and confusion for law enforcement, the business community and American consumers.
For example, the content of a single e-mail could be subject to as many as four different levels of privacy protections under ECPA, depending on where it is stored, and when it is sent. There are also no clear standards under that law for how and under what circumstances the Government can access cell phone, or other mobile location information when investigating crime or national security matters. In addition, the growing popularity of social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, present new privacy challenges that were not envisioned when ECPA was passed.
Simply put, the times have changed, and so ECPA must be updated to keep up with the times.
Well, today Sen. Leahy proposed a new bill that might do just that. The bill (pdf here) would get rid of that 180-day loophole, and require the feds to get a warrant no matter how old the email or data might be.
Interesting Fourth Amendment decision from the Supreme Court this morning, in a case which at first glance didn’t seem all that cert-worthy. The facts are as run-of-the-mill as they come — an undercover buy-and-bust, the dealer ran into a building, arrest team followed in just as one of the doors slammed shut but couldn’t tell which of 2 apartments the guy went into, from the hallway they smelled dank weed burning, the smell was stronger by the apartment on the left, the cops banged on the door and announced themselves, the cops heard stuff being moved around inside and figured it was evidence being destroyed, the cops burst in and found significant amounts of pot and cocaine.
The first time we read the facts in this case, we couldn’t help wondering “seriously, what’s the problem here?” We’re well aware that the cops’ story might not be entirely truthful, but on the facts as given there just didn’t seem to be grounds for suppression. The cops are allowed to pursue a suspect into the hallway of an apartment building (here it was a breezeway, arguably even less private). The cops were entitled to bang on the door that smelled of burning marijuana. There’s no Fourth Amendment prohibition against the police banging on your door and shouting “police police police.” On hearing sounds consistent with destruction of evidence, it’s pretty well settled that an exigency now existed. That’s one of the dozen or so exceptions where society’s interest in something (here, preservation of evidence) trumps the right against warrantless searches. So seriously, what was the problem?
The problem was that the police arguably created the exigency themselves. If they hadn’t banged on the door and announced their presence, there wouldn’t have been any evidence-destruction sounds. Can the police manufacture an exception to the warrant requirement, one that would not have existed otherwise, and then rely on that exception to conduct a warrantless search?
Ah, now it gets interesting.
Our jury’s still out, and there’s so much stuff to catch up on. There’s the 5th Circuit’s denial of Jeff Skilling’s appeal, even though the Supreme Court had struck down the “honest services fraud” charge last summer. We were so ready to write something about it yesterday, but work intervened, and now we’re not in the mood. Maybe this weekend.
Instead, we’re all intrigued about the Senate hearings earlier this week on whether federal law enforcement ought to get a warrant before doing any search and seizure out there in the cloud. Apparently, the Obama administration says the warrant requirement is just too much of a hassle.
The term “cloud computing” covers a lot of things, but for these purposes we’re talking about people storing data not on their own hard drives, but out there somewhere in the ether of the internet. Of course, “out there somewhere” means “stored on someone else’s servers.” Which means it’s there for the taking (or destruction) if those remote servers were to be compromised. And of course, that means it’s out there for the seeing if law enforcement decides to go poking around in the cloud.
was a careful, bipartisan law designed in part to protect electronic communications from real-time monitoring or interception by the Government, as emails were being delivered and from searches when these communications were stored electronically. At the time, ECPA was a cutting-edge piece of legislation. But, the many advances in communication technologies since have outpaced the privacy protections that Congress put in place.
The point is, the law sort of made sense back in the 80s. And it still kinda made sense when Google was new and Facebook was still in the future.
But now, things have changed. In ways that are both dramatic and obvious to anyone who might be reading this post. Now, by default, the vast majority of users do not store their emails locally (if they even know how to do so). Emails are almost always accessed through a third party’s servers. Almost nobody downloads their emails — and even if they do, the original remains on the server.
The vast majority of users expect that their emails, protected by their usernames and passwords, will remain private. Even though the emails are stored out there in the cloud, the ordinary reasonable expectation is that they are private.
In order to obtain a search warrant for a particular e-mail account, law enforcement has to establish probable cause to believe that evidence will be found in that particular account. In some cases, this link can be hard to establish.
As everyone reading this is probably aware, last Monday the website Gizmodo announced an exclusive look at Apple’s iPhone 4, which hasn’t been officially released yet. In their post (here), they said “you are looking at Apple’s next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3GS. We got it. We disassembled it. It’s the real thing, and here are all the details.” The post was written by blogger Jason Chen, and featured video of him showing details of the phone, and a lot of photos.
As time went on (see all the posts here), it came out that Gizmodo had paid $5,000 for the phone. The guy they bought it from wasn’t the phone’s owner, but had merely found it in a beer garden back in March. An Apple employee had lost it there.
So, if they bought it from someone who wasn’t the owner, and they knew it was supposed to be a secret, did the folks at Gizmodo commit any crimes here?
Law enforcement got involved very fast. By Friday, law enforcement in San Mateo had gotten a search warrant (viewable here) to seize Jason Chen’s computers, disks, drives, and any records pertaining to the Apple prototype 4G iPhone.
The search warrant was executed that same day, and a bunch of computer stuff was seized (the inventory is also viewable here).
Yesterday, the chief deputy district attorney for San Mateo County told the WSJ’s “Digits” blog (here) that nobody’s saying a crime happened or not. They’re still investigating.
In support of that statement, Gawker Media cited California Penal Code §1524(g) (viewable here), which prohibits search warrants for items described in Evidence Code §1070.
Evidence Code §1070 (here) says a judge can’t hold a journalist in contempt for refusing to disclose his sources, or for refusing to disclose unpublished information gotten while preparing a story.
So we have to ask, does Gawker Media know what it’s even talking about?
In a stunning 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court today reversed its longstanding bright-line rule which had permitted warrantless car searches after an arrest, even when there was no concern for officer safety or the preservation of evidence. The case is Arizona v Gant.
Writing for the majority in this important decision, Justice Stevens held that the police may only search the passenger compartment of a vehicle, pursuant to the arrest of a recent occupant, if it is reasonable to believe that the arrested person might access the car while it’s being searched, or that the car contains evidence of the crime for which that person was arrested.
Interestingly, the votes were contrary to common stereotype. The majority, which limited police powers, included the two most right-wing justices in the popular mind, Scalia and Thomas. The minority, which would have expanded police powers, included two fairly liberal justices, Kennedy and Breyer.
Rodney Gant was arrested for driving with a suspended license. After he was arrested, the police handcuffed him and locked him in the back of their cruiser. Once he was secured, the police then searched his car and found a jacket on the back seat. In a pocket of that jacket, they found some cocaine.
The bright line has seemed only brighter in the past decade, however, especially after Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996), which held that the police could seize evidence in plain view within a car even after an arrest for a mere traffic violation, regardless of whether there was an ulterior motive in making the traffic stop. So the trial court’s ruling was not a surprise.
Despite the common interpretation, Gant appealed, arguing that Belton shouldn’t be read so broadly as that. It shouldn’t permit a search of the car when the arrestee poses no present threat to the officers. And it shouldn’t permit a search of the car when there is no way it could contain evidence of the crime for which he’d been arrested. There was simply no exigency that satisfied the policy underlying the Belton rule.
The Arizona Supreme Court agreed, and reversed. The Arizona Supreme Court found that Belton only had to do with how much searching could go on during a vehicle search incident to arrest, and did not have to do with whether such a search was permissible once the scene was secure. The Supreme Court of the United States had explained its underlying policy back in Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969), saying that the reasons justifying warrantless search incident to arrest is for the safety of the officers, and for the preservation of destructible evidence. In this case, those justifications did not exist at the time of the search.
The State of Arizona filed cert, arguing that the bright-line rule of Belton permitted the search, and that the common interpretation is the right one.
Writing for the majority, Stevens said that the bright-line rule, though the common interpretation, is the wrong interpretation. He saw that this came about because of an inappropriate reliance on Brennan’s dissent in Belton. Brennan had felt that the Belton rule created a legal fiction that the interior of a car is always within the immediate control of an arrestee, even when that person is no longer near the car at the time of the search.
Stevens acknowledged that this reading leads to absurd outcomes, including searched “incident to arrest” after the arrestee had long since left the scene.
This second condition is when, based on the individual circumstances, it would be reasonable to believe there is evidence relevant to the particular crime for which the suspect was arrested.
The bright-line rule has clearly been demolished, and replaced with a case-by-case analysis of the facts.
Now bright-line rules aren’t necessarily a bad thing, in and of themselves. There is a tradeoff between the necessity to account for the vagaries of real life, and the necessity for an easily-understood rule that police can follow. Both considerations are necessary for the protection of individual liberties. If the line is too bright, then law enforcement can ignore common sense and violate rights just because they can. But if the rule is too convoluted, to take into account all the vagaries of real life, then law enforcement won’t understand it, and risks violating rights by accident (or on purpose).
(2) there’s reason to believe that the car contains evidence relevant to the crime he was arrested for. That’s not going to cause any confusion. Police officers and trial judges won’t have a hard time applying it.
There has been a movement in American jurisprudence away from formalism and bright lines, toward balancing. Instead of emphasizing bright-line rules requiring warrants, or dispensing with the need, the courts have been leaning more towards whatever is reasonable under the particular circumstances. A judicial, backward-looking approach, rather than a legislative one.
This ruling clearly fits that trend.
We find this concurrence to be almost as good a read as his dissents. He lays plain the absurdities of the bright-line rule, only hinted at by the majority opinion. He does acknowledge that the Founders weren’t thinking of this stuff at all. And he tears the dissent of fellow conservative Alito to shreds. But we’ll let you read it all for yourself.
For now, suffice it to say that a major case was decided today, and the ruling is a good one for defendants and law enforcement both.
On Monday, a unanimous Supreme Court reiterated its rule that a police officer may pat down the passenger of a car that was stopped for a traffic infraction, if the officer has reason to believe the passenger is armed and dangerous. The Court also added that the authority to conduct a patdown doesn’t end when police start asking about matters unrelated to the traffic stop.
Writing for the Court in Arizona v. Johnson (No. 07-1122), Justice Ginsburg pointed out that this is not exactly new law. Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106, held that police are allowed to ask the driver of a car to get out, after a lawful traffic stop. The interest in officer safety outweighed the “de minimis” additional intrusion of having the driver exit the car. Then, once the driver is out of the car, Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, says he can be patted down if there’s reason to believe he’s armed and dangerous.
Maryland v. Wilson, 519 U.S. 408, said that the Mimms rule applies to passengers the same as to drivers. Passengers and drivers both have the same incentive to avoid being arrested for more serious crimes than the traffic violation, and have the same incentive to use violence to avoid such arrest. The interest in officer safety again outweighed the “minimal” additional intrusion of being asked to exit the car. Everyone’s already been seized, essentially, by the car stop.
Here, Officer Maria Trevizo, of Arizona’s gang task force, was part of a car stop for driving with a suspended registration. At the time of the stop, she had no reason to suspect any of the passengers of a crime. However, on approaching the car, she saw that the passenger Lemon Johnson wore Crips clothing, and had a police scanner sticking out of his pocket. When asked to identify himself, Johnson said her was from Eloy, Arizona, which Trevizo knew was a Crips gang location. Johnson also said he’d done prison time for burglary.
Trevizo wanted to ask more questions out of earshot of the others in the car, to see if she could get any info about the gang Johnson might have been in. So she asked him to get out of the car. Her observations so far, plus his statements, gave her reason to think he might be armed, so when he got out she started to perform a Wilson frisk. When she found a gun in his waistband, Johnson started fighting with her, and she handcuffed him. Johnson was later convicted at trial of, among other things, possession of a weapon by a prohibited possessor.
The Arizona Court of Appeals reversed his conviction, holding that Trevizo’s authority to pat him down ended when she started asking about matters unrelated to the traffic stop. Yes, he was initially detained pursuant to the traffic stop, but then the encounter devolved into a consensual conversation. As Johnson was no longer technically seized by the car stop, the police no longer had authority to conduct a patdown.
The Supreme Court held that the Arizona court got that wrong. Nothing ever happened that would have given Johnson reason to believe he was free to leave without police permission. He was seized by the car stop, and a reasonable person would understand that throughout the time the car is stopped, he isn’t free to just walk away. The mere fact that Johnson was being questioned about non-traffic-related matters wasn’t something that would change that understanding.
Other writers out there are seeing this ruling as a travesty, another nail in the coffin of Fourth Amendment protections. Over at Simple Justice, for example, the mere reiteration of the existing Wilson rule is called “the evisceration of rights by baby steps.” It’s clear that such writers simply disagree with the greater value the courts have placed on officer safety, as opposed to the freedom from being patted down. Those are their values, and we can’t fault that.
But critics such as these are missing the real point of the case, which is that a traffic stop never devolves to a lesser encounter until either the traffic stop is over, or until the police say so. To us, this seems to be a far more troubling bright line. Certainly, situations can be envisioned in which a passenger would reasonably believe that he was free to leave, even though the stop wasn’t over and the officer might disagree.
We, for example, once took a cab to an important meeting across town. The cab driver, playing to type, showed a remarkable ignorance of the workings of a motorized vehicle, as well as the difference between the street and the sidewalk. One of New York’s finest swiftly stopped the cabbie before anyone (including us) got hurt. While the officer dealt with the cabbie, we simply walked away and caught another cab. Under this new ruling, however, it would have been appropriate for the officer to stop us. The officer could then even frisk us, if he thought the wallet in our suit jacket was a suspicious bulge.
That’s what you get with bright-line rules, though. One the one hand, you get the efficiency and most-of-the-time fairness of an easy rule for officers to remember and follow. But on the other hand, you lose case-by-case judgment, and wind up with exceptional situations of authorized injustice. Yet another pair of considerations for the ongoing balancing test that is the law.
The Bill of Rights, notably Amendments 4-6, protects accused individuals from improper action by the police. The typical remedy for police violation of these rights is suppression of the evidence that would not have been gathered but for the violation. This Exclusionary Rule protects the justice system, by ensuring that the maximum lawfully-gathered evidence is available, while ensuring that defendants aren’t prosecuted with unlawfully-gathered evidence. Police officers and departments are not punished for violations, because that would create an incentive to avoid borderline situations where evidence could have been obtained lawfully. Rather than do that, the Exclusionary Rule lets officers go right up to the line of what they’re allowed to do, and only takes away what they shouldn’t have been allowed to get.
The Exclusionary Rule is not an individual right, but is rather a remedy that has been crafted over generations of thoughtful jurisprudence. It simultaneously maximizes protection of the individual’s rights, and society’s interest in law enforcement. It balances two powerful and competing interests, and it does the job elegantly. As such, it is a beautiful rule, but one that is nevertheless criticized — both by law-and-order types and by defendant-rights types — when its role is misunderstood. Unfortunately, it is misunderstood all the time.
So it was no surprise to see plenty of misunderstanding of the Exclusionary Rule in yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Herring v. United States (No. 07-513). Split 5-4 (and with delightful sniping in the footnotes), the justices on either side of the ruling tried to clarify what the Exclusionary Rule means, but only demonstrated that they’re missing the point. All of them. In their attempt to clarify the rule, all they did was muddy the waters.
That’s right, we just said that we understand the Exclusionary Rule better than the Supreme Court. Modesty is not our strong suit.
The Herring case arose in Coffee County, Alabama. Bennie Dean Herring was someone who’d had his share of run-ins with law enforcement over the years. His truck was impounded, and he went to the Sheriff’s Department to get something out of it. When one of the Sheriff’s investigators found out, he had the Coffee County warrant clerk check to see if Herring had any outstanding warrants. There weren’t any in Coffee County. Then they called neighboring Dale County to check. The Dale County computers showed an active arrest warrant for failing to show up in court on a felony charge. Based on that information, the Coffee County officer pulled Herring over as he left the impound lot, arrested him, and recovered methamphetamines and an illegal gun.
In the meantime, the Dale County warrant clerk went to get a copy of the warrant, to send to the Coffee County officer. But there wasn’t one in the file. So the clerk checked with the court, and found out that the warrant had been recalled. For whatever reason, the information never got from the Dale County court to the Dale County warrant database. The warrant clerk called the Coffee County warrant clerk immediately, and the warrant clerk immediately called the officer, but the arrest and search had already taken place.
At trial, Herring moved to suppress the evidence on the ground that the arrest was illegal, as the warrant it was based on no longer existed. The trial court said the evidence was admissible, because the officer did nothing wrong, and acted in good faith on information that the warrant was still outstanding.
On appeal, the Eleventh Circuit agreed that the Coffee County officer did nothing wrong. Any error was independent of that officer. The error was the result of negligence on someone else’s part, and was moreover a negligent inaction rather than some government action. The Circuit therefore held that the negligence was so attenuated from the officer’s actions that any benefit to be gained by suppression, and so the evidence was admissible under the “good faith” rule of U.S. v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984).
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts pointed out that, even if the search or arrest was unreasonable, the Exclusionary Rule doesn’t always apply. It’s a last resort only. He reiterated that exclusion is not a right of the individual, but is instead a deterrent. The benefits of a deterrent must be weighed against its costs.
Thus, when police have acted in “objectively reasonable” reliance on a warrant that was later held to be invalid, or on a statute that was later declared unconstitutional, or on a court (not police) database that mistakenly stated that an arrest warrant was outstanding, the Supreme Court has held that the evidence was admissible under the “good faith” rule. The Court had held that evidence should be suppressed only when the officer knew or should have known that the search was unconstitutional. Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340 (1987).
“Objectively reasonable” (or “good faith”) means “a reasonably well-trained officer would have known that the search was illegal, in light of all the circumstances.” It’s not a subjective test of what the officer actually intended, but rather a test of what he should have known. Here, there was no reason to believe that the Coffee County officer wasn’t being objectively reasonable in relying on the information from Dale County’s warrant clerk. So the officer did nothing requiring suppression.
The underlying error didn’t require suppression, either. Here, the clerical error wasn’t the result of a recklessly-maintained system. Nor was it the result of the police planting false information for the purpose of justifying false arrests later on. The kind of clerical error here is not something that the Exclusionary Rule could affect or deter meaningfully.
In this opinion, Roberts’ reasoning was certainly sound. However, he amplified the erroneous viewpoint that the proper policy purpose of the Exclusionary Rule is to deter future misconduct. The policy is categorically not to deter. Deterrence is a purpose of punishment, and this is not a rule of punishment. Deterrence gives the police an incentive not to approach the line of impermissibility. That is precisely what the Rule is designed to avoid.
The Exclusionary Rule is not a rule of deterrence or of punishment, but is instead a rule of balancing — balancing individual rights with society’s interests in law enforcement. Roberts does get the concept, as in his discussions of balancing marginal utility against cost. But his repetition of the “deterrence” fallacy just confuses an otherwise clear argument.
Justice Ginsberg similarly the Exclusionary Rule in her dissent (joined by Justices Stevens, Souter and Breyer). Like Roberts, Ginsberg says the purpose is deterrence. But she goes even further to say that the Rule should be used to deter practically all police error.
This is a much more expansive purpose for the Exclusionary Rule (or as Ginsberg puts it, “a more majestic conception”). She goes so far as to say that any arrest based on carelessly-maintained database information would be unlawful, and would require suppression.
If the Rule were to be used as a deterrent, Ginsberg does make an argument that its marginal utility even in cases of carelessness, like this one, is sufficient to justify its use. Suppressing evidence could very well lead to reforms in the data management, to ensure that the same mistake doesn’t happen again. But exclusion is not the only means to that end, and is not even a very suitable means, as there is no actual pressure on the record-keepers to change their ways. The more effective means would be pressure from police leadership and political superiors to fix the process. Also, exclusion of evidence in County A is hardly likely to influence behavior in County B.
Justice Breyer issued his own dissent, joined by Justice Souter. In it, he makes the same error of ascribing deterrent purposes to the Exclusionary Rule, rather than the purpose of balancing interests. And as a result, he falls into the same trap of reasoning as Ginsberg.
Breyer wants a bright-line rule. Because of his focus on deterrence, he would draw the line between the police and the courts — if the error was made by court personnel, then they are not going to be deterred by suppression, so the Exclusionary Rule should not apply. But if the error was made by any police personnel, then the Rule should apply. Breyer fails to explain, however, how police database clerics are in any way deterred from negligent error by the suppression of evidence seized as a result of such error. He similarly fails to explain how court clerks are somehow different, so that they could not have been so deterred by suppression.
Ginsberg and Breyer’s arguments fall apart because they’re looking at suppression as a punishment, a deterrent, rather than as the result of a balancing of competing interests. Roberts gets it, but he too makes the same mistake to some degree. This decision seems to have muddied the waters, instead of clarifying the rule.
Oh well, better luck next time guys!

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