Opinion ID: 736643
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Silver Platter Doctrine

Text: 37 In the defendants' last assignment of error, the Merediths urge this Court to hold that the silver platter doctrine precludes admission of the evidence obtained pursuant to the first search warrant in the federal prosecution because it lacked probable cause and because the good faith exception does not apply in federal prosecutions. 38 The silver platter doctrine was developed by the United States Supreme Court when the Fourth Amendment did not apply to the states. The Supreme Court was once of the view that any evidence seized pursuant to a legal search conducted by state officers, although illegal under the Fourth Amendment, could be handed over on a silver platter for use in a federal criminal prosecution. See United States v. Searp, 586 F.2d 1117, 1120 (6th Cir.1978) (citing Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383 (1914)). After the Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment applied to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment in Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U.S. 25 (1949), the Supreme Court in 1960 rejected the silver platter doctrine. See Elkins v. United States, 364 U.S. 206 (1960). In Elkins, the Supreme Court dictated that [i]n determining whether there has been an unreasonable search and seizure by state officers, a federal court must make an independent inquiry, whether or not there has been such an inquiry by a state court, and irrespective of how any such inquiry may have turned out. Id. at 223-24. Thus, there is no longer a viable silver platter doctrine. See also California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35, 43 (1988) (Court rejected defendant's argument that his expectation of privacy in his garbage should be deemed reasonable as a matter of federal constitutional law because the warrantless search and seizure of his garbage was impermissible as a matter of California law.) 39 In addition, the defendants' contention that the good faith exception does not apply in federal court is misplaced. In United States v. Leon, the case in which the Supreme Court espoused the good faith exception to the warrant requirement, the Court applied the good faith exception to state officers relying on a state magistrate judge's issuance of a warrant lacking probable cause. Id. at 901-02, 926. The case upon which defendants rely, United States v. Wright, 16 F.3d 1429 (6th Cir.1994), held only that the resolution of a motion to suppress evidence obtained by state officers in federal court is governed by the Fourth Amendment and not by state rules of law and whether the seizure violated state law is irrelevant in a federal prosecution. Id. at 1434. 40 For these reasons, the defendants' contention that, in a federal prosecution, the good faith exception to the warrant requirement should not apply to evidence seized by state officers pursuant to a warrant lacking probable cause is meritless.