Opinion ID: 450747
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Nix v. Williams

Text: 22 As mentioned above, the district court in the instant case relied on our statement in Cherry I that Cherry's consent to the second search was tainted by the violation of his Miranda rights. Under Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963), if the search was so tainted, the evidence derived therefrom would be inadmissible at trial unless one of the exceptions to the exclusionary rule applied. 6 The district court applied one of these exceptions, the inevitable discovery exception, to hold the evidence admissible. Although the inevitable discovery exception has been recognized in varying forms by federal courts for over twenty years, 7 the Supreme Court for the first time invoked it as a basis for the admission of evidence only recently in Nix v. Williams, --- U.S. ----, 104 S.Ct. 2501, 81 L.Ed.2d 377 (1984). 23 In Williams, Iowa police, based on facts uncovered in an ongoing police investigation, had reason to believe that the defendant was responsible for the disappearance of a 10-year-old girl from a YMCA building in Des Moines, Iowa. The police obtained a warrant for his arrest and at the same time initiated an intense search for the girl in the countryside between Des Moines and Grinnell, where the police surmised the defendant had left the girl or her body. The search party consisted of two hundred volunteers who were divided into teams of four to six persons each and directed to search specific grid areas. While the search was underway, the defendant surrendered to the authorities and, as a result of an illegal interrogation, directed the police to the child's body. At the time the search was called off, a search team was within two and one-half miles of the site where the body was found. 24 In considering whether the evidence of the body's location and condition was admissible as fruit of the illegal interrogation, the Supreme Court relied on the basic principles underlying the exclusionary rule and its exceptions. According to the Court, the core rationale of the rule is to deter police misconduct by ensuring that the prosecution is not put in a better position than it would have been in if no illegality had transpired. The high social cost of allowing obviously guilty persons to go unpunished, however, requires at the same time that the prosecution generally not be put in a worse position by the operation of the rule than it would have been in but for the constitutional violation. This latter notion, the Court argued, was the rationale behind the independent source doctrine and justified the recognition of an inevitable discovery exception as well. The Court held that, just as evidence that had been discovered by means wholly independent of any constitutional violation was admissible, when the information ultimately or inevitably would have been discovered by entirely lawful means, the exclusionary rule should not apply. In either case, reasoned the Court, the exclusion of evidence would fail to restore the parties to their previous positions and thus upset the careful weighing of competing interests underlying the exclusionary rule. 8 25 With respect to the burden of proof, the Court held that, in order for otherwise tainted evidence to be admissible, the prosecution had to demonstrate the applicability of the inevitable discovery exception by a preponderance of the evidence. In so holding, the Court rejected the defendant's position that the burden should be clear and convincing evidence on the ground that inevitable discovery involves no speculative elements but focuses on demonstrated historical facts capable of ready verification or impeachment. Id. at 2510 n. 5. Finally, turning to the facts of the case at hand, the Supreme Court noted that the child's body had been found near a culvert, one of the kinds of places the search teams had been specifically directed to search, and that at the suppression hearing testimony was introduced that the body would have been found within three to five hours if the search had not been called off. Based on the foregoing, the Court concluded that the discovery of the body was inevitable and thus the evidence was admissible under the inevitable discovery exception.