Opinion ID: 2055341
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Legislative Action Needed

Text: The courts, however, are not the appropriate forum to consider all the various proposals or to implement them. The courts are, necessarily, limited by the facts of each case and the advocacy of the parties, and therefore suffer, at times, from tunnel vision. LeFave, Improving Police Performance Through the Exclusionary Rule  Part II: Defining the Norms and Training the Police, 30 Mo.L.Rev. 566, 568 (1965). The legislature, on the other hand, has more fact-finding apparatus at its disposal, can solicit views from all interested parties, can explore all facets of law enforcement procedure and is not confined by the factual matrix of a given case and is, therefore, in a better position to attempt an accommodation of the competing interests and policies involved. Lumbard, The Administration of Criminal Justice: Some Problems and their Resolution, 49 A.B.A.J. 840, 846 (1963). It is time for our legislature to recognize its responsibility in this field. It has been 65 years since Weeks and 18 years since Mapp. During this period, no legislative action has been taken to develop more effective methods of protecting the rights guaranteed our citizens by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and by Article I, Section 8, of the Pennsylvania Constitution. (This legislative inertia can be attributed, at least in part, to Mapp itself, see Weber, supra at 227, although this does not explain the legislative inaction prior to Mapp. ) If the legislature adopts a valid mechanism that works, it is not unlikely that the United States Supreme Court would overrule Mapp v. Ohio , or substantially restrict the reach of the exclusionary rule as applied to Pennsylvania (or any state adopting an effective method), [15] or that the majority of this Court would modify the exclusionary doctrine as the remedy for violations of the Pennsylvania constitutional right to privacy. For the foregoing reasons, I would affirm the judgments of sentence.