Opinion ID: 1917628
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: judicial decisions as predicates for good-faith exception

Text: We have been focusing on judicial decisions, more particularly on appellate opinions, as a basis for the good-faith exception and premising that discussion on an officer's reliance on case law congruent in all material respects with the search the officer is anticipating. As in Davis [94] and McCane [95] cited earlier, a number of federal and state courts have also accepted case law as an appropriate predicate for good-faith reliance. [96] They presume that appellate opinions, dealing with earlier events, can have the same prospective reliability as a warrant or unambiguous statute that invites objectively reasonable reliance on its clarity and presumed validity for a look at an upcoming search. Other courts, noting that an appellate opinion based on past events is not directed at the specific facts of an anticipated search, and thus is not express authority for that upcoming intrusion, have declined to premise the good-faith exception on judicial opinions. [97] These courts are concerned that a trial judge or appellate panel may define settled law too loosely and thereby invite police officers, rather than the courts, to prescribe when exclusion isand is notappropriate. In other words, there is a concern that unless the courts define settled law tightly enough to provide an unambiguous road map to guide the warrantless search, the courts will be merging the discredited mistake-of-law defense ( see supra Part IV.) into the good-faith exception, with all the mischief that this could entail. The danger would be too many police officers judging their own authority expansivelyand thus more and more often erroneouslywith serious erosion of the deterrence called for by the exclusionary rule. Put another way, a court's failure to interpret settled law strictlyincluding an unwillingness to call the law unsettled on the fact pattern presentedwould be an invitation to police misconduct through interpretation of judicial opinions in ways that will narrow the rule of exclusion and force the courts to announce empty Fourth Amendment violations. In Krull, the Supreme Court recognized this very danger: [T]he question whether the exclusionary rule is applicable in a particular context depends significantly upon the actors who are making the relevant decision that the rule is designed to influence. The answer to this question might well be different when police officers act outside the scope of a statute, albeit in good faith. In that context, the relevant actors are not legislators or magistrates, but police officers who concededly are engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime. (Emphasis added.)[ [98] ] Moreover, in Leon and its Supreme Court progeny, there was a third-party check or checkpointa judicial magistrate, a warrant clerk, a record officer, or the plain language of a statute before the officer was entitled to conduct the search. When an officer is allowed instead to rely on police academy interpretation of judicial opinions to justify a search without additional, clear guidance, the potential for slippage into unconstitutional terrain is obvious. [99] If we say that case law, like a warrant, can serve as a basis for the good-faith exception, there is language in Herring thatunless this court defines settled law narrowly and preciselywould appear to allow the police officer, not the court, to define the settled law that permits the search. Assume, contrary to our decision here, that we were not to define our settled Belton law by reference to a published opinion reflecting the material facts applicable to the officer's intended searchin short, a roadmap akin to the clarity of a warrant. Absent that limited definition, Herring would permit suppression of the evidence seized only if it can be said that the law enforcement officer had knowledge, or may properly be charged with knowledge, that the search was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment, namely, that a reasonably well trained officer would have known that the search was illegal  in light of all of the circumstances. (Emphasis added.) [100] With this legal protection that the officer could search unless he knew the search was unconstitutional, an officer could rely on a plausible, though not established, interpretation of Belton that would justify the search of Debruhl's car without regard to whether Debruhl had been removed and secured before the search. Mere plausible law would become settled law, without regard to how this court might have evaluated the search in the first instance.