Court Opinion

ID: 9628492
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:22:15.023866+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:07:06.566617
License: Public Domain

CAMERON, Justice,
specially concurring.
As defined by the United States Supreme Court, the exclusionary rule has been much criticized, depending in good part on the philosophy of the speaker.1 In praising or criticizing the rule, individual cases are usually cited to support the conclusion of the speaker. Those in support cite the facts in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 81 S.Ct. 1684, 6 L.Ed.2d 1081 (1961), as a reason for the application of the exclusionary rule. Any fair reading of Mapp v. Ohio, supra, must evoke some support for the exclusionary rule, and there can be no sense of outrage at the result reached by the United States Supreme Court in that case. This does not mean that a strict or remorseless application of the exclusionary rule will cure the evils of the outrageous police conduct apparent in the case of Mapp v. Ohio, supra. For example, a major study which has been widely quoted was conducted by Dallin H. Oaks, then a Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and a former Justice of the Utah Supreme Court. D. Oaks, Studying the Exclusionary Rule in Search and Seizure, *27037 U. of Chi.L.Rev. 665 (1970). His study of the effects of the rule on police behavior in a number of locations found “no convincing evidence to verify the functional premise of deterrence upon which the rule is based,” Oaks, supra, at 672, and he argued, “As a device for directly deterring illegal searches and seizures by the police, the exclusionary rule is a failure.” Oaks, supra, at 755. On the other side, the cost of the rule becomes apparent at the suppression of perfectly valid, good, and material evidence, with the result that the perpetrators of horrible and heinous crimes go free. Also, I believe one of the main defects of the rule is that by the very action of focusing upon the rule rather than the evidence, guilt becomes immaterial. The diversion of the fact-finding process from the search for the truth may be the major cost of the exclusionary rule. As Dallin Oaks has stated:
Truth and justice are ultimate values, so understood by our people, and the law and the legal profession will not be worthy of public respect and loyalty if we allow our attention to be diverted from these goals.
Ethics, Morality and Professional Responsibility, 1975 B.Y.U.L.Rev. 591, 596 quoted by the United States Supreme Court in Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465, 491, n. 30, 96 S.Ct. 3037, 3051, n. 30, 49 L.Ed.2d 1067, 1086, n. 30 (1976). Charles Alan Wright has noted with reference to the exclusionary rule:
Its benefit to society is dubious and uncertain. Its cost to society is great and real. Hundreds or thousands of criminals go free each year because the police are found to have violated, in one way or another, the intricate body of law on when and how they may search.
C.A. Wright, Must the Criminal Go Free If the Constable Blunders, 50 Tex.L.Rev. 736, 741 (1972).
This does not mean that there is not some benefit in the exclusionary rule. However, the societal costs of invoking the rule vary greatly from case to case, and I believe the rule can be and should be restricted to those cases where these societal costs of imposing the rule do not exceed the benefits of the enforcement of the rule.
Insofar as allowed by the United States Supreme Court in their future decisions, I would adopt a balancing test for the admission of illegally obtained evidence under the Arizona Constitution.2 This balancing approach would prevent the rule from being invoked whenever the societal costs of applying the rule exceed societal benefits. In its simplified form, it would directly compare the gravity of the crime in a particular case with the gravity of the police misconduct, in order to determine whether the costs of freeing the guilty exceed the expected benefit of deterring the police. Where such societal costs exceed the expected benefits, it is socially unwise to apply the exclusionary rule, so the rule should not be applied.
Where the expected benefits outweigh such costs, it can reasonably be argued that the rule is justified and should continue to be used. The internal logic of this test is simple — where the criminal conduct involved is more dangerous to society than the police misconduct, it does not make sense to sacrifice the criminal prosecution in order to deter the police.
Balancing costs and benefits is not new in the law. The balancing of costs and benefits is the essence of intelligent human decisionmaking, and this has been broadly recognized by the law. For example, it forms the basis of the familiar “Hand formula,” United States v. Carroll Towing Co., 159 F.2d 169 (2d Cir.1947), a balancing which is at the core of the law of negligence. This tort doctrine holds that if a person fails to correctly balance the costs and benefits of taking a particular precaution, he will have to pay for the consequential harm. If judges expect members of the public to balance costs and benefits in making their decisions, why should mem*271bers of the public not expect the same from judges?
And judges do just that. A careful weighing of societal interests is involved every time a decision is made defining such broad concepts as “due process of law,” “freedom of the press,” “establishment of religion,” and “cruel and unusual punishment.” Enforcement of' the Fourth Amendment protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures” should not be treated any differently.
Perhaps the area of “freedom of speech” provides the best illustration of the weighing and balancing undertaken by the Supreme Court in implementing constitutional provisions. Justice Frankfurter, one of the Court’s most articulate advocates of judicial balancing, said in his concurrence in Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494, 521, 524-25, 71 S.Ct. 857, 873, 874-75, 95 L.Ed. 1137, 1158-59, 1160 (1951):
The historic antecedents of the First Amendment preclude the notion that its purpose was to give unqualified immunity to every expression * * *.
******
Absolute rules would eventually lead to absolute exceptions, and such exceptions would eventually corrode the rules. The demands of free speech in a democratic society as well as the interest in national security are better served by a candid and informed weighing of the competing interests, within the confines of the judicial process, than by announcing dogmas too inflexible for the non-Euclidean problems to be solved, (emphasis added)
Constitutional absolutism in the area of search and seizure has not worked. The United States Supreme Court has made clear, however, that “the policies behind the exclusionary rule are not absolute. Rather, they must be evaluated in light of competing interests.” Stone v. Powell, supra, 428 U.S. at 488, 96 S.Ct. at 3049, 49 L.Ed.2d at 1084. The Court has spoken of the “balancing process” at work in the cases creating exceptions to the exclusionary rule, defining this process as “weighing the utility of the exclusionary rule against the costs of extending it” in a particular context. Id. at 489, 96 S.Ct. at 3050, 49 L.Ed.2d at 1085.
A form of a balancing approach has been suggested by other writers. Professor Kaplan has proposed a “serious case” exception which he describes as follows:
The * * * proposed modification of the exclusionary rule is a simple one. It would provide that the rule not apply in the most serious cases — treason, espionage, murder, armed robbery, and kidnapping by organized groups ***[;] * * * the mere fact of a fourth amendment violation would not require the exclusion of evidence in the relatively small class of the most serious cases.
J. Kaplan, The Limits of the Exclusionary Rule, 26 Stan.L.Rev. 1027, 1046 (1974). Parenthetically, it is submitted such crimes as rape and arson should be added to this list of “serious cases.” I agree with this exception, although I do not believe it goes far enough. It is in this group of cases that the costs of applying the exclusionary rule are the highest, and the potential disproportion between the gravity of the crime and the gravity of the police impropriety is the greatest. Regardless of the actual amount of this disproportion, the gravity of these cases always will by definition exceed the gravity of any Fourth Amendment violation. This is because, the rhetoric of some civil libertarians to the contrary, it is worse to be murdered or raped than to have one’s house searched without a warrant, no matter how aggravated the latter violation. The only problem with this exception is that it is incomplete, and Kaplan’s formulation only looks at one side of the equation — costs. Only where the costs of the rule are very high, would Kaplan not apply it.
On the other end of the scale is the “good faith” exception, which also looks at only the other side of the equation — benefits. This exception would restrict use of the rule whenever the police officer has acted in good faith, and so the benefits of deterring him would be very low. One of the most ardent advocates of this exception *272is Justice Byron R. White who explains its function as follows:
When law enforcement personnel have acted mistakenly, but in good faith and on reasonable grounds, and yet the evidence they have seized is later excluded, the exclusion can have no deterrent effect. The officers, if they do their duty, will act in similar fashion in similar circumstances in the future * * *.
Stone v. Powell, supra, at 540, 96 S.Ct. at 3073, 49 L.Ed.2d at 1114 (White, J., dissenting). This is also the thrust of the argument made by Judge Henry Friendly who would exclude only “the fruit of activity intentionally or flagrantly illegal.” Benchmarks, 260-62 (1967), quoted in United States v. Williams, 622 F.2d 830, 841 (5th Cir.1980). Similarly, Charles Alan Wright would apply the rule only to “outrageous” police conduct. Wright, supra, at 744. This simple good faith/bad faith test thus would not apply the rule where it appears that the deterrent benefit is small or nonexistent, and would apply the rule where the potential deterrent benefit appears large. Adoption of a good faith exception has also been recommended by the American Law Institute, Model Code of Pre-Arraignment Procedure, Sec. SS 290.2 (Off. Draft No. 1, 1972), and by a recent Attorney General’s Task Force Report, Attorney General’s Task Force Report — Final Report at 55-56 (1981), and has been adopted by the Fifth Circuit in United States v. Williams, supra. As noted in the majority opinion, the Supreme Court recently approved a good faith exception to the exclusionary rule in a case where the police relied upon a valid search warrant to obtain evidence. Segura v. United States, — U.S. -, 104 S.Ct. 3380, 82 L.Ed.2d 599 (1984).
I also agree with the results of this test. Where the deterrent benefit to police would be very small or non-existent, it should be outweighed by the cost of releasing essentially any criminal. The shortcoming of this rule, however, is that it is underinclusive, leaving out many of the most important cases. These include all cases in which the police acted with less than good faith, but their actions are outweighed by the egregious nature of the crime. This overlooks the fact that flagrantly illegal searches also take place against very serious criminals such as murderers, kidnappers, rapists, and foreign spies.
The major strength of the balancing approach is that by definition it avoids disproportional results, likely the greatest drawback of the exclusionary rule. This approach leads to socially sensible decisions. The exclusionary rule is applied only when the benefits of its application outweigh its costs.
Aside from this strong utilitarian argument, the balancing approach is also justified in terms of the fundamental fairness of its results. The accused will be allowed to invoke the rule only where the illegality committed against him is more grave than the crime he has committed against others. Thus, the accused will be “let off” only where he has suffered more than his purported victims.
Another major advantage of the balancing approach is that it could serve to replace all of the piecemeal exceptions to the rule heretofore created by the Court when faced with compelling cases. This would return some rationality to this area of the law. Not only would there be more common sense, but also more stability. In the future, the opportunity to openly balance the equities of these cases would remove the pressure on the Court to create new exceptions of questionable merit to reach right results.
Admittedly, the price of this return to rationality would be that it may require a substantial expenditure of the time and effort of judges, who must perform the delicate balancing of social interests called for by this proposal. It is doubtful, however, that the court would spend as much time as it does now in hearing motions to suppress. This is because the relevant inquiry would be based on the general equities presented by the facts, rather than on minute technical distinctions. Per se categories could resolve the easy cases, as is done in other areas of the law. One such category could be established for types of crime deemed so *273serious that no search and seizure violation would ever justify application of the exclusionary rule; another per se category would be established for crimes so trivial that deterrence of any search and seizure violation would justify applying the rule. The “hard cases” in the middle would still require a careful weighing and balancing of competing interests to reach the right result in each case. But is this not what the judicial process is really all about?
It is submitted that the strengths of this plan are greater than the weaknesses, and the expenditure of judicial resources required is justified in terms of the benefits of better results and better law. Even so, the expenditure of judicial time need not be more than the time now spent in the suppression hearing. This balancing approach should be adopted, then, if the exclusionary rule is destined to survive at all.3

. Cardozo, J., in People v. Defore, 242 N.Y. 13, 150 N.E. 585 (1926); J. Wigmore in 8 J. Wig-more, Evidence, Sec. 2184 (3d ed. 1940); Frankfurter, J., for the Court in Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U.S. 25, 69 S.Ct. 1359, 93 L.Ed. 1782 (1949); Burger, J., in Who Will Watch the Watchman?, 14 Am.U.L.Rev. 1 (1964); La Fave and Remington in Controlling the Police: The Judge’s Role in Making and Reviewing Law Enforcement Decisions, 62 Mich.L.Rev. 987 (1965); D. Oaks in Studying the Exclusionary Rule in Search and Seizure, 37 U.Chi.L.Rev. 665 (1970); Burger, C.J., dissenting in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Fed. Bur. of Narc., 403 U.S. 388, 411, 91 S.Ct. 1999, 2012, 29 L.Ed.2d 619, 635 (1971); C.A. Wright in Must the Criminal Go Free if the Constable Blunders?, 50 Tex.L. Rev. 736 (1972); J. Kaplan in The Limits of the Exclusionary Rule, 26 Stan.L.Rev. 1027 (1974); E. Griswold in Search and Seizure: A Dilemma of the Supreme Court (1975); Powell, J., for the Court in Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465, 96 S.Ct. 3037, 49 L.Ed.2d 1067 (1976); Wilkey, J., in The Exclusionary Rule: Why Suppress Valid Evidence?, 62 Judicature 215 (1978); Rehnquist, J., in California v. Minjares, 443 U.S. 916, 100 S.Ct. 9, 61 L.Ed.2d 892 (1979); G. Bell in Attorney General’s Task Force on Violent Crime—Final Report, p. 55 (1981); President's Task Force on Victims of Crime, Final Report, December, 1982, p. 25 et seq.

. Much if not most of what I say here has been previously stated in Cameron and Lustiger, The Exclusionary Rule: A Cost-Benefit Analysis, 101 F.R.D. 109 (1984).

. In concurring I assume, however, that there is no Wong Sun problem, Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963). If there were a violation of Wong Sun, id., a balancing approach would suggest that such "tainted” evidence be excluded because the police transgressions are both serious and systematic, and the crime as indicated by the sentence imposed (concurrent three year terms of probation) is neither serious nor violent.