Constitutional Law

Supreme Court Chipping Away At Fourth Amendment's 'Exclusionary Rule'

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is helping to push the high court closer to weakening procedural safeguards for criminal defendants. The New York Times’ Adam Liptak analyzes recent rulings that reinterpret the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule, which bars improperly obtained evidence from use at trial. In the high court’s recent Herring v. United States decision, a 5-4 majority concluded that unlawful police conduct should not require the suppression of evidence if all that was involved was isolated carelessness, the Times noted. In that case, Bennie Dean Herring was arrested in one Alabama county based on incorrect information from another county’s police authorities. The warrant that Herring was arrested on had actually been withdrawn. The high court majority found that the exclusionary rule could not be used to invalidate Herring’s conviction on drugs and weapons charges.

Liptak maintains that the decision “suggested that the exclusionary rule itself might be at risk,” noting that along with Roberts, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. are “certain votes” in favor of doing away with the exclusionary rule. Pamela S. Karlan, a Stanford law professor and faculty adviser for the law school’s ACS student chapter, told the Times that while the exclusionary rule may be safe for the time being, noting that five votes are not now available to ditch the rule, “you are not going to see any dimension along which there is going to be an expansion of defendants’ rights in this court.”

Full post as published by ACS Blog on February 02, 2009 (boomark / email).