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CA10 finds GFE to Gant

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

The Tenth Circuit today found a good faith exception to Arizona v. Gant. United States v. McKane, 08-6235 (10th Cir. July 28, 2009). The settled law [albeit wrong?] pre-Gant is a sufficient basis for the good faith exception to apply: Two inseparable principles have emerged from the Supreme Court cases and each builds upon the underlying purpose of the exclusionary rule: deterrence. First, the exclusionary rule seeks to deter objectively unreasonable police conduct, i.e., conduct which an officer knows or should know violates the Fourth Amendment. See, e.g., Herring, 129 S. Ct. at 701-04; Krull, 480 U.S. at 348-49. Second, the purpose of the exclusionary rule is to deter misconduct by law enforcement officers, not other entities, and even if it was appropriate to consider the deterrent effect of the exclusionary rule on other institutions, there would be no significant deterrent effect in excluding evidence based upon the mistakes of those uninvolved in or attenuated from law enforcement...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on July 28, 2009 (boomark / email).