Constitutional Law

High Court Mulls Reach of Fourth Amendment's 'Exclusionary Rule'

The U.S. Supreme Court entertained arguments yesterday in a case involving a police search of a person based on a faulty warrant. In Herring v. United States, Bennie Dean Herring was arrested in one Alabama county based on incorrect information from another county’s police authorities that a warrant was still outstanding for Herring’s arrest. The warrant had actually been withdrawn. Herring argued that the evidence found during the arrest, drugs and a gun, should be barred under the exclusionary rule of the Fourth Amendment. Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor, in a post on The Volokh Conspiracy includes a link to the transcript of the arguments.

Pamela S. Karlan, Stanford Law School professor and faculty adviser for the law school's ACS student chapter, argued that the search of Herring, based on a lapsed warrant, violated his Fourth Amendment rights and therefore the evidence should be excluded. “If you announce that police error is going to lead to the suppression of evidence, police will do a better job of maintaining their records.” Michael R. Dreeben, a deputy U.S. solicitor general, argued that the justices should not allow the exclusionary rule to apply here because it involved an “isolated clerical error in the maintenance of warrants.”

During a recent Supreme Court preview panel discussion, Kerr discussed at length the Herring case and another Fourth Amendment case before the high court. Video of that discussion is available here.
 

Full post as published by ACS Blog on October 08, 2008 (boomark / email).