Law Commons^™

The Corrosive Effect Of Inevitable Discovery On The Fourth Amendment, Tonja Jacobi, Elliot Louthen

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court has only once, almost four decades ago, addressed the doctrine of inevitable discovery, when it established the exception in Nix v. Williams. Inevitable discovery encapsulates the notion of no harm, no foul—if law enforcement would have discovered unlawfully obtained evidence regardless of a constitutional violation, then the resulting evidence need not be excluded. Nix laid out two simple dictates: the eponymous requirement of inevitability and a corresponding evidentiary burden requiring the prosecution to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that law enforcement inevitably would have discovered the evidence without the violation. Such analysis requires counterfactual …

Reimagining Criminal Justice: What Good Has Come From The 'Good' Faith Exception?, Yasamin Elahi-Shirazi

Reimagining Criminal Justice

On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor settled into bed with her boyfriend Kenneth Walker after she finished working back-to-back shifts as an emergency room technician in Louisville, Kentucky. At around 12:30 a.m., the couple heard banging coming from their front door, they asked who was at the door. They heard no response. Suddenly, the front door “flies off its hinges” and armed men began to enter their apartment. Walker, a licensed gun owner, fired at the intruders, shooting one in the leg, to protect himself and Ms. Taylor from unknown intruders.

The intruders returned fire, with around thirty rounds, killing …

Regulating Interrogations And Excluding Confessions In The United States: Balancing Individual Rights And The Search For Truth, Jenia I. Turner

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Like other criminal justice systems, the U.S. system must balance, on the one hand, enforcing the criminal law and, on the other, protecting individual rights in the process. Reliable fact-finding is a prerequisite to the effective enforcement of criminal law and to just outcomes. Protection of individual rights often promotes reliable fact-finding, as when a ban on involuntary confessions prevents the introduction of unreliable testimony at trial. On occasion, however, the commitment to accurate fact-finding may conflict with individual rights in a particular case. One of the clearest examples of such a conflict occurs when a court must decide whether …

Supreme Irrelevance: The Court’S Abdication In Criminal Procedure Jurisprudence, Tonja Jacobi, Ross Berlin

Faculty Articles

Criminal procedure is one of the Supreme Court’s most active areas of jurisprudence, but the Court’s rulings are largely irrelevant to the actual workings of the criminal justice system. The Court’s irrelevance takes two forms: objectively, on the numbers, its jurisprudence fails to protect the vast majority of people affected by the criminal justice system; and in terms of salience, the Court has sidestepped the major challenges in the United States today relating to the criminal justice system. These challenges include discrimination in stops and frisks, fatal police shootings, unconscionable plea deals, mass incarceration, and disproportionate execution of racial minorities. …

The Subversions And Perversions Of Shadow Vigilantism, Paul H. Robinson, Sarah M. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

This excerpt from the recently published Shadow Vigilantes book argues that, while vigilantism, even moral vigilantism, can be dangerous to a society, the real danger is not of hordes of citizens, frustrated by the system’s doctrines of disillusionment, rising up to take the law into their own hands. Frustration can spark a vigilante impulse, but such classic aggressive vigilantism is not the typical response. More common is the expression of disillusionment in less brazen ways by a more surreptitious undermining and distortion of the operation of the criminal justice system.

Shadow vigilantes, as they might be called, can affect the …

Can We Protect The Innocent Without Freeing The Guilty? Thoughts On Innocence Reforms That Avoid Harmful Tradeoffs, Paul Cassell

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

It is fundamentally important that the criminal justice system accurately separate the guilty from the innocent. But many recent reform measures from the innocent movement rest on shaky ground. Protecting against wrongful convictions can create tradeoffs. If poorly crafted, a reform measure might not only prevent convicting innocent persons but also guilty persons, allowing dangerous criminals to avoid incarceration and continue to victimize innocent persons. From a public policy perspective, these tradeoffs create concern that reform measures may be cures worse than the disease.

With this caution in mind, it is possible to craft reforms that help to protect the …

The Wrong Decision At The Wrong Time: Utah V. Strieff In The Era Of Aggressive Policing, Julian A. Cook

Scholarly Works

On June 20, 2016, the United States Supreme Court held in Utah v. Strieff that evidence discovered incident to an unconstitutional arrest of an individual should not be suppressed given that the subsequent discovery of an outstanding warrant attenuated the taint from the unlawful detention. Approximately two weeks later the issue of aggressive policing was again thrust into the national spotlight when two African-American individuals — Alton Sterling and Philando Castile — were killed by policemen in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Falcon Heights, Minnesota, respectively, under questionable circumstances. Though connected by proximity in time, this article will demonstrate that these …

Evidence Laundering In A Post-Herring World, Kay L. Levine, Jenia I. Turner, Ronald F. Wright

Faculty Articles

The Supreme Court’s decision in Herring v. United States authorizes police to defeat the Fourth Amendment’s protections through a process we call evidence laundering. Evidence laundering occurs when one police officer makes a constitutional mistake when gathering evidence and then passes that evidence along to a second officer, who develops it further and then delivers it to prosecutors for use in a criminal case. The original constitutional taint disappears in the wash.

Courts have allowed evidence laundering in a variety of contexts, from cases involving flawed databases to cases stemming from faulty judgments and communication lapses in law enforcement teams. …

Police Reform And The Judicial Mandate, Julian A. Cook

Scholarly Works

In response to a crisis that threatens his tenure as Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel announced in December 2015 reform measures designed to curb aggressive police tactics by the Chicago Police Department (CPD). The reform measures are limited, but aim to reduce deadly police-citizen encounters by arming the police with more tasers, and by requiring that officers undergo deescalation training. Though allegations of excessive force have plagued the department for years, the death of Laquan McDonald, an African-American teenager who was fatally shot by Jason Van Dyke, a white officer with the CPD, was the impetus for the Mayor’s reforms. …

Government Retention And Use Of Unlawfully Secured Dna Evidence, Wayne A. Logan

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

The Moral Vigilante And Her Cousins In The Shadows, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

By definition, vigilantes cannot be legally justified – if they satisfied a justification defense, for example, they would not be law-breakers – but they may well be morally justified, if their aim is to provide the order and justice that the criminal justice system has failed to provide in a breach of the social contract. Yet, even moral vigilantism is detrimental to society and ought to be avoided, ideally not by prosecuting moral vigilantism but by avoiding the creation of situations that would call for it. Unfortunately, the U.S. criminal justice system has adopted a wide range of criminal law …

Policing The Immigration Police: Ice Prosecutorial Discretion And The Fourth Amendment, Jason A. Cade

Scholarly Works

A persistent puzzle in immigration law is how the removal adjudication system should respond to the increasing prevalence of violations of noncitizens’ constitutional rights by arresting officers. Scholarship in this area has focused on judicial suppression of unconstitutionally obtained evidence, typically by arguing that the Supreme Court should overrule its 1984 decision in INS v. Lopez-Mendoza not to enforce the exclusionary rule in civil immigration court. This Essay, in contrast, considers the role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attorneys in upholding the Fourth Amendment, taking as a launching point the recent exercise of prosecutorial discretion by ICE attorneys in …

The Exclusionary Rule: Is It On Its Way Out? Should It Be?, Christopher Slobogin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This symposium, comprising six articles in addition to this one, was triggered by a spate of Supreme Court opinions occurring over the last seven years, all of which raise the two questions in the title to this article (which is also the title of the symposium). Since 1974, when United States v. Calandra definitively established deterrence as the primary objective of the suppression remedy, the Court has nibbled away at the exclusionary rule from a number of different directions. But the Court's decisions in Hudson v. Michigan (2006), Herring v. United States (2009), and Davis v. United States (2011) reveal …

Brady, Trust, And Error, Samuel R. Wiseman

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Unraveling The Exclusionary Rule: From Leon To Herring To Robinson - And Back?, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

The Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule began to unravel in United States v. Leon. The facts were compelling. Why exclude reliable physical evidence from trial when it was not the constable who blundered, but “a detached and neutral magistrate” who misjudged whether probable cause was present and issued a search warrant? Later cases applied the exception for “good faith” mistakes to a police officer who, pursuing a grudge against a suspect, arrested and searched him and his truck on the basis of a false and negligent report from a clerk in another county of an outstand­ing arrest warrant. The California Supreme …

Expanding The Scope Of The Good-Faith Exception To The Exclusionary Rule To Include A Law Enforcement Officer's Reasonable Reliance On Well-Settled Case Law That Is Subsequently Overruled, Ross Oklewicz

Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In 2009, the Supreme Court handed down several important decisions on criminal procedure. Perhaps unanticipated at the time, two of those decisions have been read together by lower courts to reach dramatically different results. The emerging split has been sharp, bringing with it urgent calls for the Court to intervene.

Laying the foundation for the conflicting decisions was New York v. Belton, in which the Supreme Court held that “when a policeman has made a lawful custodial arrest of the occupant of an automobile, he may, as a contemporaneous incident of that arrest, search the passenger compartment of the automobile” …

Probabilities In Probable Cause And Beyond: Statistical Versus Concrete Harms, Sherry F. Colb

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"You Crossed The Fog Line!"—Kansas, Pretext, And The Fourth Amendment, Melanie D. Wilson

Scholarly Articles

In Whren, the United States Supreme Court sanctioned pretextual traffic stops. In practice the holding of Whren condones police investigations that target certain suspect classes of people, like Hispanics, for increased police scrutiny. In permitting pretextual stops, the Court ignored the risk that such practices will encourage police to distort the truth, overlooked the cost of under-enforcement of the laws, and ignored the consequences to the criminal justice system of race and ethnicity based discrimination.

Kansas law exacerbates these risks by making fog-line stops a model for protecting ulterior motives from a sifting judicial inquiry. In Kansas, it makes …

Reconceiving The Fourth Amendment And The Exclusionary Rule, Craig M. Bradley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Equivalent Deterrence: A Proposed Alternative To The Exclusionary Rule In Criminal Proceedings, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps no other area of American jurisprudence is as controversial as the exclusionary rule. Rejected by all other civilized countries2 and held in contempt by much of the American public, the rule reached its zenith during the Warren Court, only to be chipped away a little at a time by the Burger Court. Indeed, if the rule is ever to die, it seems destined to go out with a whimper rather than a bang. . .

The Doctrine Of Inevitable Discovery: A Plea For Reasonable Limitations, Steven P. Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

In reinstating the Iowa murder conviction of Robert Williams, the Supreme Court accepted explicitly for the first time the doctrine of inevitable discovery. Applied for some time by state and federal courts, the doctrine of inevitable discovery is a means by which evidence obtained illegally can still be admitted against defendants in criminal cases. Unfortunately, the Court chose to adopt the doctrine without any of the safeguards necessary to insure that the deterrent impact of the exclusionary rule would be preserved, and in a form that is subject to and almost invites abuse.

This article warns of the danger to …

Gates, Leon And The Compromise Of Adjudicatory Fairness: (Part Ii)-Aggressive Majoritarianism, Willful Deafness, And The New Exception To The Exclusionary Rule, Joel J. Finer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Article will offer an elaboration of the idea of judicial "aggressiveness" (which Professor Stone, by and large, leaves undefined) through examination of the majority opinion in United States v. Leon and its application in Massachusetts v. Sheppard. It will also advance the thesis that the majority in Leon exhibited a particular kind of aggressiveness--willful deafness.

Gates, Leon And The Compromise Of Adjudicatory Fairness: (Part I)-A Dialogue On Prejudicial Concurrences, Joel J. Finer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

On July 5, 1984, the Supreme Court in Leon v. United States held that where law enforcement officials execute a search warrant issued in violation of the dictates of the fourth amendment but act in the "good faith," "objectively-reasonable" belief that the warrant was constitutionally valid, the fruits of the search should not (with a few exceptions) be excluded from evidence under the exclusionary rule. On June 8, 1983, in Illinois v. Gates, the Supreme Court, after calling for and receiving briefs and arguments on the same issue of whether the exclusionary rule should be modified, concluded, for reasons of …

The Exclusionary Rule In Germany, Craig M. Bradley

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The exclusionary rule that the Supreme Court has fashioned to suppress evidence obtained unconstitutionally is directed at least in part toward deterring police conduct that violates constitutional norms. Since the inception of the rule, the value and efficacy of a prescript that excludes otherwise relevant and probative evidence in a factfinding proceeding has been a subject of heated debate. In this Article, Professor Bradley examines the rather different exclusionary rules used in Germany. He argues that a comparison of exclusionary rules in Germany and the United States suggests that a number of different policies of a criminal justice system could …

How We Got The Fourth Amendment Exclusionary Rule And Why We Need It, Yale Kamisar

Articles

Why the continuing storm of controversy over the exclusionary rule? Why the deep and widespread hostility to it? I think a recent law office search case, because it arose in a setting so unlike the typical search and seizure case, furnishes a clue. In O'Connor v. Johnson, St. Paul police obtained a warrant to search an attorney's office for business records of a client suspected of making false written statements in applying for a liquor license. The attorney happened to be present when the police arrived. Holding on to his work product file, which contained some of the records sought, …

The Consent Problem In Wiretapping & Eavesdropping: Surreptitious Monitoring With The Consent Of A Participant In A Conversation, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

The extent to which American society should permit wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping has been considered by judges, legislators and scholars for many years, although this consideration has yet to result in legal rules that respond rationally and consistently to the conflicting demands of privacy and effective law enforcement. Constitutional analysis has, until very recently, relied on concepts like "physical invasion of a constitutionally protected area," producing distinctions with little relation to underlying social values; statutory restrictions on wiretapping have been much more severe than those imposed on eavesdropping, though the latter, particularly in light of the rapidly developing technology, poses …