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Searches and Seizures: Exclusionary Rule The exclusionary rule is a legal principle that states that evidence collected or analyzed in violation of the U.S. Constitution cannot be used in a criminal trial. It is meant to deter unlawful police conduct. During the past couple of decades, the Supreme Court has been steadily carving out exceptions to the exclusionary rule. This section contains some opinion excerpts that illustrate the Court's approach to the Rule, the exceptions and the reasons behind them. Pages: ‹1› ‹2›
...[T]he exclusionary rule is a better remedy than a civil action against an offending officer. Unlike the fear of personal liability, it should not create excessive deterrence; moreover, it avoids the obvious unfairness of subjecting the dedicated officer to the risk of monetary liability for a misstep while endeavoring to enforce the law. Society, rather than the individual officer, should accept the responsibility for inadequate training or supervision of officers engaged in hazardous police work.
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The facts of this case do not describe an actual arrest, but rather an unlawful attempt to take a presumptively innocent person into custody. Such an attempt was unlawful at common law. Thus, if the Court wants to define the scope of the Fourth Amendment based on the common law, it should look, not to the common law of arrest, but to the common law of attempted arrest, according to the facts of this case. [...] it would still be necessary to decide whether the unlawful attempt to make an arrest should be considered a seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and whether the exclusionary rule should apply to unlawful attempts. [...] ...[U]nder the Court's logic-chopping analysis, the exclusionary rule has no application because an attempt to make an unconstitutional seizure is beyond the coverage of the Fourth Amendment, no matter how outrageous or unreasonable the officer's conduct may be.
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The offense to the dignity of the citizen who is arrested, handcuffed, and searched on a public street simply because some bureaucrat has failed to maintain an accurate computer data base strikes me as equally outrageous. In this case, of course, such an error led to the fortuitous detection of respondent's unlawful possession of marijuana, and the suppression of the fruit of the error would prevent the prosecution of his crime. That cost, however, must be weighed against the interest in protecting other, wholly innocent citizens from unwarranted indignity.
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