My Zen Arcade

As I posted earlier, it looks a lot like the Roberts Supreme Court is, basically, rolling back the 4th Amendment.  Muttrox posted a comment linking to an NYT article that goes into more detail, and points out a couple of cases that are currently begin decided based on the Herring decision.  For example:

In one of the first trial court decisions to interpret Herring, a federal judge in New Jersey took the broader view, refusing to suppress evidence obtained from computer hard drives under a search warrant based on false information supplied by a Secret Service agent. The agent had told the judge that DVDs found during an earlier search contained child pornography.This was false: other law enforcement officials had reviewed the DVDs and had found no child pornography. The agent, who was leading the investigation, testified that he did not know of that review when he made his statement.

So, the cops busted into this guy’s house based on a warrent based on information from a Secret Service agent who hadn’t actually waited until the evidence was reviewed.  He knew there were DVDs and so they MUST have been kiddie porn DVDs.  So a warrent was issued based on, really, nothing, and the results of that warrent (based on, really, nothing) are allowed into evidence because, well, hey, it was an honest mistake.  This, to me, gets us very close to “Well, I just KNEW he was up to something so I busted in based on good faith” which is one of the reasons we have the 4th Amendment in the first place!

Scalia figures that the police are much more professional now, and therefor the exclusionary rule isn’t very necessary anymore.  Of course, the information he is basing this on doesn’t say anything of the sort. But this has been a court that doesn’t much care for facts and has little problem twisting the truth to suit their own needs.

You’ll notice that I flip back and forth between ‘4th Amendment’ and ‘exclusionary rule’.  In my mind, they are effectively the same thing.  The 4th protects us from unreasonable search and seizure.  But without the exclusionary rule, whats the point?  If a cop busts into my house on a hunch, but without a warrent, and finds an illegal hand gun, he has violated the 4th.  But if that hand gun can be used as evidence, then what, exactly, is the motivation for the cop to not do that again?  Without the exclusionary rule, there’s not much of a reason to obey the 4th Amendment.

And how hard, exactly, do you think it would be to stretch ‘isolated carelessness’ into ‘reasonable assumptions’?  Shoot, how hard is it to show ANYTHING as ‘isolated carelessness’?  Does that mean every cop gets one mulligan in his career?

Sounds that way to me.