Supreme Court Rules Police Can Violate 4th Amendment.....

[Igel]

68. They commit a logical error.

Their opinion is irrelevant.

The result wasn't to deny the validity of the 4th Amendment and due process. Due process for the search was upheld.

What was altered was the penalty for violating the 4th Amendment. What is the proper penalty to impose on the government if one of its agents violates due process?

The standard before tossing evidence has varied over time. You don't need a warrant in many cases because of probable cause. Do you need warrants to search cars? That's changed over time; is the car an extension of your home or not? The standard is flexible.

In this case, "reasonable" will certainly need to be defined. I'm not sure there's a valid definition in precedent, and probably not one in statute. It'll vary by state, in any event.

However, let's play a math game. Often you look for boundary values, extremes, maxima and minima in trying to understand a math problem.

This case is simple. The cop shouldn't have pulled over the driver. Therefore any evidence that was found, even if properly obtained after that single improper event, must be ruled out. On principle. The evidence is tainted, and the details of the evidence are immaterial--to avoid moral hazard the state must be penalized for that initial 4th Amendment violation. Sadly, this case has no extremes, unless "extreme inconsequentiality" counts. That just lets the penalty, dismissing all the evidence, be seen as just and right because it's so small. So I'll make up an extreme case.

So in this state you're doing good if you have 1 working tail light. Let's say Mr. Erizo is stopped while going at the speed limit by officer Milicia who sees he doesn't have two working tail lights. Uh-oh, he shouldn't have been pulled over, so anything after that foolish mistake by an ignorant officer is inadmissible by any standard of perfection.

But standing there, writing out the ticket that will be tossed out, officer Milicia hears a baby crying. Since none is visible through the windows, he demands that the trunk be opened. In the trunk he finds a very sick baby on the naked body of a woman who's apparently been raped and strangled. Turns out she's an illegal immigrant and he picked her up as she walked alone, with no witnesses, 10 miles from the border. There's no way to connect her to him, no way to tell where she even entered the US, if not for the illegal traffic stop. If he'd continued on his way, it's likely he'd have buried her, anonymously, where she wouldn't be found for a long, long time--so evidence linking her to him would be entirely lacking. We can argue that perhaps he'd have been in an accident, perhaps he'd have confessed while in a drunken stupor, perhaps he'd have done something else. All of these are possible but not probable.

But we've already argued that the proper standard for due process is to say that anything after that initial violation of the 4th Amendment is inadmissible. That was a principle, and there's no clear, objective way of saying, "The inadmissibility of evidence depends on the severity of the crime that's improperly uncovered." There are too many crimes, and at some point judges are going to be asked to use their reason--to be reasonable--in evaluating when the officer's error is sufficient to dismiss the 4th Amendment violation. That will lead to wildly different standards of justice in different courts.

Which is exactly the problem people have with saying that the SCOTUS decision is wrong, because it relies on a standard of "reasonableness." However this standard relies less on what's uncovered, where emotions are likely to be raw, and more on the initial infraction by the officer. In other words, it evaluates not the guilt or innocence of a citizen prior to trial, but the guilt or innocence of an officer and the admissibility of evidence based on that officer's actions. The officer is trained; has protocols and regulations to follow. Arguably, that's a better place to put the onus.

However, it still leaves the horribleness of my extreme case unreasolved, because let's say that the reasonableness standard leads to what most here suspect will happen: An overwhelmingly disproportionate number of "mistakes" will go against non-white minorities. You know that if 80% of such inadmissible stops are against blacks and if Mr. Erizo is black his lawyer will argue that the evidence found should be inadmissible.

Imperfect laws, imperfect enforcement officers, imperfect citizens can't lead to a perfect system. Zero-tolerance is seldom the answer.