Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Fourth Amendment

Criminal Law

: Fourth Amendment

CA6: Parsing a Fourth Amendment claim; GFE or inevitable discovery can overcome Heck

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

The Sixth Circuit parses a Fourth Amendment claim into its parts to find that a civil case can survive a Heck bar because of the good faith exception or inevitable discovery making the seized evidence admissible anyway. Harper v. Jackson, 2008 U.S. App. LEXIS 17105, 2008 FED App. 0484N (6th Cir. August 12, 2008) (unpublished).* Thus, the good faith exception can become a weapon for the plaintiff: Although Heck bars § 1983 Fourth Amendment claims where the contested search produced the only evidence supporting the conviction and no legal doctrine could save the evidence from exclusion, see, e.g., Ballenger v. Owens, 352 F.3d 842, 847 (4th Cir. 2003); Covington v. City of New York, 171 F.3d 117, 123 (2d Cir. 1999), the case before us is distinct...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on August 14, 2008 (boomark / email).