Constitutional Law

High Court Upholds Conviction Despite Faulty Warrant

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Herring v. U.S. that the Fourth Amendment does not exclude evidence found on Bennie Dean Herring after he was arrested on an invalid warrant. “When police mistakes leading to an unlawful search are the result of isolated negligence attenuated from the search rather than systemic error or reckless disregard of constitutional requirements, the exclusionary rule does not apply,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. The case involved Bennie Dean Herring, who was arrested in one Alabama county based on incorrect information from another county’s sheriff’s department. When he was arrested on a warrant that had been withdrawn, police found drugs and a weapon in his car. Herring’s attorneys argued that the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule barred the evidence from use at trial. The New York Times reported that the justices in the majority concluded that the police errors in Herring “do not compare with the kind of egregious and deliberate police misconduct that gave rise to the exclusionary rule in the first place.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a dissenting opinion said the majority’s decision would leave “Herring, and others like him, with no remedy for violations of their constitutional rights.”

Tom Goldstein, writing for Scotusblog, said the majority’s “reasoning is broader – much, much broader. Today, the Supreme Court holds that negligent errors by the police generally do not trigger the exclusionary rule.”

Full post as published by ACS Blog on January 14, 2009 (boomark / email).