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350. Magical thinking

By Joel Jacobsen

In the Davis v. Washington decision of a couple years ago (see post 127), Justice Scalia's opinion for the Supreme Court contained a footnote explaining that suppression of evidence under the sixth amendment has no deterrent effect on police officers:Police investigations themselves are, of course, in no way impugned by our characterization of their fruits as testimonial. ...  The Confrontation Clause in no way governs police conduct ...That's a bit odd, because for the past 47 years the Supreme Court has been telling us that suppressing evidence under the fourth amendment has the effect of "deterring official misconduct and removing inducements to unreasonable invasions of privacy".  So suppressing evidence under the fourth amendment affects police behavior in a way that suppressing evidence under the sixth amendment's confrontation clause doesn't...continue to full post

Full post as published by Judging Crimes on March 18, 2008 (boomark / email).