Background
On December 13, 1990, a Justice of the Peace issued a warrant for the arrest of Isaac Evans (respondent), because respondent failed to appear to answer for several traffic violations. Six days later, respondent appeared by his own volition, and the Justice of the Peace marked respondent's file for the warrant to be "quashed". Under standard court procedure, a justice court clerk informs the Sheriff's Office of a quashed warrant, however this did not take place. Thus the warrant remained on file at the Sheriff's Office even though it was no longer valid.
On January 5, 1991, respondent is observed by Phoenix police officer Bryan Sargent driving the wrong way down a one-way street near the police station. When respondent was asked for his driver's license, respondent informed Sargent that it had been suspended. This prompted Sargent to check the data terminal in his patrol car for respondent's records. The record confirmed the respondent's license was suspended, and also showed the erroneous outstanding warrant for his arrest. Based on this warrant, Sargent proceeds to arrest respondent, and in the process of arrest, respondent drops a "hand-rolled cigarette that the officers determined smelled of marijuana." Sargent then searched respondent's car and discovered a bag of marijuana, and was charged with possession. When the Phoenix Police Department notified the Justice court of the arrest, they discovered the warrant had been quashed, and informed the police.
Respondent argued that his arrest was unlawful since the warrant for his arrest had been quashed 17 days prior, and the discovery of the marijuana would not have happened without said arrest. Therefore, he filed a motion to suppress due to a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights, to which the exclusionary rule is a remedy. Furthermore, he argued that "the purposes of the exclusionary rule would be served here by making the clerks for the court ... more careful about making sure that warrants are removed from the records." The trial court agreed, granting respondent's motion on the grounds that it could find no "distinction between State action, whether it happens to be the police department or not."
Upon appeal, the Arizona Court of Appeals reversed the decision on a divided vote because it "believed that the exclusionary rule [was] not intended to deter justice court employees or Sheriff's Office employees who are not directly associated with the arresting officers or the arresting officers' police department."
The Arizona Supreme Court rejected this distinction, reasoning that the exclusionary rule would force criminal records to be kept more efficiently by those who maintain them, whether police or court staff.
Majority Opinion
The Fourth Amendment guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. The exclusionary rule is not derived from the Fourth Amendment, rather it is the judicial remedy for a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Although the exclusionary rule was originally implemented as a guard for privacy rights, after United States v. Leon , it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court as a tool for deterring police misconduct.
In United States v. Leon , 468 U.S. 897 (1984), the Court had ruled that the exclusionary rule did not require the suppression of evidence seized pursuant to a search warrant that was later determined to be invalid. In Leon, the police's reliance on the validity of the search warrant was objectively reasonable; thus, excluding the evidence seized in that case would not have deterred any future misconduct on the part of the police. The exclusionary rule does not serve to deter illegal conduct on the part of judges, after all. For a similar reason, the Court in Evans ruled that the exclusionary rule should not require suppression of the evidence seized in this case.
Because court employees were responsible for the error, applying the exclusionary rule in this case would not deter future errors. First, the exclusionary rule was historically aimed at preventing police misconduct, not court clerical errors. Second, there is no evidence that court employees were motivated to "subvert the Fourth Amendment or that lawlessness among these actors requires application of the extreme sanction of exclusion." There had been testimony at a suppression hearing that the clerical error at issue in this case occurred once every three or four years—although, as Justice Ginsburg pointed out, that same witness had also admitted that the same error occurred three other times the same day. Finally, because court clerks are not actively involved in law enforcement, applying the exclusionary rule in this case would have little impact on the clerks responsible for entering data regarding outstanding warrants. Ultimately, there was no evidence that the officer acted unreasonably on the basis of the information he had at hand.
Dissenting Opinions
Justice Stevens took issue with the notion that the exclusionary rule served to deter only police misconduct. Because the Fourth Amendment constrains the power of the sovereign, the exclusionary rule — the remedy for violating the Fourth Amendment — should "impose[] costs on that sovereign, motivating it to train all of its personnel to avoid future violations." Nor did Justice Stevens think that the exclusionary rule was an extreme sanction, for there is nothing extreme about allowing the sovereign to profit from its "negligent misconduct."
Stevens also distinguished this case from Leon. In Leon, there had been a presumably valid warrant issued at the time of the search; in this case there was none. Furthermore, there was some police conduct involved in maintaining the database on which the officer relied to determine whether there was, in fact, a warrant out for Evans's arrest. To say that the exclusionary rule did not apply in this situation was, therefore, not entirely accurate for Justice Stevens. Moreover, Stevens observed that there was no civil remedy under section 1983 for Fourth Amendment violations that result from erroneous information in police databases, either against the individual officer or against the city that employs him. "The offense to the dignity of the citizen who is arrested, handcuffed, and searched on a public street simply because some bureaucrat has failed to maintain an accurate computer data base strikes me as... outrageous." The fact that the police happened to find Evans's marijuana as a result of inaccurate information in the database had to be weighed against the interest of law-abiding citizens.
Justice Ginsburg argued that the case was not properly before the Court because it rested on an independent and adequate ground in Arizona law — its statute dealing with good-faith reliance on the validity of warrants. The Supreme Court's interference would therefore impede on Arizona's ability to act as a laboratory for legal innovations. The majority observed that part of the Arizona Supreme Court's decision did in fact rest on the exclusionary rule, so that the Court had jurisdiction to review the case.
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. In addition, it sets requirements for issuing warrants: warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate, justified by probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the exclusionary rule, which prevents prosecutors from using evidence in court that was obtained by violating the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, applies not only to the federal government but also to the states. The Supreme Court accomplished this by use of a principle known as selective incorporation; in Mapp this involved the incorporation of the provisions, as interpreted by the Court, of the Fourth Amendment which is applicable only to actions of the federal government into the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause which is applicable to actions of the states.
Search and seizure is a procedure used in many civil law and common law legal systems by which police or other authorities and their agents, who, suspecting that a crime has been committed, commence a search of a person's property and confiscate any relevant evidence found in connection to the crime.
In the United States, the exclusionary rule is a legal rule, based on constitutional law, that prevents evidence collected or analyzed in violation of the defendant's constitutional rights from being used in a court of law. This may be considered an example of a prophylactic rule formulated by the judiciary in order to protect a constitutional right. The exclusionary rule may also, in some circumstances at least, be considered to follow directly from the constitutional language, such as the Fifth Amendment's command that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself" and that no person "shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law."
Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U.S. 25 (1949), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held 6—3 that, while the Fourth Amendment was applicable to the states, the exclusionary rule was not a necessary ingredient of the Fourth Amendment's right against warrantless and unreasonable searches and seizures. In Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383 (1914), the Court held that as a matter of judicial implication the exclusionary rule was enforceable in federal courts but not derived from the explicit requirements of the Fourth Amendment. The Wolf Court decided not to incorporate the exclusionary rule as part of the Fourteenth Amendment in large part because the states which had rejected the Weeks Doctrine had not left the right to privacy without other means of protection. However, because most of the states' rules proved to be ineffective in deterrence, the Court overruled Wolf in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961). This landmark case made history as the exclusionary rule enforceable against the states through the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the same extent that it applied against the federal government.
United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court established the "good faith" exception to the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule.
Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U.S. 586 (2006), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a violation of the Fourth Amendment requirement that police officers knock, announce their presence, and wait a reasonable amount of time before entering a private residence does not require suppression of the evidence obtained in the ensuing search.
Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321 (1987), held that the Fourth Amendment requires the police to have probable cause to seize items in plain view.
Inevitable discovery is a doctrine in United States criminal procedure that permits admission of evidence that was obtained through illegal means if it would "inevitably" have been obtained regardless of the illegality. It is one of several exceptions to the exclusionary rule, or the related fruit-of-the-poisonous tree doctrine, which prevent evidence collected in violation of a defendant's constitutional rights from being admitted in court.
California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207 (1986), was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which it ruled that warrantless aerial observation of a person's backyard did not violate the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Herring v. United States, 555 U.S. 135 (2009), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States on January 14, 2009. The court decided that the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule applies when a police officer makes an arrest based on an outstanding warrant in another jurisdiction, but the information regarding that warrant is later found to be incorrect because of a negligent error by that agency.
Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757 (1966), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court clarified the application of the Fourth Amendment's protection against warrantless searches and the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for searches that intrude into the human body. Until Schmerber, the Supreme Court had not yet clarified whether state police officers must procure a search warrant before taking blood samples from criminal suspects. Likewise, the Court had not yet clarified whether blood evidence taken against the wishes of a criminal suspect may be used against that suspect in the course of a criminal prosecution.
Kentucky v. King, 563 U.S. 452 (2011), was a decision by the US Supreme Court, which held that warrantless searches conducted in police-created exigent circumstances do not violate the Fourth Amendment as long as the police did not create the exigency by violating or threatening to violate the Fourth Amendment.
Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106 (1977), is a United States Supreme Court criminal law decision holding that a police officer ordering a person out of a car following a traffic stop and conducting a pat-down to check for weapons did not violate the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Elkins v. United States, 364 U.S. 206 (1960), was a US Supreme Court decision that held the "silver platter doctrine", which allowed federal prosecutors to use evidence illegally gathered by state police, to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014), is a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court unanimously held that the warrantless search and seizure of digital contents of a cell phone during an arrest is unconstitutional.
Utah v. Strieff, 579 U.S. ___, 136 S. Ct. 2056 (2016), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States limited the scope of the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule.
Birchfield v. North Dakota, 579 U.S. ___ (2016), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the search incident to arrest doctrine permits law enforcement to conduct warrantless breath tests but not blood tests on suspected drunk drivers.
Dollree Mapp was the appellant in the Supreme Court case Mapp v. Ohio (1961). She argued that her right to privacy in her home, the Fourth Amendment, was violated by police officers who entered her house with what she thought to be a fake search warrant. Mapp also argued that the Exclusionary Rule was violated due to the collection of the evidence that was found after the police had entered her house without a convincing search warrant according to Mapp's experience. In the Supreme Court case, Mapp v. Ohio, the decision was made in favor of Mapp, in a 6–3 ruling. As a result of the ruling in Mapp v. Ohio, Mapp's conviction was voided. A few years after Mapp v. Ohio was ruled upon, Mapp was convicted again, but this time for the possession of narcotics. After her prison sentence had ended, she began working "for a non-profit that provided legal assistance to inmates."
Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465 (1976), was decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that limited which claims of Fourth Amendment violations could be made by state prisoners in habeas corpus petitions in federal courts. Specifically, a claim that the exclusionary rule had been broken would be barred if state courts had already given it a full and fair hearing. The decision combined two cases that were argued before the Supreme Court on the same day with similar issues, one filed by Lloyd Powell and the other, titled Wolff v. Rice, filed by David Rice.
