Taint (legal)

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Taint is a term used in the legal field with reference to evidence that has been "tainted" or ruined in some manner. [1] The most common of such usage is with reference to evidence, testimony, identification by witnesses, or confessions that have been obtained by law enforcement illegally. The illegality usually results from a violation of one's constitutional rights, such as a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution protecting against unreasonable search and seizure. For example, the dissent in the Supreme Court decision of Missouri v. Seibert stated that "the court must examine whether the taint dissipated through the passing of time ... ." Missouri v. Seibert, 542 U.S. 600, 628 (U.S. 2004) (Justice O'Connor Dissent, emphasis added). The court in Wong Sun v. U.S., discussed "purg[ing] of the primary taint" with reference to allowing evidence because the defendant's statements were voluntary and a lengthy period of time had passed as an intervening act. Wong Sun v. U.S., 371 U.S. 471, (1963) (quoting J. Maguire, Evidence of Guilt 221 (1959) (emphasis added) (stating: "... by means sufficiently distinguishable to be purged of the primary taint.")).

Investigators sometimes employ a "filter team," or "taint team," composed of individuals not involved in an investigation, to prevent investigators from seeing information that could taint evidence, such as information protected by attorney-client privilege. [2]

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Fruit of the poisonous tree is a legal metaphor used to describe evidence that is obtained illegally. The logic of the terminology is that if the source of the evidence or evidence itself is tainted, then anything gained from it is tainted as well.

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Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497 (1961), was a United States Supreme Court case that held that plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge a Connecticut law that banned the use of contraceptives and banned doctors from advising their use because the law had never been enforced. Therefore, any challenge to the law was deemed unripe because there was no actual threat of injury to anyone who disobeyed the law. The same statute would later be challenged again (successfully) in Griswold v. Connecticut.

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Missouri v. Seibert, 542 U.S. 600 (2004), is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that struck down the police practice of first obtaining an inadmissible confession without giving Miranda warnings, then issuing the warnings, and then obtaining a second confession. Justice David Souter announced the judgment of the Court and wrote for a plurality of four justices that the second confession was admissible only if the intermediate Miranda warnings were "effective enough to accomplish their object." Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a concurring opinion that the second confession should be inadmissible only if "the two-step interrogation technique was used in a calculated way to undermine the Miranda warning."

<i>R v Wong</i> Supreme Court of Canada case

R v Wong, [1990] 3 S.C.R. 36, is a leading decision of the Supreme Court of Canada on the evidence obtained by electronic video surveillance conducted without authorization. The Court held that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a hotel room. This expectation does not depend on whether those persons were engaging in illegal activities. Therefore, individuals can expect that agents of the state will not engage in warrantless video surveillance. Electronic surveillance without authorization violates Section Eight of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, for this particular case, the Supreme Court held that the police acted in good faith and had reasonable and probable ground to believe criminal activities were committed. The surveillance without authorization was a result of misunderstanding. Hence, acceptance of the surveillance as evidences will not bring the administration of justice into disrepute under Section Twenty-four of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385 (1920), was a U.S. Supreme Court Case in which Silverthorne attempted to evade paying taxes. Federal agents illegally seized tax books from Silverthorne and created copies of the records. The issue in this case is whether or not derivatives of illegal evidence are permissible in court. The ruling, delivered by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was that to permit derivatives would encourage police to circumvent the Fourth Amendment, so the illegal copied evidence was held tainted and inadmissible. This precedent later became known as the "fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine," and is an extension of the exclusionary rule.

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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.

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United States v. Payner, 447 U.S. 727 (1980), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court reversed a district court's suppression of evidence in the criminal prosecution of an Ohio businessman charged with tax evasion. The case concerned both issues of criminal procedure and the application of the exclusionary rule derived from the Fourth Amendment. By a 6–3 margin the Court both reaffirmed its earlier rulings' holding that only the party whose Fourth Amendment protections may have been violated has standing to challenge the evidence seized in the search, and barred lower courts from exercising their supervisory power to exclude such evidence at the trial of third parties.

Marcus v. Search Warrant, 367 U.S. 717 (1961), full title Marcus v. Search Warrant of Property at 104 East Tenth Street, Kansas City, Missouri, is an in rem case decided by the United States Supreme Court on the seizure of obscene materials. The Court unanimously overturned a Missouri Supreme Court decision upholding the forfeiture of hundreds of magazines confiscated from a Kansas City wholesaler. It held that both Missouri's procedures for the seizure of allegedly obscene material and the execution of the warrant itself violated the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments' prohibitions on search and seizure without due process. Those violations, in turn, threatened the rights protected by the First Amendment.

Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U.S. 374 (1967), is a United States Supreme Court case involving issues of privacy in balance with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and principles of freedom of speech.

In Maryland v. King, 569 U.S. 435 (2013), the United States Supreme Court decided that a cheek swab of an arrestee's DNA is comparable to fingerprinting and therefore, a legal police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

References

  1. "Taint Law & Legal Definition" on USLegal.com
  2. ""Taint Team" or Special Master: One Recent Analysis". www.americanbar.org.