Exclusionary Rule

¶ … Exclusionary Rule and a Possible Alternative Under the exclusionary rule, as created by United States Supreme Court legal precedent, "illegally obtained evidence has been inadmissible in federal criminal courts since 1914." From the onset of its codification in legal and police protocol, proponents of this rule hoped that it would help eliminate police misconduct and protect individual rights.

Of course, to this day, opponents of the exclusionary rule have stated that the only beneficiaries of the exclusionary rule have been guilty criminals, and an innocent American society has punished, as criminals merely from errors made by the police. Regardless of one's personal opinion, it is also important to note, in reviewing the history of the exclusionary rule that in the 1961 case of Mapp v. Ohio extended to the rule to all of the states.

("Landmark Cases of The Supreme Court," 2003) In its ideal, theoretical formulation, the exclusionary rule should mean that every person whom has an illegal search or seizure wielded upon them by the authorities will go free. It should not matter if the person is guilty or innocent, if the evidence was incriminating or not, as all individuals, guilty or innocent should have their rights protected by the legal system.

Also, with the exclusionary rule in place, the police thus should be discouraged from committing illegal searches and seizures upon innocent as well as guilty individuals, because they do not want any potential evidence they collect, to be thrown out in court. The exclusionary rule has two main problems. One problem is for the accused, the other problem from the authorities' point-of-view.

For the accused, the police are more than capable of using illegal searches or seizures to harass or intimidate individuals from whom they wish to extract testimony or evidence, even if the police know they will not be able to get a conviction from the evidence obtained against the individual they are conducting the search. For the accusing authorities, the downside is even more evident -- a minor police error can cause a guilty party to go free. There are exceptions to the exclusionary rule.

The first exception is the "Independent Source Doctrine," which allows evidence to be used as incriminating an individual in court, if the evidence seized in two different physical ways, one of them illegal, but the second in a legal fashion. The second exception is the "Inevitable Discovery Doctrine" that states if the evidence would have inevitably been located by legal means, it is allowed.

The third and final exception is that of "Good Faith," when a police officer receives a warrant from a magistrate and acts on it to seize evidence -- even if there was an error in allowing the police officer to have the warrant, since the point of the exclusionary rule is to deter police misconduct, and there is no misconduct by a police officer, the evidence need not be suppressed.

(Cooke, 2002) These exceptions address some of the problems of the exclusionary rule from the authorities' point-of-view -- not every incident of misconduct, however technical, results in the guilty going free or valuable evidence not being used in court.

Another possible remedy to the problems of the rule, however, would be to reform the exclusionary rule entirely, which some legal scholars have suggested, and simply prosecute officers to the fullest extent of the law when officers conduct illegal searches and seizures for harassment, and still allow the evidence to be submitted in court. Punish the officers, not the evidence, this thinking.