The rule that illegally obtained evidence is inadmissible exists to disincentivize the police from obtaining evidence illegally.
But if the police believed, in good faith, that a particular search was legal and reasonable, based on the fact that a judge authorized them to perform it, then excluding the resulting evidence doesn't serve that purpose.
Update: This is not a new thing. The good-faith exception has been in U.S. law for decades. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception . You may not like it, but it's not something the judge just made up out of thin air.
Excluding the evidence would incentivize police to stop choosing the most convenient interpretation of the law. They should have to try to make the most accurate interpretation, which means punishment when they are wrong. Just like for everyone else
No. In 2020 the police went to a magistrate judge to ask for a warrant. The judge issued the warrant. Five years later, another judge has determined that the warrant should not have been issued in the first place.
That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason to punish them for it.
> That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason to punish them for it.
It's not punishing the police. It's not allowing them to use evidence that they shouldn't have been allowed to gather.
Fining them, firing them, and/or jailing them for breaking the law; those would be ways of punishing them. That's not what is being discussed here. Admittedly, we pretty much _never_ punish police no matter what they do, so it's kind of a moot point.
No, that is not the point. Common law does not exist to render justice to the people in and of itself, it exists to give the people a mechanism of getting that justice themselves.
I expect anyone that was convicted due to this dragnet would now be able to appeal.
Where is it written that, if a judge tells a police officer they can do something, they are legally allowed to do it, no matter how blatantly illegal it is? I'm open to being corrected, but I have a hard time believing that, if a judge told a officer they have permission to go out an summarily execute 40 random people in the mall, it would be legal for the officer to do so. And once _anything_ can be illegal even if a judge tells them two, you're now in a grey area figuring out what is/isn't illegal.
At the moment, I would believe they were both wrong, and that the officer broke the law. I _think_ the judge also broke the law, but I don't know exactly how that works.
Who commands the police officer to do things? Is it his/her superior, or the judge directly?
If there is a chain of command in any police department or Sheriff's Office, then the judge is not going to jump that chain and interpose herself in giving orders to a lowest-level officer who is on-the-ground and doing things.
The order's going to go to the office of their commander, who's going to evaluate it, and then it'll go through proper channels, so by the time your hypthetical "Police Officer in Summary Execution of 40 Innocent Consumers" then the order's been interdicted or validated as totally within the law as they interpret it?
I think there's a disconnect in the way we're looking at this. It seems like you feel the person who told the officers to "go do this" is at fault, and anyone who did <this> isn't. I feel strongly that both are at fault. If a mob boss orders a murder and a hitman carries it out, they're both at fault. Same deal here.
“You feel”? Who is “you”? Are you referring to me? I have no feelings or judgement on any particular case. I have no facts about them. I don’t care because I am not involved and I am not in authority.
Please do not ascribe judgements to me that I am not making. I was simply asking questions to clarify a typical process that may be hypothetically followed. Thank you.
Sorry, there's multiple people in the conversation. I was originally speaking to the person that said this
> They were allowed to gather the evidence - they had a warrant from a judge. The judge erred, not the police.
And that statement makes it very clear that, if the judge gives the ok to do something, then the judge is at fault; and _not_ the person that actually does the thing. I disagree with this. The person who does the thing is responsible for their own actions. The judge may _also_ be at fault, but that doesn't absolve the officer who took the action.
Your response (in the context of what I said)
>> if a judge tells a police officer they can do something
> Who commands the police officer to do things? Is it his/her superior, or the judge directly?
Seems to indicate you think I said the judge is the one who ordered the officer to do the thing. I didn't. I said the judge gave permission for it.
To be very clear, in a situation where
1. Tier 1 officer orders Tier 2 officer to have a thing done
2. Tier 2 officer orders Tier 3 officer to do the thing
3. Judge authorizes Tier 3 officer to do the thing
4. Tier 3 officer does the thing
If "the thing" is clearly illegal (to a reasonable person), then ALL of those individuals are at fault. And Tier 3 officer clearly broke the law when doing the thing.
Really we should be punishing the judge who approved it in the first place. A judge that violates the rights of the people shouldn't be allowed to be a judge.
There is obviously a line between what is and is not a permissible search somewhere and it's virtually inevitable that judicial rulings will from time to time err on both sides of that line (and they do). Punishing judges for ruling in ways which are later overturned would destroy rule of law at a fundamental level.
> Punishing judges for ruling in ways which are later overturned would destroy rule of law at a fundamental level.
Not where people's most fundamental rights are concerned. What it would do is cause judges to err on the side of caution before making a ruling that would violate the constitution which is exactly what we want judges to do.
That's obviously unworkable if you consider that even the Supreme Court's interpretation of fundamental rights can change over time. If a future Supreme Court overturns a prior Supreme Court decision in a way that expands a particular right, do we punish all the judges who followed the previous precedent? If we do, then we have a judicial system that encourages individual judges to ignore the Supreme Court, which doesn't seem like a good setup.
But more fundamentally, the system you're proposing doesn't just incentivize judges to err on the side of caution, it incentivizes them to never rule in favor of the government and just punt the decision to the next level. If the cost of ever being overturned on appeal in favor of an individual's rights is losing their job, while there is no corresponding downside of ruling the other way, there's basically no reason to ever risk granting a warrant, for example.
Judges who violate the basic rights of other judges would also be subject to some level of accountability though. At a certain point, we have to trust government officials to at least attempt to do their jobs and we need to have ways to address the situation when they don't. It shouldn't matter if that judge is a democrat or a republican.
Right now there is currently zero accountability. At best, when a judge violates people's constitutional rights some small number of those people will be able to get an unjust ruling overturned at which point they might be released from prison or might get some monetary payout at the expense of taxpayers, but the judge is still free to do whatever they want without consequence knowing that at least a few people will be unable to assert their rights.
Considering that unaccountable judges are where we're starting from, I think having a means to make judges accountable can only improve things. Given the choice between judges being able to violate people's rights without any accountability or a system where judges have some level of accountability for the most egregious violations of our rights, even while that system requires us to make sure that it isn't being clearly abused, I think we're better off with the option to get some accountability where it's needed.
It doesn't need to be a perfect system to be a better one, and it feels like we could put some guardrails in place to keep the amount of obvious abuse down. It's difficult to believe that judges willfully violating people's rights without consequence is an unsolvable problem, let alone one that couldn't possibly be improved somehow.
The Rule of Law is already being broken by a judge saying the law doesn't matter when it is convenient to getting a conviction, meanwhile for normal citizens ignorance of the law is not a defense.
This is not responsive. The police did not commit a crime here.
Also note that there are good-faith defenses to all sorts of crimes, because (for example) there is a difference between knowingly defrauding a customer and just making a mistake.
The Fourth Amendment was violated by the magistrate judge who issued the illegal warrant, not by the police officers who, acting in in good faith, executed it.
No, the judge told them they were allowed to do it. The act of doing it is what violated the fourth amendment. If they hadn't acted on the warrant, the fourth amendment wouldn't have been violated. The judge was _wrong_, but the police are the ones that violated the amendment.
If my lawyer tells me selling a specific analog version of fentanyl is legal because it's different enough/whatever, and I good faith sell an analog version of fentanyl, do I get a good faith exemption?
I take it fentanyl is some illegal drug, but some people can legally sell drugs (licensed apothecaries). If they go for a license, get it approved, then sell a drug, and then it turns out the license is invalid due to no fault of their own and should not have been issued, I don't think anyone is surprised if the apothecary is not on the hook for that. But I'm not a lawyer, much less a judge, so who knows what they'd actually rule
In the example where "someone told me to do it", you're glossing over evidence (this was in writing, not hearsay). In the example of addictive substances, you can be reasonably expected to do your own research and not take a random person's written word for it. The analogy is so hyperbolic, I don't get the impression you're trying to reasonably think about this case
Fentanyl is an illegal drug. There is an Analog Acct that makes it so that close analogs to fentanyl are illegal. That was done because people were making analogs and getting away with it.
Drug dealers then went to their lawyers and asked if certain formulations fell under the Analog Act. Their lawyer said no and wrote out how they were legal and didn't fall under the analog act. They sold the drugs and went to prison even though they thought they were in the clear (so good faith should apply, right?).
This is a real case that I have experience with so not sure why I'm being called out as acting in bad faith or making up a ridiculous scenario. This is a real scenario with the people sitting in prison still (for another 5 years).
Right, I see. There's still the difference of having official permission according to the legal system, such as the search warrant being a mechanism codified in law, or the mechanism to get a license as an apothecary to operate a pharmacy
If there is no such license you can apply for, I'm not sure there exists a system by which you can be indemnified from criminal prosecution for doing such sales (or possession or whatever the case may be)
The question reminded me of a 2019 case where two parties went to the judge to get a ruling on something, without there being damages or claims. (Here, a potential buyer and seller could ask to decide whether a certain substance would be legal to sell before the sale happens, steering clear of prosecution until there is a ruling.) Reading that case back, the legal provision that made this possible only applies to situations where the parties are free to do whatever (such as with a contract dispute); it does not work for creating jurisprudence on criminal law. Asking ChatGPT as a quick last attempt, it proposes to ask a lawyer (you've shared how well that worked) or to sue the government over the law that makes the sale illegal which would be void if the judge goes "this substance doesn't fall under that law anyway" and then you've got jurisprudence to work with. The latter sounds a bit strange, not sure if that's actually possible, but it'd be worth exploring for such edge cases where it may or may not be criminal to do a certain thing
Of course, I totally see how this is a double standard: you've done your homework and to the best of everyone's knowledge it's legal, and then when it turns out you're wrong, whether you get sent to prison depends on whether it was the government who sanctioned it. Everyone can make an honest mistake, government or no
I don't know the intentions of the drugs dealers you have experience with. If there are legit purposes for the specific analog they were selling (that is, purposes falling outside of the spirit of the law that makes fentanyl (analogs) illegal) then it seems strange that a judge would send them to prison for years. Was a long prison sentence perhaps compulsory due to some minimum sentence requirement as part of this war on drugs thing? Wondering this since our government is implementing more and more minimum punishments despite research showing this does not deter the behavior and also increases recidivism due to the longer time you spend outside society, losing any position that you had in it. It's great
In the United States you can sell non-controlled supplements. For example you used to be able to buy MDMA (street name ecstasy/molly) over the counter at health food stores in the 1980s before the government classified it. In my area there are all kinds of strange stimulants sold in gas stations, and something called kratom people seem to get mildly hooked on.
The drug dealers were ex-marines that received debilitating injuries fighting in Afghanistan, became addicted to pain pills when they came home, and because of their injuries were unable to work. So they were selling drugs. Then the analog act came around, which made a large amount of closely related drugs illegal. They were drug dealers, and should be in prison. Someone died from these weird compounds they were bringing in from China to try and skirt the Analog Act. But these guys in their head justified it because they were using the same compounds, and they felt they needed to subdue their pain. But these guys also didn't hide it. They had a lawyer that they ran things by. They bought cars from dealerships with their money, not trying to hide it in any way.
I don't think 'good faith' should apply to them. But also don't think 'good faith' should supersede the United States Constitution. If it applies to the prosecution side, it should apply to the defense. A judge shouldn't be able to waive away our Constitution just because it's inconvenient in a prosecution. In the US, even if something is determined unconstitutional and that determination means people should be released from prison, every single person impacted has to go to court and prove it applies to them. We should release people imprisoned unConstitutionally, but we don't, because again it's inconvenient to the legal system. There is even a time limit on those people to go to court, and if they don't in time (say because they don't know, because they aren't notified) then they are bared from bringing it up in a motion to the court.
Drugs are a hard one. I blew up my life over addiction. Many around me were to. Some were using drugs, some alcohol, some gambling, some risky sex. One interesting feature of American society is we used to give people a second chance. For old guys like me, many of the characters in westerns were criminals turned better as law men one town over. These guys would have been completely different if they were receiving adequate pain care and some sort of job opportunities when they came back from war. I think society needs that. But it also can't enable bad behavior. Interesting/complex times.
18 U.S. Code § 242, “Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States…”.
The judge erred in granting the warrant, the police violated the above statute. Them being unaware would be an affirmative defense, that does require admission of the above crime.
If you believe in good faith that you have not broken the law, and can reasonably convince a jury of that, you almost certainly will receive a lighter sentence than you would have otherwise and in some cases also be acquitted.
So this isn’t really a good argument even if we ignore the fact that it’s a non sequitur.
A better argument is that the good faith exception, while making sense in principle, can easily be abused by the police to make illegally obtained evidence look like it was done in good faith, and therefore the exception itself should be removed because of how difficult it is to actually gauge and enforce.
> If you believe in good faith that you have not broken the law, and can reasonably convince a jury of that, you almost certainly will receive a lighter sentence than you would have otherwise
Juries usually don't decide sentencing, and even if they did I don't think that would matter with crimes viewed as wrong in themselves (mala in se) though it might with crimes viewed as wrong because they are prohibited (mala prohibita).
Well there's also the case that a main component in having your sentence reduced is expressing genuine remorse.
I'm not sure how on earth someone could be remorseful for a mala prohibitum victimless offense while simultaneously maintaining they in good faith thought they were following the law. Any expression of those two views simultaneously would in practice be seen as not much more than "sorry I got caught -- doing something I thought was legal."
Doesn't seem contradictory to explain you thought it was okay and had no ill intent, but now realize your mistake and won't do it again. Requiring regret is problematic when you're claiming innocence (didn't do it), but when all parties agree you did it, your concern is convincing them you won't do it again.
Jeremy Kettler -- bought a silencer completely made and sold within his state (no interstate commerce) and believed based on the Kansas Second Amendment Act (I think that was the name) which legalized intrastate NFA items that it was 100% legal. His own state representatives had advertised to their constituents that the law exempted silencers that never crossed state boundaries. The buyer and seller did it openly and even had photos on facebook, seemingly totally oblivious this would actually still touch federal law / interstate commerce.
Cody Wilson -- Went to a sugar daddy website that verifies IDs to ensure all 'escorts' are 18 which is a pretty good faith way to do it IMO. Woman seemingly had fake ID at some point, and also lied and turned out to be like 16 or 17. At some point later she underwent counseling at school and admitted she was an escort, after which a criminal investigation happened and Mr. Wilson was arrested. As a strict liability crime, there was no defense that due diligence was done to ensure the escort was 18.
The SAFA case is complicated, granted, and rare; it reached the appellate circuit for a reason.
CSAM and child sexual assault are one of the few areas of criminal law where we confer (in my opinion, correctly) absolute liability.
Broadly speaking, I think more cops have been convicted of duty-related crimes than unsuspecting random convicted of and punished for a crime they didn’t know they committed.
These kind of convictions aren't rare in the firearms ___domain. People get arrested or convicted all the time for doing stuff they had no idea was illegal. More recently a Navy Sailor (Patrick Adamiak) in the pipeline to be a SEAL was convicted after selling an imported parts kit that had been destroyed per ATF guidelines from the early 2000s. But apparently when he resold it, (after buying it openly from gunbroker), the ATF decided the way the kit was cut up was wrong and put him away for 20 years. Oh yes they had a few other excuses -- he had a decomissioned RPG tube, so the ATF just put an entirely other gun inside the fucking tube and fired it to claim it still work.
In that case, even the Navy, which almost never does this to felons, terminated him with an honorable discharge and even let him run up all his liberty time before releiving him.
Absolute liability is unquestionably completely wrong. It is punishing someone despite his not having had any kind of guilty state of mind. It creates criminal liability for something that is completely beyond the defendant's control. Nothing could be a greater abuse.
What justification do you have for the view that it is right that in some US states you can be convicted of a crime despite never having done anything wrong, with no negligence, no recklessness, no intent, no knowledge, nothing? Because that goes against the most fundamental precept of criminal law: the requirement of both actus reus and mens rea. With no guilty mind there is no criminal liability.
Hide some drugs in someone's luggage when they're traveling at an airport and then get back to me. There's tons of cases of people being arrested for things they either had no idea they doing or had no idea was illegal. And then even more where the police tack on lots of charges for someone that's already been arrested; for things that they had no idea they were a problem in the first place.
Hell, there are tons of examples of people being arrested for things that aren't crimes at all, and even for acts that are constitutionally protected. Police don't care because they know they'll get away with it (and might even get a paid vacation) when the case against the person who was arrested and likely lost their job as a result gets thrown out. If the unlawfully arrested person is lucky and/or wealthy enough to afford a good lawyer they might get a decent amount of tax payer money out of it.
It's a perfectly reasonable defense to a charge of mail fraud, for example.
Or employing illegal aliens. "But they told me they had work visas, and they showed me what later turned out to be expertly-counterfeited visas!" Why shouldn't that get you off the hook, if true?
I have this vague impression that a certain amount of intent, but (a) I think it’s more about intending to do the bad thing than knowing that the bad thing is illegal, and (b) this is all very vague so I could be totally wrong.
It apparently doesn't in one of the areas of which I have a high level interest. The ATF is constantly changing their mind on what a machine gun is, and if it is one, it is a strict liability crime.
Not long ago a guy was put in jail for creating business-card sized metal sheets with the image of a 'lightning link' (machinegun conversion device) on it. Not the actual device, just a picture of it etched <0.001" into the metal. Clearly just art, and even when the ATF cut it out they could not get it function as a machine gun. They gave it to an actual machinist, and even after a day he could not get it to function as a machine gun. They could only get it to do anything by literally jamming it into the gun and making it do hammer follow, which every AR-15 can do with the parts already in it.
Up until the guy was convicted I don't think anyone had any idea a picture of a machine gun on a metal card was a machine gun. They even convicted the guy advertising it, who never as far as I know actually distributed one.
Are you talking about the AutoKeyCard case, Kristopher Ervin and Matthew Hoover? Ervin finally gets out of prison on 2025-05-03 and Hoover gets out on Christmas 2026.
Agreed. Part of the problem here is that there are few consequences (other than perhaps non-promotion) for judges who issue bad warrants, and we don't have good information on how many warrant applications are rejected or wrongly granted.
It is an established principle. But it also is an exception to how our legal system works: you are usually bound, retroactively, by new legal principles when courts “discover” them.
Reminds me of the de-facto good-faith exemptions for US police for not shooting civilians, or for the US government for arming death squads, or dictators, or genocidal military campaigns etc.
Horseshit. This isn't a criminal conviction, the standard of mens rea doesn't and shouldn't apply. To add a good faith loophole only incentivizes two things: purposeful ignorance and lying.
The problem here is that the police ALREADY have systems upon systems upon systems in place to ensure they never have to take accountability, ever. Police _literally_ get away with murder, but more importantly, they routinely get away with lesser offenses.
I mean, if we can't even charge someone like Chauvin without first burning down a few cities, could you just imagine how many clerical errors get swept under the rug? How much false evidence is floating around? How many innocent people are behind bars?
But if the police believed, in good faith, that a particular search was legal and reasonable, based on the fact that a judge authorized them to perform it, then excluding the resulting evidence doesn't serve that purpose.
Update: This is not a new thing. The good-faith exception has been in U.S. law for decades. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception . You may not like it, but it's not something the judge just made up out of thin air.