U.S. Supreme Court 06-16-11
by: Grapkoch • June 15, 2011 • no comments
Read the full article for details about the following new cases:
- Exclusion and Good Faith Reliance on Circuit Court Precedent
This morning, the Court announced its decision on whether to apply the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule when police conduct a search in compliance with binding precedent that is later overruled. In refusing to do so, the Court explained that "[b]ecause suppression would do nothing to deter police misconduct in these circumstances, and because it would come at a high cost to both the truth and the public safety, we hold that searches conducted in objectively reasonable reliance on binding appellate precedent are not subject to the exclusionary rule."
In arriving at this conclusion, the majority explicitly rejects the proposition that the exclusionary rule is "a self-executing mandate implicit in the FourthAmendment itself." Instead, the Court reiterates the need to engage in "a more rigorous weighing" of "costs and deterrence benefits" of the rule, with a particularly sharp eye towards "the 'flagrancy of the police misconduct' at issue." Under this test, "[p]olice practices trigger the harsh sanction of exclusion only when they are deliberate enough to yield 'meaningful' deterrence, and culpable enough to be 'worth the price paid by the justice system.'"
Applying the foregoing test, the Court notes that because the appellate precedent at issue here actually authorized a certain police practice, "all agree that the officers' conduct [at issue here] was in strict compliance with then-binding Circuit law and was not culpable in any way." In fact, the "officers who conducted the search did not violate Davis's Fourth Amendment rights deliberately, recklessly, or with gross negligence .Nor does this case involve any 'recurring or systemic negligence' on the part of law enforcement .The police acted instrict compliance with binding Circuit precedent." (Citations omitted). Therefore, there was no basis for concluding that the deterrent value of the rule exceeded its social costs.
Along the way to this conclusion, the Court rejects two very notable arguments (both were advocated by Davis and adopted by the dissent):
- The Court rejects the proposition that this is a retroactivity case governed by the principles in Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U.S. 314 (1987), by arguing that this is a question of "remedy" and not "retroactivity."
- The Court also rejects the argument that by adopting this form of the good-faith exception the Court leaves criminal defendants without an incentive for challenging binding precedent, thereby stunting the development of Fourth Amendment litigation. In rejecting this argument the Court notes, among other things, that "[w]e have never held that facilitating the overruling of precedent is a relevant consideration in an exclusionary-rule case. Rather, we have said time and again that the sole purpose of the exclusionary rule is to deter misconduct by law enforcement."
More information on Davis v. United States can be found at the SCOTUSblog case page, available here.
