(Untitled)

[elengul]

I really love it when the SCOTUS guts the Bill of Rights.

That is the PDF to the syllabus of the ruling. For a more digestible thing to read on it, I recommend the New York Times article on the subject

Comments

[menhalae]

Keep in mind that it is a good thing for criminals to be punished for their crimes. The specific dude in this case is clearly a criminal, so ideally we want him to be punished. If we are going to set him free, we need a good reason for doing so. Normally in police misconduct cases, the good reason is that we want to discourage the state from behaving improperly. But once a system gets big enough, then statistically mistakes are inevitable despite even the best efforts to prevent them. Should we let a dangerous meth dealer back on the street because some clerk made a mistake months prior? In my opinion, no.

This ruling will not protect police who plant evidence or beat confessions out of people. It will not protect a police force who systematically makes "mistakes" about having valid warrants, or regularly "loses" exculpatory evidence. It's intended to give the state freedom to act without having to worry that an uncrossed t somewhere will void an expensive investigation and prosecution, and to stop unnecessarily letting bad guys back out on the street.

One of the reasons I supported Obama is because I felt that between the two candidates, he was the only one who had realistic solutions to modern problems. Similarly, I support this decision because I feel like it takes a realistic approach to handling the inevitable mistakes of the modern judicial system. The categorical approach taken by the dissent assumes that all police mistakes involve some level of preventable misconduct or negligence, which may have been true in the past when the judicial bureaucracy was smaller, but is simply not true anymore.

[pneumatik]

Wheeee!! Everyone, slide down manhalae's slippery slope!

So how can you tell if an administrative error is on purpose or not? If the police dept. can't find a piece of evidence the day of a trial, is it just administrative error and we should trust that the police really found the murder weapon with the defendant's fingerprints on it?

Which t's and f's need to be crossed, and which ones don't? I guess none of the details are important, as long as we only ignore them when the defendant is /clearly/ a criminal. And if maybe we lock up someone who would have been found innocent if all the details were considered and handled correctly, well, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

[menhalae]

The "administrative error or not" question is a question of fact that both sides can argue in court, as with every other question of fact.

The guy's clearly a criminal because they found drugs and a gun on him. As far as I know this is not disputed, or at least the defense could not convince the jury otherwise. He's a danger and should be in jail unless there is some other purpose to serve. Would keeping him out of jail serve the purpose of preventing police error? No, because realistically the police cannot prevent these sort of clerical errors all the time.

Your disappearing fingerprinted murder weapon conviction is farfetched. If that happened then there would be many ways the defendant would go free -- case dismissed or mistrial or jury finds for the defendant or overturn on appeal on various grounds. Plus the judge might impose some sort of sanctions on the prosecution, and it would be very embarrassing politically.

The more real worry is that the police will become more careless regarding warrants and searches and such because they know it won't sting them as bad if they're wrong. I hope this ruling will be interpreted by the lower courts to require a heavy burden on the state to show that the error really was a careless, statistically unavoidable mistake. I don't like the idea of the police regularly "accidentally" breaking into the wrong houses during a search in the hopes of finding something illegal.

[pneumatik]

I was going to write up a longer response, but then I read the end of your comment and saw that you agree with me that this ruling means that police departments as a whole aren't responsible for probable cause, just the cop doing the search. The difference between your opinion and mine is that you think this isn't too bad, while I think it's terribly because it gives cops a reason to do searches without legitimate cause.