(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]

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.