By Debra Cassens Weiss
The U.S. Supreme Court has found an exception to the exclusionary rule for negligent police errors.
Tom Goldstein, a Supreme Court litigator who was involved in the case, calls today's ruling in Herring v. United States "a significant shift in the court’s jurisprudence."
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the opinion (PDF) for the five-justice majority, quoting Judge Benjamin Cardozo’s famous objection to the exclusionary rule in a 1926 case, the Chicago Tribune reports.
“The criminal should not ‘go free because the constable has blundered,’ ” Roberts wrote. The Associated Press and Bloomberg News also covered the decision.
The defendant in the case, Bennie Dean Herring, was arrested based on what police thought was an outstanding warrant for his arrest. Authorities later learned that the warrant had been recalled, but sought to prosecute Herring based on drugs and a gun found during the arrest.
Roberts wrote that improperly obtained evidence may be admitted "when police mistakes are the result of negligence such as that described here, rather than systemic error or reckless disregard of constitutional requirements."
Roberts said the purpose of the exclusionary rule is to deter illegal police conduct, and it is not an individual right.
Writing at SCOTUSblog, Goldstein says previous Supreme Court cases had allowed a good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule only for nonpolice conduct. "My preliminary reaction is that we will at some point soon regard today’s Herring decision as one of the most important rulings in that field in the last quarter century," he writes.
