US Supreme Court Justices Step Closer to Repeal of Evidence Ruling
http://www.buzzflash.net/story.php?id=1000550
www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/washington/31scotus.html?_r=1&th&...
sent by Justice4alltoday since 7 hours 9 minutes, published about 7 minutes
In 1983, a young lawyer in the Reagan White House was hard at work on what he
called in a memorandum “the campaign to amend or abolish the exclusionary rule”
— the principle that evidence obtained by police misconduct cannot be used
against a defendant.
Now that young lawyer, John G. Roberts Jr., is chief justice of the United
States.
This month, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority in Herring v.
United States, a 5-to-4 decision, took a big step toward the goal he had
discussed a quarter-century before.
Taking aim at one of the towering legacies of the Warren Court, its landmark
1961 decision applying the exclusionary rule to the states, the chief justice’s
majority opinion established for the first time that unlawful police conduct
should not require the suppression of evidence if all that was involved was
isolated carelessness.
That was a significant step in itself.
More important yet, it suggested that the exclusionary rule itself might be at
risk.
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