If you’re like me, chances are your ears perk up when you hear the exclusionary rule discussed in the news. Even if you don’t practice criminal law, you know the rule’s importance as the central judicial deterrent against police violations of the Fourth Amendment search and seizure clause.
Utah v Strieff, decided at the end of this year’s U.S. Supreme Court term, definitely narrowed the scope of the rule. In Strieff, a police officer stopped the defendant without reasonable suspicion, as constitutionally required. During the stop, the police officer asked for identification, ran the ID by dispatch, and discovered an outstanding arrest warrant for a traffic violation. The officer arrested the defendant, searched him, and found meth and drug paraphernalia. SCOTUS held that the evidence was admissible even though the stop was unconstitutional because the valid, preexisting, and untainted arrest warrant attenuated the connection between the stop and the evidence.
Many are calling Strieff “a significant win for the police.” Whether that’s a good thing I suppose depends on your perspective on the present struggle between police officers and minority communities. Justice Sotomayor argued in her dissent that the opinion incentivizes the police to conduct unreasonable stops because a lot of people have outstanding warrants for minor offenses. And the collateral consequences of an arrest are severe—a “civil death of discrimination” by whoever conducts a background check. Justice Sotomayor has been criticized for crafting her dissent based on experience and evidence outside of the record. However, even one conservative commentator agreed that she raised a valid critique about the danger of eroding the exclusionary rule. In part, this is because the majority in Strieff seems to leave open the possibility (although the court declined to definitively rule on it) that the existence of an outstanding warrant might make an initial stop lawful, even without reasonable suspicion.
For more on important U.S. Supreme Court cases this term, see the 2016 Criminal Law Update.