7 ms·

The rule that illegally obtained evidence is inadmissible exists to disincentivize the police from obtaining evidence illegally. But if the police believed, in

by mjd 1y ago

The rule that illegally obtained evidence is inadmissible exists to disincentivize the police from obtaining evidence illegally. But if the police believed, in good faith, that a particular search was legal and reasonable, based on the fact that a judge authorized them to perform it, then excluding the resulting evidence doesn't serve that purpose. Update: This is not a new thing. The good-faith exception has been in U.S. law for decades. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception . You may not like it, but it's not something the judge just made up out of thin air.

ty6853 1y ago
If I believe, in good faith, I have not broken the law. I should not be convicted.
- mjd 1y ago
  This is not responsive. The police did not commit a crime here. Also note that there are good-faith defenses to all sorts of crimes, because (for example) there is a difference between knowingly defrauding a customer and just making a mistake.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    > The police did not commit a crime here. They did, however, violate the Fourth Amendment. Per the court.
    - mjd 1y ago
      The Fourth Amendment was violated by the magistrate judge who issued the illegal warrant, not by the police officers who, acting in in good faith, executed it.
      - RHSeeger 1y ago
        No, the judge told them they were allowed to do it. The act of doing it is what violated the fourth amendment. If they hadn't acted on the warrant, the fourth amendment wouldn't have been violated. The judge was _wrong_, but the police are the ones that violated the amendment.
        mjd 1y ago
        “No warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, … and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Judge Magit violated the amendment by issuing the warrant.
      - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
        If my lawyer tells me selling a specific analog version of fentanyl is legal because it's different enough/whatever, and I good faith sell an analog version of fentanyl, do I get a good faith exemption?
        lucb1e 1y ago
        Bad analogy but I'll try it: I take it fentanyl is some illegal drug, but some people can legally sell drugs (licensed apothecaries). If they go for a license, get it approved, then sell a drug, and then it turns out the license is invalid due to no fault of their own and should not have been issued, I don't think anyone is surprised if the apothecary is not on the hook for that. But I'm not a lawyer, much less a judge, so who knows what they'd actually rule In the example where "someone told me to do it", you're glossing over evidence (this was in writing, not hearsay). In the example of addictive substances, you can be reasonably expected to do your own research and not take a random person's written word for it. The analogy is so hyperbolic, I don't get the impression you're trying to reasonably think about this case
        _DeadFred_ 1y ago
        Fentanyl is an illegal drug. There is an Analog Acct that makes it so that close analogs to fentanyl are illegal. That was done because people were making analogs and getting away with it. Drug dealers then went to their lawyers and asked if certain formulations fell under the Analog Act. Their lawyer said no and wrote out how they were legal and didn't fall under the analog act. They sold the drugs and went to prison even though they thought they were in the clear (so good faith should apply, right?). This is a real case that I have experience with so not sure why I'm being called out as acting in bad faith or making up a ridiculous scenario. This is a real scenario with the people sitting in prison still (for another 5 years).
  - everforward 1y ago
    18 U.S. Code § 242, “Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States…”. The judge erred in granting the warrant, the police violated the above statute. Them being unaware would be an affirmative defense, that does require admission of the above crime.
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    Police can commit statutory crimes to gather evidence in the USA. I'd like to see any solid ruling that says otherwise. What they cannot do is violate certain constitutional rights to do so without triggering exclusion.
- encom 1y ago
  If you can cite previous court cases in your favour, you probably won't.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > If I believe, in good faith, I have not broken the law. I should not be convicted How often does this actually happen in criminal matters?
  - mjd 1y ago
    It's a perfectly reasonable defense to a charge of mail fraud, for example. Or employing illegal aliens. "But they told me they had work visas, and they showed me what later turned out to be expertly-counterfeited visas!" Why shouldn't that get you off the hook, if true?
  - ty6853 1y ago
    Jeremy Kettler -- bought a silencer completely made and sold within his state (no interstate commerce) and believed based on the Kansas Second Amendment Act (I think that was the name) which legalized intrastate NFA items that it was 100% legal. His own state representatives had advertised to their constituents that the law exempted silencers that never crossed state boundaries. The buyer and seller did it openly and even had photos on facebook, seemingly totally oblivious this would actually still touch federal law / interstate commerce. Cody Wilson -- Went to a sugar daddy website that verifies IDs to ensure all 'escorts' are 18 which is a pretty good faith way to do it IMO. Woman seemingly had fake ID at some point, and also lied and turned out to be like 16 or 17. At some point later she underwent counseling at school and admitted she was an escort, after which a criminal investigation happened and Mr. Wilson was arrested. As a strict liability crime, there was no defense that due diligence was done to ensure the escort was 18.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      The SAFA case is complicated, granted, and rare; it reached the appellate circuit for a reason. CSAM and child sexual assault are one of the few areas of criminal law where we confer (in my opinion, correctly) absolute liability. Broadly speaking, I think more cops have been convicted of duty-related crimes than unsuspecting random convicted of and punished for a crime they didn’t know they committed.
- __loam 1y ago
  This is a weird concept to people in stem fields, but in law intent matters a lot. It's the difference between manslaughter and murder.
  - ty6853 1y ago
    It apparently doesn't in one of the areas of which I have a high level interest. The ATF is constantly changing their mind on what a machine gun is, and if it is one, it is a strict liability crime. Not long ago a guy was put in jail for creating business-card sized metal sheets with the image of a 'lightning link' (machinegun conversion device) on it. Not the actual device, just a picture of it etched <0.001" into the metal. Clearly just art, and even when the ATF cut it out they could not get it function as a machine gun. They gave it to an actual machinist, and even after a day he could not get it to function as a machine gun. They could only get it to do anything by literally jamming it into the gun and making it do hammer follow, which every AR-15 can do with the parts already in it. Up until the guy was convicted I don't think anyone had any idea a picture of a machine gun on a metal card was a machine gun. They even convicted the guy advertising it, who never as far as I know actually distributed one.
    - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
      Meanwhile, you can use bump-stocks as a redneck machine gun all day long.
      - AngryData 1y ago
        Bumpstocks are a worthless gimmick, you can bump fire 99.9% of semi-auto guns with zero modifications or special stocks.
    - aftbit 1y ago
      Are you talking about the AutoKeyCard case, Kristopher Ervin and Matthew Hoover? Ervin finally gets out of prison on 2025-05-03 and Hoover gets out on Christmas 2026.
- addicted 1y ago
  If you believe in good faith that you have not broken the law, and can reasonably convince a jury of that, you almost certainly will receive a lighter sentence than you would have otherwise and in some cases also be acquitted. So this isn’t really a good argument even if we ignore the fact that it’s a non sequitur. A better argument is that the good faith exception, while making sense in principle, can easily be abused by the police to make illegally obtained evidence look like it was done in good faith, and therefore the exception itself should be removed because of how difficult it is to actually gauge and enforce.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > If you believe in good faith that you have not broken the law, and can reasonably convince a jury of that, you almost certainly will receive a lighter sentence than you would have otherwise Juries usually don't decide sentencing, and even if they did I don't think that would matter with crimes viewed as wrong in themselves (mala in se) though it might with crimes viewed as wrong because they are prohibited (mala prohibita).
    - ty6853 1y ago
      Well there's also the case that a main component in having your sentence reduced is expressing genuine remorse. I'm not sure how on earth someone could be remorseful for a mala prohibitum victimless offense while simultaneously maintaining they in good faith thought they were following the law. Any expression of those two views simultaneously would in practice be seen as not much more than "sorry I got caught -- doing something I thought was legal."
      - tedunangst 1y ago
        Doesn't seem contradictory to explain you thought it was okay and had no ill intent, but now realize your mistake and won't do it again. Requiring regret is problematic when you're claiming innocence (didn't do it), but when all parties agree you did it, your concern is convincing them you won't do it again.
plsbenice34 1y ago
Excluding the evidence would incentivize police to stop choosing the most convenient interpretation of the law. They should have to try to make the most accurate interpretation, which means punishment when they are wrong. Just like for everyone else
- mjd 1y ago
  No. In 2020 the police went to a magistrate judge to ask for a warrant. The judge issued the warrant. Five years later, another judge has determined that the warrant should not have been issued in the first place. That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason to punish them for it.
  - Vegenoid 1y ago
    The evidence can be suppressed without punishing the police.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - RHSeeger 1y ago
    > That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason to punish them for it. It's not punishing the police. It's not allowing them to use evidence that they shouldn't have been allowed to gather. Fining them, firing them, and/or jailing them for breaking the law; those would be ways of punishing them. That's not what is being discussed here. Admittedly, we pretty much _never_ punish police no matter what they do, so it's kind of a moot point.
    - multjoy 1y ago
      They were allowed to gather the evidence - they had a warrant from a judge. The judge erred, not the police.
      - 1y ago
reverendsteveii 1y ago
Horseshit. This isn't a criminal conviction, the standard of mens rea doesn't and shouldn't apply. To add a good faith loophole only incentivizes two things: purposeful ignorance and lying.
- mjd 1y ago
  Learn to tell the difference between "I don't like it" and "horseshit". The legal precedent for this goes back decades, and it's been argued by many people better-informed than you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception
  - const_cast 1y ago
    He doesn't like it, and it's also horseshit. The problem here is that the police ALREADY have systems upon systems upon systems in place to ensure they never have to take accountability, ever. Police _literally_ get away with murder, but more importantly, they routinely get away with lesser offenses. I mean, if we can't even charge someone like Chauvin without first burning down a few cities, could you just imagine how many clerical errors get swept under the rug? How much false evidence is floating around? How many innocent people are behind bars?
einpoklum 1y ago
Reminds me of the de-facto good-faith exemptions for US police for not shooting civilians, or for the US government for arming death squads, or dictators, or genocidal military campaigns etc.
anon373839 1y ago
It is an established principle. But it also is an exception to how our legal system works: you are usually bound, retroactively, by new legal principles when courts “discover” them.
anigbrowl 1y ago
Agreed. Part of the problem here is that there are few consequences (other than perhaps non-promotion) for judges who issue bad warrants, and we don't have good information on how many warrant applications are rejected or wrongly granted.

by mjd 1y ago

ty6853 1y ago

If I believe, in good faith, I have not broken the law. I should not be convicted.

mjd 1y ago
This is not responsive. The police did not commit a crime here. Also note that there are good-faith defenses to all sorts of crimes, because (for example) there is a difference between knowingly defrauding a customer and just making a mistake.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  > The police did not commit a crime here. They did, however, violate the Fourth Amendment. Per the court.
  - mjd 1y ago
    The Fourth Amendment was violated by the magistrate judge who issued the illegal warrant, not by the police officers who, acting in in good faith, executed it.
    - RHSeeger 1y ago
      No, the judge told them they were allowed to do it. The act of doing it is what violated the fourth amendment. If they hadn't acted on the warrant, the fourth amendment wouldn't have been violated. The judge was _wrong_, but the police are the ones that violated the amendment.
      - mjd 1y ago
        “No warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, … and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Judge Magit violated the amendment by issuing the warrant.
    - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      If my lawyer tells me selling a specific analog version of fentanyl is legal because it's different enough/whatever, and I good faith sell an analog version of fentanyl, do I get a good faith exemption?
      - lucb1e 1y ago
        Bad analogy but I'll try it: I take it fentanyl is some illegal drug, but some people can legally sell drugs (licensed apothecaries). If they go for a license, get it approved, then sell a drug, and then it turns out the license is invalid due to no fault of their own and should not have been issued, I don't think anyone is surprised if the apothecary is not on the hook for that. But I'm not a lawyer, much less a judge, so who knows what they'd actually rule In the example where "someone told me to do it", you're glossing over evidence (this was in writing, not hearsay). In the example of addictive substances, you can be reasonably expected to do your own research and not take a random person's written word for it. The analogy is so hyperbolic, I don't get the impression you're trying to reasonably think about this case
        _DeadFred_ 1y ago
        Fentanyl is an illegal drug. There is an Analog Acct that makes it so that close analogs to fentanyl are illegal. That was done because people were making analogs and getting away with it. Drug dealers then went to their lawyers and asked if certain formulations fell under the Analog Act. Their lawyer said no and wrote out how they were legal and didn't fall under the analog act. They sold the drugs and went to prison even though they thought they were in the clear (so good faith should apply, right?). This is a real case that I have experience with so not sure why I'm being called out as acting in bad faith or making up a ridiculous scenario. This is a real scenario with the people sitting in prison still (for another 5 years).
- everforward 1y ago
  18 U.S. Code § 242, “Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States…”. The judge erred in granting the warrant, the police violated the above statute. Them being unaware would be an affirmative defense, that does require admission of the above crime.
- qingcharles 1y ago
  Police can commit statutory crimes to gather evidence in the USA. I'd like to see any solid ruling that says otherwise. What they cannot do is violate certain constitutional rights to do so without triggering exclusion.
encom 1y ago
If you can cite previous court cases in your favour, you probably won't.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> If I believe, in good faith, I have not broken the law. I should not be convicted How often does this actually happen in criminal matters?
- mjd 1y ago
  It's a perfectly reasonable defense to a charge of mail fraud, for example. Or employing illegal aliens. "But they told me they had work visas, and they showed me what later turned out to be expertly-counterfeited visas!" Why shouldn't that get you off the hook, if true?
- ty6853 1y ago
  Jeremy Kettler -- bought a silencer completely made and sold within his state (no interstate commerce) and believed based on the Kansas Second Amendment Act (I think that was the name) which legalized intrastate NFA items that it was 100% legal. His own state representatives had advertised to their constituents that the law exempted silencers that never crossed state boundaries. The buyer and seller did it openly and even had photos on facebook, seemingly totally oblivious this would actually still touch federal law / interstate commerce. Cody Wilson -- Went to a sugar daddy website that verifies IDs to ensure all 'escorts' are 18 which is a pretty good faith way to do it IMO. Woman seemingly had fake ID at some point, and also lied and turned out to be like 16 or 17. At some point later she underwent counseling at school and admitted she was an escort, after which a criminal investigation happened and Mr. Wilson was arrested. As a strict liability crime, there was no defense that due diligence was done to ensure the escort was 18.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    The SAFA case is complicated, granted, and rare; it reached the appellate circuit for a reason. CSAM and child sexual assault are one of the few areas of criminal law where we confer (in my opinion, correctly) absolute liability. Broadly speaking, I think more cops have been convicted of duty-related crimes than unsuspecting random convicted of and punished for a crime they didn’t know they committed.
__loam 1y ago
This is a weird concept to people in stem fields, but in law intent matters a lot. It's the difference between manslaughter and murder.
- ty6853 1y ago
  It apparently doesn't in one of the areas of which I have a high level interest. The ATF is constantly changing their mind on what a machine gun is, and if it is one, it is a strict liability crime. Not long ago a guy was put in jail for creating business-card sized metal sheets with the image of a 'lightning link' (machinegun conversion device) on it. Not the actual device, just a picture of it etched <0.001" into the metal. Clearly just art, and even when the ATF cut it out they could not get it function as a machine gun. They gave it to an actual machinist, and even after a day he could not get it to function as a machine gun. They could only get it to do anything by literally jamming it into the gun and making it do hammer follow, which every AR-15 can do with the parts already in it. Up until the guy was convicted I don't think anyone had any idea a picture of a machine gun on a metal card was a machine gun. They even convicted the guy advertising it, who never as far as I know actually distributed one.
  - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    Meanwhile, you can use bump-stocks as a redneck machine gun all day long.
    - AngryData 1y ago
      Bumpstocks are a worthless gimmick, you can bump fire 99.9% of semi-auto guns with zero modifications or special stocks.
  - aftbit 1y ago
    Are you talking about the AutoKeyCard case, Kristopher Ervin and Matthew Hoover? Ervin finally gets out of prison on 2025-05-03 and Hoover gets out on Christmas 2026.
addicted 1y ago
If you believe in good faith that you have not broken the law, and can reasonably convince a jury of that, you almost certainly will receive a lighter sentence than you would have otherwise and in some cases also be acquitted. So this isn’t really a good argument even if we ignore the fact that it’s a non sequitur. A better argument is that the good faith exception, while making sense in principle, can easily be abused by the police to make illegally obtained evidence look like it was done in good faith, and therefore the exception itself should be removed because of how difficult it is to actually gauge and enforce.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > If you believe in good faith that you have not broken the law, and can reasonably convince a jury of that, you almost certainly will receive a lighter sentence than you would have otherwise Juries usually don't decide sentencing, and even if they did I don't think that would matter with crimes viewed as wrong in themselves (mala in se) though it might with crimes viewed as wrong because they are prohibited (mala prohibita).
  - ty6853 1y ago
    Well there's also the case that a main component in having your sentence reduced is expressing genuine remorse. I'm not sure how on earth someone could be remorseful for a mala prohibitum victimless offense while simultaneously maintaining they in good faith thought they were following the law. Any expression of those two views simultaneously would in practice be seen as not much more than "sorry I got caught -- doing something I thought was legal."
    - tedunangst 1y ago
      Doesn't seem contradictory to explain you thought it was okay and had no ill intent, but now realize your mistake and won't do it again. Requiring regret is problematic when you're claiming innocence (didn't do it), but when all parties agree you did it, your concern is convincing them you won't do it again.

plsbenice34 1y ago

Excluding the evidence would incentivize police to stop choosing the most convenient interpretation of the law. They should have to try to make the most accurate interpretation, which means punishment when they are wrong. Just like for everyone else

mjd 1y ago
No. In 2020 the police went to a magistrate judge to ask for a warrant. The judge issued the warrant. Five years later, another judge has determined that the warrant should not have been issued in the first place. That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason to punish them for it.
- Vegenoid 1y ago
  The evidence can be suppressed without punishing the police.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- RHSeeger 1y ago
  > That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason to punish them for it. It's not punishing the police. It's not allowing them to use evidence that they shouldn't have been allowed to gather. Fining them, firing them, and/or jailing them for breaking the law; those would be ways of punishing them. That's not what is being discussed here. Admittedly, we pretty much _never_ punish police no matter what they do, so it's kind of a moot point.
  - multjoy 1y ago
    They were allowed to gather the evidence - they had a warrant from a judge. The judge erred, not the police.
    - 1y ago

reverendsteveii 1y ago

Horseshit. This isn't a criminal conviction, the standard of mens rea doesn't and shouldn't apply. To add a good faith loophole only incentivizes two things: purposeful ignorance and lying.

mjd 1y ago
Learn to tell the difference between "I don't like it" and "horseshit". The legal precedent for this goes back decades, and it's been argued by many people better-informed than you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception
- const_cast 1y ago
  He doesn't like it, and it's also horseshit. The problem here is that the police ALREADY have systems upon systems upon systems in place to ensure they never have to take accountability, ever. Police _literally_ get away with murder, but more importantly, they routinely get away with lesser offenses. I mean, if we can't even charge someone like Chauvin without first burning down a few cities, could you just imagine how many clerical errors get swept under the rug? How much false evidence is floating around? How many innocent people are behind bars?

einpoklum 1y ago

Reminds me of the de-facto good-faith exemptions for US police for not shooting civilians, or for the US government for arming death squads, or dictators, or genocidal military campaigns etc.

anon373839 1y ago

It is an established principle. But it also is an exception to how our legal system works: you are usually bound, retroactively, by new legal principles when courts “discover” them.

anigbrowl 1y ago

Agreed. Part of the problem here is that there are few consequences (other than perhaps non-promotion) for judges who issue bad warrants, and we don't have good information on how many warrant applications are rejected or wrongly granted.