Easier Searches

But "apologies to all"

Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court often belittle lawyers' arguments and reverse the rulings of their predecessors. But rarely do they say they are sorry. Last week Justice William Rehnquist, writing for a majority of five, offered "apologies to all" for stirring a major legal debate on whether the court should weaken the exclusionary rule's ban on the use of illegally seized evidence in criminal trials. Having riled everyone about the issue, the court decided not to address the question after all.

The Justices had called for legal arguments on whether the Fourth Amendment allows a "good faith" exception to the exclusionary rule; that would mean illegally gathered evidence could be used in criminal trials if police acted in the reasonable belief that what they were doing was constitutional. At least five Justices have indicated reservations about the rule, and one of them, Byron White, said in his separate opinion last week that a "good faith" exception should be created. But, citing procedural reasons, other Justices backed off the issue for now. Instead, the majority turned to another issue in the case and chipped away at two Warren Court rulings to make the issuing of search warrants easier.

The case that started all this involved two suspected drug traffickers, Lance and Susan Gates of Bloomingdale, III., whom police had learned about from an anonymous letter. They sought a search warrant after confirming that the Gateses had taken a trip to Florida, just as the letter predicted they would. Police were waiting when the couple returned home; the resulting search turned up 350 Ibs. of marijuana in the car trunk. The Gateses claimed that the police, in seeking the warrant, had not met the Warren Court's "two-pronged" requirement: that they show what the informant's "basis of knowledge" was, and that they demonstrate why they believed the informant.

The Supreme Court, however, held that the old Warren Court rulings had created a "complex superstructure of evidentiary and analytical rules." It was time, wrote Justice Rehnquist, to return to less rigid restrictions and allow a magistrate issuing a warrant to "make a practical, common sense decision whether, given all the circumstances ... there is a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place." The result, says a pleased Sue Johnson, top official of the Police Executive Research Forum, is that "officers will seek search warrants more frequently." At the same time, defense attorneys will undoubtedly find it far harder to challenge most warrants that are issued. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.