“The right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” – United Stated States Constitution, Amendment IV.
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights that protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures, and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause, which must be stated – under oath – by law enforcement.
United States vs. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984), a search and seizure case in which the Supreme Court created the “good faith” exception to the exclusionary rule, may be the most far-reaching erosion of our protection from warrantless searches and seizures of any case decided by our highest Court.
In 1981, California police received a tip that Patsy Stewart and Armando Sanchez were selling drugs out of their homes. Law enforcement began to closely monitor them – and those coming and going; and pursue leads pertaining to the cars that frequently visited their residences. Through a “tip” to law enforcement, the police linked Ricardo Del Castillo and Alberto Leon to the illegal enterprise. Based on that near baseless tip – and police surveillance, a detective wrote an affidavit and a judge signed a search warrant.
The police executed the search warrant, and performed the search. However, the warrant was later ruled invalid because the police lacked sufficient probable cause for a valid search warrant to be issued. Evidence collected in the search was nevertheless held to be admissible in court on the grounds that the police conducted the search in “good faith” reliance on the validity of the defective warrant.
Prior to this ruling, the exclusionary rule required evidence collected in violation of the defendant’s constitutional rights to be suppressed in any subsequent criminal prosecution. The Leon decision limited this rule by deciding that if the officers were relying – in good faith – upon a warrant that later turned out to be invalid, the exclusionary rule would not render the evidence inadmissible. This holding became known as the “good faith exception” to the exclusionary rule.
The Leon decision’s limitation on the exclusionary rule started a trend in constitutional law toward loosening restrictions on when illegally obtained evidence could be admissible in criminal cases. Since the stated purpose of the exclusionary rule was to deter law enforcement from violating people’s rights, the Court began to carve out exceptions to the exclusionary rule in cases where it reasoned that there was no bad intent on the part of law enforcement. These exceptions were justified on the grounds that when such violations were inadvertent, the exclusionary rule did not function as a deterrent, and as such, this remedy for constitutional violations served no practical purpose.
Critics of this reasoning argued that this sort of loophole discouraged police and judges from following proper procedures and severely undercut one of the few legal remedies citizens have against unlawful police action. They feared that Leon would open the door for courts to admit illegally obtained evidence in a variety of other scenarios and diminish police adherence to constitutional limitations, and that this decision marked the start of a backlash toward the Supreme Court’s series of rulings throughout the 60s and 70s that were intended to protect individual rights from government intrusion.
