Wolf v. Colorado (1949)

338 U.S. 25 (1949)

Vote: 6-3
Opinion: J. Frankfurter
Decision: Affirmed
Majority: J. Frankfurter, joined by J. Vinson, J. Reed, J. Jackson, J. Burton
Concurring: J. Black
Dissent: J. Murphy, joined by J. Rutledge, and J. Douglas

MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER delivered the opinion of the Court.

The precise question for consideration is this: Does a conviction by a State court for a State offense deny the “due process of law” required by the Fourteenth Amendment, solely because evidence that was admitted at the trial was obtained under circumstances which would have rendered it inadmissible in a prosecution for violation of a federal law in a court of the United States because there deemed to be an infraction of the Fourth Amendment as applied in Weeks v. United States (1914)?…

The notion that the “due process of law” guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment is shorthand for the first eight amendments of the Constitution and thereby incorporates them has been rejected by this Court again and again, after impressive consideration …

For purposes of ascertaining the restrictions which the Due Process Clause imposed upon the States in the enforcement of their criminal law, we adhere to the views expressed in Palko v. Connecticut, supra, 302 U. S. 319. That decision speaks to us with the great weight of the authority, particularly in matters of civil liberty, of a court that included Mr. Chief Justice Hughes, Mr. Justice Brandeis, Mr. Justice Stone and Mr. Justice Cardozo, to name only the dead in rejecting the suggestion that that the Due Process Clause incorporated the original Bill of Rights …

Due process of law thus conveys neither formal nor fixed nor narrow requirements. It is the compendious expression for all those rights which the courts must enforce because they are basic to our free society. But basic rights do not become petrified as of any one time, even though, as a matter of human experience, some may not too rhetorically be called eternal verities. It is of the very nature of a free society to advance in its standards of what is deemed reasonable and right. Representing as it does a living principle, due process is not confined within a permanent catalogue of what may at a given time be deemed the limits or the essentials of fundamental rights …

The security of one’s privacy against arbitrary intrusion by the police-which is at the core of the Fourth Amendment-is basic to a free society. It is therefore implicit in “the concept of ordered liberty” and as such enforceable against the States through the Due Process Clause. The knock at the door, whether by day or by night, as a prelude to a search, without authority of law but solely on the authority of the police, did not need the commentary of recent history to be condemned as inconsistent with the conception of human rights enshrined in the history and the basic constitutional documents of English-speaking peoples …

Granting that in practice the exclusion of evidence may be an effective way of deterring unreasonable searches, it is not for this Court to condemn as falling below the minimal standards assured by the Due Process Clause a State’s reliance upon other methods which, if consistently enforced, would be equally effective … We cannot brush aside the experience of States which deem the incidence of such conduct by the police too slight to call for a deterrent remedy not by way of disciplinary measures but by overriding the relevant rules of evidence. There are, moreover, reasons for excluding evidence unreasonably obtained by the federal police which are less compelling in the case of police under State or local authority. The public opinion of a community can far more effectively be exerted against oppressive conduct on the part of police directly responsible to the community itself than can local opinion, sporadically aroused, be brought to bear upon remote authority pervasively exerted throughout the country.

We hold, therefore, that in a prosecution in a State court for a State crime the Fourteenth Amendment does not forbid the admission of evidence obtained by an unreasonable search and seizure. And though we have interpreted the Fourth Amendment to forbid the admission of such evidence, a different question would be presented if Congress under its legislative powers were to pass a statute purporting to negate the Weeks doctrine. We would then be faced with the problem of the respect to be accorded the legislative judgment on an issue as to which, in default of that judgment, we have been forced to depend upon our own. Problems of a converse character, also not before us, would be presented should Congress under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment undertake to enforce the rights there guaranteed by attempting to make the Weeks doctrine binding upon the States.

Affirmed.

Excerpted by Kimberly Clairmont

Mapp v. Ohio (1961)

367 U.S. 643 (1961)

Vote: 6-3
Decision: Reversed and remanded
Majority: Clark, joined by Warren, Black, Douglas, and Brennan
Concurrence: Black
Concurrence: Douglas
Concurrence: Stewart (in judgment)
Dissent: Harlan, joined by Frankfurter and Whittaker

MR. JUSTICE CLARK delivered the opinion of the Court.

Appellant stands convicted of knowingly having had in her possession and under her control certain lewd and lascivious books, pictures, and photographs in violation of § 2905.34 of Ohio’s Revised Code. … [T]he Supreme Court of Ohio found that her conviction was valid though “based primarily upon the introduction in evidence … seized during an unlawful search of defendant’s home. … ”

On May 23, 1957, three Cleveland police officers arrived at appellant’s residence in that city pursuant to information that “a person [was] hiding out in the home, who was wanted for questioning in connection with a recent bombing, and that there was a large amount of policy paraphernalia being hidden in the home.”. …  [T]he officers knocked on the door and demanded entrance, but appellant, after telephoning her attorney, refused to admit them without a search warrant. They advised their headquarters of the situation and undertook a surveillance of the house.

The officers again sought entrance some three hours later when four or more additional officers arrived on the scene. When Miss Mapp did not come to the door immediately, at least one of the several doors to the house was forcibly opened and the policemen gained admittance. Meanwhile Miss Mapp’s attorney arrived, but the officers … would permit him neither to see Miss Mapp nor to enter the house. It appears that Miss Mapp was halfway down the stairs from the upper floor to the front door when the officers, in this highhanded manner, broke into the hall. She demanded to see the search warrant. A paper, claimed to be a warrant, was held up by one of the officers. She grabbed the “warrant” and placed it in her bosom. A struggle ensued in which the officers recovered the piece of paper and as a result of which they handcuffed appellant because she had been “belligerent” in resisting their official rescue of the “warrant” from her person. … Appellant, in handcuffs, was then forcibly taken upstairs to her bedroom where the officers searched a dresser, a chest of drawers, a closet and some suitcases. They also looked into a photo album and through personal papers belonging to the appellant. The search spread to the rest of the second floor including the child’s bedroom, the living room, the kitchen and a dinette. The basement of the building and a trunk found therein were also searched. The obscene materials for possession of which she was ultimately convicted were discovered in the course of that widespread search.

At the trial, no search warrant was produced by the prosecution, nor was the failure to produce one explained or accounted for. At best, “There is, in the record, considerable doubt as to whether there ever was any warrant for the search of defendant’s home.” The Ohio Supreme Court believed a “reasonable argument” could be made that the conviction should be reversed “because the methods’ employed to obtain the [evidence] … were such as to ‘offend “a sense of justice,”‘” but the court found determinative the fact that the evidence had not been taken “from defendant’s person by the use of brutal or offensive physical force against defendant.”

The State says that, even if the search were made without authority, or otherwise unreasonably, it is not prevented from using the unconstitutionally seized evidence at trial, citing Wolf v. Colorado, (1949), in which this Court did indeed hold “that, in a prosecution in a State court for a State crime, the Fourteenth Amendment does not forbid the admission of evidence obtained by an unreasonable search and seizure.” On this appeal … it is urged once again that we review that holding. …

[I]n Weeks v. United States, (1914), stated that “the Fourth Amendment … put the courts of the United States and Federal officials, in the exercise of their power and authority, under limitations and restraints [and] … forever secure[d] the people, their persons, houses, papers and effects against all unreasonable searches and seizures under the guise of law. … ”

Specifically dealing with the use of the evidence unconstitutionally seized, the Court concluded “If letters and private documents can thus be seized and held and used in evidence against a citizen accused of an offense, the protection of the Fourth Amendment … might as well be stricken from the Constitution. … ”

. … The Court, in Olmstead v. United States, (1928), in unmistakable language restated the Weeks rule: “The striking outcome of the Weeks … really forbade its introduction if obtained by government officers through a violation of the Amendment.”

. …

In 1949, 35 years after Weeks was announced, this Court, in Wolf v. Colorado, again for the first time, discussed the effect of the Fourth Amendment upon the States through the operation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It said: “[W]e have no hesitation in saying that, were a State affirmatively to sanction such police incursion into privacy, it would run counter to the guaranty of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Nevertheless, after declaring that the “security of one’s privacy against arbitrary intrusion by the police” is “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ and, as such, enforceable against the States through the Due Process Clause,” Palko v. Connecticut, (1937), and announcing that it “stoutly adhere[d]” to the Weeks decision, the Court decided that the Weeks exclusionary rule would not then be imposed upon the States as “an essential ingredient of the right.” The Court’s reasons for not considering essential to the right to privacy … were bottomed on factual considerations.

… [W]e will consider the current validity of the factual grounds upon which Wolf was based.

… [P]rior to the Wolf case, almost two-thirds of the States were opposed to the use of the exclusionary rule, now, despite the Wolf case, more than half of those … have wholly or partly adopted or adhered to the Weeks rule. Significantly, among those now following the rule is California, which, according to its highest court, was “compelled to reach that conclusion because other remedies have completely failed to secure compliance with the constitutional provisions. … ” People v. Cahan, (1955). In connection with this California case, we note that the second basis elaborated in Wolf in support of its failure to enforce the exclusionary doctrine against the States was that “other means of protection” have been afforded “the right to privacy.” The experience of California that such other remedies have been worthless and futile is buttressed by the experience of other States. The obvious futility of relegating the Fourth Amendment to the protection of other remedies has, moreover, been recognized by this Court since Wolf.

Likewise, time has set its face against what Wolf called the “weighty testimony” of People v. Defore, (1926). There, Justice (then Judge) Cardozo, rejecting adoption of the Weeks exclusionary rule in New York, had said that “[t]he Federal rule as it stands is either too strict or too lax.” However, the force of that reasoning has been largely vitiated by later decisions of this Court. These include the recent discarding of the “silver platter” doctrine which allowed federal judicial use of evidence seized in violation of the Constitution by state agents, Elkins v. United States (1960). … Because there can be no fixed formula, we are admittedly met with “recurring questions of the reasonableness of searches,” but less is not to be expected when dealing with a Constitution. …

It therefore plainly appears that the factual considerations supporting the failure of the Wolf Court to include the Weeks exclusionary rule when it recognized the enforceability of the right to privacy against the States in 1949 … could not, in any analysis, now be deemed controlling.

Some five years after Wolf, in answer to a plea made here Term after Term that we overturn its doctrine on applicability of the Weeks exclusionary rule. …

And only last Term, after again carefully reexamining the Wolf doctrine in Elkins v. United States … [t]he Court concluded that … all evidence obtained by an unconstitutional search and seizure was inadmissible in a federal court regardless of its source. Today we are … led … to close the only courtroom door remaining open to evidence secured by official lawlessness in flagrant abuse of that basic right, reserved to all persons as a specific guarantee against that very same unlawful conduct. We hold that all evidence obtained by searches and seizures in violation of the Constitution is, by that same authority, inadmissible in a state court.

Since the Fourth Amendment’s right of privacy has been declared enforceable against the States through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth, it is enforceable against them by the same sanction of exclusion as is used against the Federal Government. Were it otherwise, then, just as without the Weeks rule the assurance against unreasonable federal searches and seizures would be “a form of words,” valueless and undeserving of mention. … Therefore, in extending the substantive protections of due process to all constitutionally unreasonable searches–state or federal–it was logically and constitutionally necessary that the exclusion doctrine–an essential part of the right to privacy–be also insisted upon as an essential ingredient of the right newly recognized by the Wolf case. …

Indeed, we are aware of no restraint, similar to that rejected today, conditioning the enforcement of any other basic constitutional right. The right to privacy … would stand in marked contrast to all other rights declared as “basic to a free society.” Wolf v. Colorado. This Court has not hesitated to enforce as strictly against the States as it does against the Federal Government the rights of free speech and of a free press, the rights to notice and to a fair, public trial, including, as it does, the right not to be convicted by use of a coerced confession, however logically relevant it be, and without regard to its reliability. And nothing could be more certain than that, when a coerced confession is involved, “the relevant rules of evidence” are overridden without regard to “the incidence of such conduct by the police,” slight or frequent. Why should not the same rule apply to what is tantamount to coerced testimony by way of unconstitutional seizure of goods, papers, effects, documents, etc.?. …

. … Presently, a federal prosecutor may make no use of evidence illegally seized, but a State’s attorney across the street may, although he supposedly is operating under the enforceable prohibitions of the same Amendment. Thus, the State, by admitting evidence unlawfully seized, serves to encourage disobedience to the Federal Constitution which it is bound to uphold. … In nonexclusionary States, federal officers, being human, were by it invited to, and did, as our cases indicate, step across the street to the State’s attorney with their unconstitutionally seized evidence. Prosecution on the basis of that evidence was then had in a state court in utter disregard of the enforceable Fourth Amendment. If the fruits of an unconstitutional search had been inadmissible in both state and federal courts, this inducement to evasion would have been sooner eliminated. …

. … Denying shortcuts to only one of two cooperating law enforcement agencies tends naturally to breed legitimate suspicion of “working arrangements” whose results are equally tainted. Byars v. United States, (1927).

There are those who say, as did Justice (then Judge) Cardozo, that, under our constitutional exclusionary doctrine, “[t]he criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered.” People v. Defore. In some cases, this will undoubtedly be the result. But, as was said in Elkins, “there is another consideration–the imperative of judicial integrity.” The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence. … Nor can it lightly be assumed that … adoption of the exclusionary rule fetters law enforcement. … The Court noted that “The federal courts themselves have operated under the exclusionary rule of Weeks for almost half a century; yet it has not been suggested either that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has thereby been rendered ineffective. … The movement towards the rule of exclusion has been halting, but seemingly inexorable.”

The ignoble shortcut to conviction left open to the State tends to destroy the entire system of constitutional restraints on which the liberties of the people rest. Having once recognized that the right to privacy embodied in the Fourth Amendment is enforceable against the States, and that the right to be secure against rude invasions of privacy by state officers is, therefore, constitutional in origin, we can no longer permit that right to remain an empty promise. Because it is enforceable in the same manner and to like effect as other basic rights secured by the Due Process Clause, we can no longer permit it to be revocable at the whim of any police officer who, in the name of law enforcement itself, chooses to suspend its enjoyment. Our decision, founded on reason and truth, gives to the individual no more than that which the Constitution guarantees him, to the police officer no less than that to which honest law enforcement is entitled, and, to the courts, that judicial integrity so necessary in the true administration of justice.

The judgment of the Supreme Court of Ohio is reversed, and the cause remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.

Reversed and remanded.

MR. JUSTICE BLACK, concurring.

. …

I am still not persuaded that the Fourth Amendment, standing alone, would be enough to bar the introduction into evidence against an accused of papers and effects seized from him in violation of its commands. For the Fourth Amendment does not itself contain any provision expressly precluding the use of such evidence, and I am extremely doubtful that such a provision could properly be inferred from nothing more than the basic command against unreasonable searches and seizures. Reflection on the problem, however, in the light of cases coming before the Court since Wolf, has led me to conclude that, when the Fourth Amendment’s ban against unreasonable searches and seizures is considered together with the Fifth Amendment’s ban against compelled self-incrimination, a constitutional basis emerges which not only justifies, but actually requires, the exclusionary rule.

. …

. … The Court’s opinion, in my judgment, dissipates the doubt and uncertainty in this field of constitutional law, and I am persuaded, for this and other reasons stated, to depart from my prior views, to accept the Boyd doctrine as controlling in this state case, and to join the Court’s judgment and opinion, which are in accordance with that constitutional doctrine.

MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS, concurring.

Though I have joined the opinion of the Court, I add a few words. This criminal proceeding started with a lawless search and seizure. The police entered a home forcefully, and seized documents that were later used to convict the occupant of a crime.

She lived alone with her fifteen-year-old daughter in the second-floor flat of a duplex in Cleveland. At about 1:30 in the afternoon of May 23, 1957, three policemen arrived at this house. They rang the bell, and the appellant, appearing at her window, asked them what they wanted. According to their later testimony, the policemen had come to the house on information from “a confidential source that there was a person hiding out in the home who was wanted for questioning in connection with a recent bombing.” To the appellant’s question, however, they replied only that they wanted to question her, and would not state the subject about which they wanted to talk.

The appellant, who had retained an attorney in connection with a pending civil matter, told the police she would call him to ask if she should let them in. On her attorney’s advice, she told them she would let them in only when they produced a valid search warrant. For the next two and a half hours, the police laid siege to the house. At four o’clock, their number was increased to at least seven. Appellant’s lawyer appeared on the scene, and one of the policemen told him that they now had a search warrant, but the officer refused to show it. Instead, going to the back door, the officer first tried to kick it in and, when that proved unsuccessful, he broke the glass in the door and opened it from the inside.

The appellant, who was on the steps going up to her flat, demanded to see the search warrant, but the officer refused to let her see it, although he waved a paper in front of her face. She grabbed it and thrust it down the front of her dress. The policemen seized her, took the paper from her, and had her handcuffed to another officer. She was taken upstairs, thus bound, and into the larger of the two bedrooms in the apartment; there she was forced to sit on the bed. Meanwhile, the officers entered the house and made a complete search of the four rooms of her flat and of the basement of the house.

. …

We held in Wolf v. Colorado, that the Fourth Amendment was applicable to the States by reason of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But a majority held that the exclusionary rule of the Weeks case was not required of the States, that they could apply such sanctions as they chose. That position had the necessary votes to carry the day. But, with all respect, it was not the voice of reason or principle.

. …

. … The immediate result was a storm of constitutional controversy which only today finds its end. I believe that this is an appropriate case in which to put an end to the asymmetry which Wolf imported into the law. It is an appropriate case because the facts it presents show–as would few other cases–the casual arrogance of those who have the untrammelled power to invade one’s home and to seize one’s person.

. …

MR. JUSTICE HARLAN, whom MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER and MR. JUSTICE WHITTAKER join, dissenting.

In overruling the Wolf case, the Court, in my opinion, has forgotten the sense of judicial restraint which, with due regard for stare decisis, is one element that should enter into deciding whether a past decision of this Court should be overruled. Apart from that, I also believe that the Wolf rule represents sounder Constitutional doctrine than the new rule which now replaces it.

From the Court’s statement of the case, one would gather that the central, if not controlling, issue on this appeal is whether illegally state-seized evidence is Constitutionally admissible in a state prosecution, an issue which would, of course, face us with the need for reexamining Wolf. However, such is not the situation. For, although that question was indeed raised here and below among appellant’s subordinate points, the new and pivotal issue brought to the Court by this appeal is whether § 2905.34 of the Ohio Revised Code, making criminal the mere knowing possession or control of obscene material, and under which appellant has been convicted, is consistent with the rights of free thought and expression assured against state action by the Fourteenth Amendment. That was the principal issue which was decided by the Ohio Supreme Court, which was tendered by appellant’s Jurisdictional Statement, and which was briefed and argued in this Court.

. …

The action of the Court finds no support in the rule that decision of Constitutional issues should be avoided wherever possible. For, in overruling Wolf, the Court, instead of passing upon the validity of Ohio’s § 2905.34, has simply chosen between two Constitutional questions. Moreover, I submit that it has chosen the more difficult and less appropriate of the two questions. The Ohio statute which, as construed by the State Supreme Court, punishes knowing possession or control of obscene material, irrespective of the purposes of such possession or control (with exceptions not here applicable) and irrespective of whether the accused had any reasonable opportunity to rid himself of the material after discovering that it was obscene, surely presents a Constitutional question which is both simpler and less far-reaching than the question which the Court decides today. It seems to me that justice might well have been done in this case without overturning a decision on which the administration of criminal law in many of the States has long justifiably relied.

. …

Essential to the majority’s argument against Wolf is the proposition that the rule of Weeks v. United States [(1914)], excluding in federal criminal trials the use of evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, derives not from the “supervisory power” of this Court over the federal judicial system, but from Constitutional requirement. This is so because no one, I suppose, would suggest that this Court possesses any general supervisory power over the state courts. Although I entertain considerable doubt as to the soundness of this foundational proposition of the majority, Wolf v. Colorado, (concurring opinion), I shall assume, for present purposes, that the Weeks rule “is of constitutional origin.”

At the heart of the majority’s opinion in this case is the following syllogism: (1) the rule excluding in federal criminal trials evidence which is the product of an illegal search and seizure is “part and parcel” of the Fourth Amendment; (2) Wolf held that the “privacy” assured against federal action by the Fourth Amendment is also protected against state action by the Fourteenth Amendment, and (3) it is therefore “logically and constitutionally necessary” that the Weeks exclusionary rule should also be enforced against the States.

This reasoning ultimately rests on the unsound premise that, because Wolf carried into the States … it must follow that whatever configurations of the Fourth Amendment have been developed in the particularizing federal precedents are likewise to be deemed a part of “ordered liberty,” and as such are enforceable against the States. For me, this does not follow at all.

. …

A state conviction comes to us as the complete product of a sovereign judicial system. Typically, a case will have been tried in a trial court, tested in some final appel late court, and will go no further. In the comparatively rare instance when a conviction is reviewed by us on due process grounds, we deal then with a finished product in the creation of which we are allowed no hand, and our task, far from being one of over-all supervision, is, speaking generally, restricted to a determination of whether the prosecution was constitutionally fair. … I do not see how it can be said that a trial becomes unfair simply because a State determines that evidence may be considered by the trier of fact, regardless of how it was obtained, if it is relevant to the one issue with which the trial is concerned, the guilt or innocence of the accused. …

. …

Excerpted by Alex Nobiletti

United States v. Leon (1984)

468 U.S. 897 (1984)

Vote: 6-3
Decision: Reversed
Majority: White, joined by Burger, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist, and O’Connor
Concurring: Blackmun
Dissent: Brennan, joined by Marshall
Dissent: Stevens

JUSTICE WHITE delivered the opinion of the Court.

This case presents the question whether the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule should be modified so as not to bar the use in the prosecution’s case … evidence obtained by officers acting in reasonable reliance on a search warrant issued by a detached and neutral magistrate but ultimately found to be unsupported by probable cause. To resolve this question, we must consider once again the tension between the sometimes competing goals of, on the one hand, deterring official misconduct and removing inducements to unreasonable invasions of privacy and, on the other, establishing procedures under which criminal defendants are “acquitted or convicted on the basis of all the evidence which exposes the truth.” Alderman v. United States, (1969).

In August, 1981, a confidential informant of unproven reliability informed an officer of the Burbank Police Department that two persons known to him as “Armando” and “Patsy” were selling large quantities of cocaine and methaqualone from their residence. … He further declared that “Armando” and “Patsy” generally kept only small quantities of drugs at their residence and stored the remainder at another location in Burbank.

On the basis of this information, the Burbank police initiated an extensive investigation. … During the course of the investigation, officers observed an automobile belonging to respondent Ricardo Del Castillo, who had previously been arrested for possession of 50 pounds of marihuana, arrive. … The driver of that car entered the house, exited shortly thereafter carrying a small paper sack, and drove away. A check of Del Castillo’s probation records led the officers to respondent Alberto Leon, whose telephone number Del Castillo had listed as his employer’s. Leon had been arrested in 1980 on drug charges, and a companion had informed the police at that time that Leon was heavily involved in the importation of drugs into this country. Before the current investigation began, the Burbank officers had learned that an informant had told a Glendale police officer that Leon stored a large quantity of methaqualone at his residence in Glendale. …

. … Officer Cyril Rombach of the Burbank Police Department, an experienced and well-trained narcotics investigator, prepared an application for a warrant to search … for an extensive list of items believed to be related to respondents’ drug trafficking activities. Officer Rombach’s extensive application was reviewed by several Deputy District Attorneys.

A facially valid search warrant was issued. … The ensuing searches produced large quantities of drugs. … Respondents were indicted by a grand jury in the District Court for the Central District of California and charged with conspiracy to possess and distribute cocaine and a variety of substantive counts.

The respondents then filed motions to suppress the evidence seized pursuant to the warrant. The District Court … concluded that the affidavit was insufficient to establish probable cause, but did not suppress all of the evidence. … In response to a request from the Government, the court made clear that Officer Rombach had acted in good faith, but it rejected the Government’s suggestion that the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule should not apply where evidence is seized in reasonable, good faith reliance on a search warrant. … To the extent that the affidavit set forth facts demonstrating the basis of the informant’s knowledge of criminal activity, the information included was fatally stale. The affidavit, moreover, failed to establish the informant’s credibility. Accordingly, the Court of Appeals concluded that the information provided by the informant was inadequate under both prongs of the two-part test established in Aguilar v. Texas, (1964), and Spinelli v. United States, (1969). The officers’ independent investigation neither cured the staleness nor corroborated the details of the informant’s declarations. … Because these deficiencies had not been cured by the police investigation, the District Court properly suppressed the fruits of the search. The Court of Appeals refused the Government’s invitation to recognize a good faith exception to the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule.

The Government’s petition for certiorari … presented only the question

“[w]hether the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule should be modified so as not to bar the admission of evidence seized in reasonable, good faith reliance on a search warrant that is subsequently held to be defective.”

We granted certiorari to consider the propriety of such a modification. …

We have concluded that, in the Fourth Amendment context, the exclusionary rule can be modified somewhat without jeopardizing its ability to perform its intended functions. Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

Language in opinions of this Court and of individual Justices has sometimes implied that the exclusionary rule is a necessary corollary of the Fourth Amendment … or that the rule is required by the conjunction of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. These implications need not detain us long. The Fifth Amendment theory has not withstood critical analysis or the test of time … and the Fourth Amendment “has never been interpreted to proscribe the introduction of illegally seized evidence in all proceedings or against all persons.” Stone v. Powell, (1976).

The Fourth Amendment contains no provision expressly precluding the use of evidence obtained in violation of its commands, and … makes clear that the use of fruits of a past unlawful search or seizure “work[s] no new Fourth Amendment wrong.” United States v. Calandra, (1974). The wrong condemned by the Amendment is “fully accomplished” by the unlawful search or seizure itself, and the exclusionary rule is neither intended nor able to “cure the invasion of the defendant’s rights which he has already suffered.” Stone v. Powell [(1976)], (WHITE, J., dissenting). The rule thus operates as “a judicially created remedy designed to safeguard Fourth Amendment rights generally through its deterrent effect, rather than a personal constitutional right of the party aggrieved.” United States v. Calandra.

. …

… [T]he … question is currently before us … must be resolved by weighing the costs and benefits of preventing the use …  of inherently trustworthy tangible evidence obtained in reliance on a search warrant issued by a detached and neutral magistrate that ultimately is found to be defective.

The substantial social costs exacted by the exclusionary rule for the vindication of Fourth Amendment rights have long been a source of concern.

. … An objectionable collateral consequence of this interference with the criminal justice system’s truthfinding function is that some guilty defendants may go free or receive reduced sentences as a result of favorable plea bargains. Particularly when law enforcement officers have acted in objective good faith or their transgressions have been minor, the magnitude of the benefit conferred on such guilty defendants offends basic concepts of the criminal justice system. Indiscriminate application of the exclusionary rule, therefore, may well “generat[e] disrespect for the law and administration of justice.” Accordingly,

“[a]s with any remedial device, the application of the rule has been restricted to those areas where its remedial objectives are thought most efficaciously served.”

United States v. Calandra; United States v. Janis, (1976).

. …

In Stone v. Powell, the Court emphasized the costs of the exclusionary rule, expressed its view that limiting the circumstances under which Fourth Amendment claims could be raised … would not reduce the rule’s deterrent effect, and held that a state prisoner who has been afforded a full and fair opportunity to litigate a Fourth Amendment claim may not obtain federal habeas relief on the ground that unlawfully obtained evidence had been introduced at his trial. … Similarly, in United States v. Janis [(1976)], we permitted the use in federal civil proceedings of evidence illegally seized by state officials, since the likelihood of deterring police misconduct through such an extension of the exclusionary rule was insufficient to outweigh its substantial social costs. In so doing, we declared that,

“[i]f … the exclusionary rule does not result in appreciable deterrence, then, clearly, its use in the instant situation is unwarranted.”

As cases considering the use of unlawfully obtained evidence in criminal trials themselves make clear, it does not follow from the emphasis on the exclusionary rule’s deterrent value that “anything which deters illegal searches is thereby commanded by the Fourth Amendment.” Alderman v. United States [(1968)]. …

. …

When considering the use of evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment … we have declined to adopt a per se or “but for” rule that would render inadmissible any evidence that came to light through a chain of causation that began with an illegal arrest. … The perception underlying these decisions … is a product of considerations relating to the exclusionary rule and the constitutional principles it is designed to protect. In short, the “dissipation of the taint” concept that the Court has applied in deciding whether exclusion is appropriate in a particular case

“attempts to mark the point at which the detrimental consequences of illegal police action become so attenuated that the deterrent effect of the exclusionary rule no longer justifies its cost.”

Brown v. Illinois [(1975)], (POWELL, J., concurring in part). Not surprisingly in view of this purpose, an assessment of the flagrancy of the police misconduct constitutes an important step in the calculus.

. …

… [T]he balancing approach that has evolved during the years of experience with the rule provides strong support for the modification currently urged upon us. … [O]ur evaluation of the costs and benefits of suppressing reliable physical evidence seized by officers reasonably relying on a warrant issued by a detached and neutral magistrate leads to the conclusion that such evidence should be admissible in the prosecution’s case in chief.

Because a search warrant

“provides the detached scrutiny of a neutral magistrate, which is a more reliable safeguard against improper searches than the hurried judgment of a law enforcement officer ‘engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime,'”

United States v. Chadwick, (1977) (quoting Johnson v. United States, (1948)). …

Deference to the magistrate, however, is not boundless. It is clear, first, that the deference accorded to a magistrate’s finding of probable cause does not preclude inquiry into the knowing or reckless falsity of the affidavit on which that determination was based. Second, the courts must also insist that the magistrate purport to “perform his neutral and detached’ function and not serve merely as a rubber stamp for the police.” Aguilar v. Texas [(1964)]. … Third, reviewing courts will not defer to a warrant based on an affidavit that does not “provide the magistrate with a substantial basis for determining the existence of probable cause.” Illinois v. Gates, [(1983)].

. …

Even if the warrant application was supported by more than a “bare bones” affidavit, a reviewing court may properly conclude that, notwithstanding the deference that magistrates deserve, the warrant was invalid because the magistrate’s probable cause determination reflected an improper analysis of the totality of the circumstances, or because the form of the warrant was improper in some respect.

Only in the first of these three situations, however, has the Court set forth a rationale for suppressing evidence obtained pursuant to a search warrant; in the other areas, it has simply excluded such evidence without considering whether Fourth Amendment interests will be advanced. To the extent that proponents of exclusion rely on its behavioral effects on judges and magistrates in these areas, their reliance is misplaced. First, the exclusionary rule is designed to deter police misconduct, rather than to punish the errors of judges and magistrates. Second, there exists no evidence suggesting that judges and magistrates are inclined to ignore or subvert the Fourth Amendment, or that lawlessness among these actors requires application of the extreme sanction of exclusion.

Third, and most important, we discern no basis, and are offered none, for believing that exclusion of evidence seized pursuant to a warrant will have a significant deterrent effect on the issuing judge or magistrate. Many of the factors that indicate that the exclusionary rule cannot provide an effective “special” or “general” deterrent for individual offending law enforcement officers apply as well to judges or magistrates. And, to the extent that the rule is thought to operate as a “systemic” deterrent on a wider audience, it clearly can have no such effect on individuals empowered to issue search warrants. Judges and magistrates are not adjuncts to the law enforcement team; as neutral judicial officers, they have no stake in the outcome of particular criminal prosecutions. The threat of exclusion thus cannot be expected significantly to deter them. Imposition of the exclusionary sanction is not necessary meaningfully to inform judicial officers of their errors, and we cannot conclude that admitting evidence obtained pursuant to a warrant while at the same time declaring that the warrant was somehow defective will in any way reduce judicial officers’ professional incentives to comply with the Fourth Amendment, encourage them to repeat their mistakes, or lead to the granting of all colorable warrant requests.

If exclusion of evidence obtained pursuant to a subsequently invalidated warrant is to have any deterrent effect, therefore, it must alter the behavior of individual law enforcement officers or the policies of their departments. One could argue that applying the exclusionary rule in cases where the police failed to demonstrate probable cause in the warrant application deters future inadequate presentations or “magistrate shopping,” and thus promotes the ends of the Fourth Amendment. Suppressing evidence obtained pursuant to a technically defective warrant supported by probable cause also might encourage officers to scrutinize more closely the form of the warrant, and to point out suspected judicial errors. We find such arguments speculative, and conclude that suppression of evidence obtained pursuant to a warrant should be ordered only on a case-by-case basis, and only in those unusual cases in which exclusion will further the purposes of the exclusionary rule.

We have frequently questioned whether the exclusionary rule can have any deterrent effect when the offending officers acted in the objectively reasonable belief that their conduct did not violate the Fourth Amendment. …

. … In short, where the officer’s conduct is objectively reasonable,

“excluding the evidence will not further the ends of the exclusionary rule in any appreciable way. … ”

Stone v. Powell, (WHITE, J., dissenting).

This is particularly true, we believe, when an officer, acting with objective good faith, has obtained a search warrant from a judge or magistrate and acted within its scope. In most such cases, there is no police illegality, and thus nothing to deter. It is the magistrate’s responsibility to determine whether the officer’s allegations establish probable cause and, if so, to issue a warrant comporting in form with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. In the ordinary case, an officer cannot be expected to question the magistrate’s probable cause determination or his judgment that the form of the warrant is technically sufficient. … Penalizing the officer for the magistrate’s error, rather than his own, cannot logically contribute to the deterrence of Fourth Amendment violations.

We conclude that the marginal or nonexistent benefits produced by suppressing evidence obtained in objectively reasonable reliance on a subsequently invalidated search warrant cannot justify the substantial costs of exclusion. …

. …

. … The good faith exception for searches conducted pursuant to warrants is not intended to signal our unwillingness strictly to enforce the requirements of the Fourth Amendment, and we do not believe that it will have this effect. As we have already suggested, the good faith exception, turning as it does on objective reasonableness, should not be difficult to apply in practice. When officers have acted pursuant to a warrant, the prosecution should ordinarily be able to establish objective good faith without a substantial expenditure of judicial time.

Nor are we persuaded that application of a good faith exception to searches conducted pursuant to warrants will preclude review of the constitutionality of the search or seizure, deny needed guidance from the courts, or freeze Fourth Amendment law in its present state. …

. …

Having determined that the warrant should not have issued, the Court of Appeals understandably declined to adopt a modification of the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule that this Court had not previously sanctioned. … We have now reexamined the purposes of the exclusionary rule and the propriety of its application in cases where officers have relied on a subsequently invalidated search warrant. Our conclusion is that the rule’s purposes will only rarely be served by applying it in such circumstances.

In the absence of an allegation that the magistrate abandoned his detached and neutral role, suppression is appropriate only if the officers were dishonest or reckless in preparing their affidavit or could not have harbored an objectively reasonable belief in the existence of probable cause. Only respondent Leon has contended that no reasonably well trained police officer could have believed that there existed probable cause to search his house; significantly, the other respondents advance no comparable argument. … Under these circumstances, the officers’ reliance on the magistrate’s determination of probable cause was objectively reasonable, and application of the extreme sanction of exclusion is inappropriate.

Accordingly, the judgment of the Court of Appeals is

Reversed.

JUSTICE BRENNAN, with whom JUSTICE MARSHALL joins, dissenting.

Ten years ago, in United States v. Calandra, (1974), I expressed the fear that the Court’s decision

“may signal that a majority of my colleagues have positioned themselves to reopen the door [to evidence secured by official lawlessness] still further and abandon altogether the exclusionary rule in search and seizure cases.”

(dissenting opinion). Since then, in case after case, I have witnessed the Court’s gradual but determined strangulation of the rule. It now appears that the Court’s victory over the Fourth Amendment is complete. That today’s decisions represent the piece de resistance of the Court’s past efforts cannot be doubted, for today the Court sanctions the use in the prosecution’s case in chief of illegally obtained evidence against the individual whose rights have been violated — a result that had previously been thought to be foreclosed.

The Court seeks to justify this result on the ground that the “costs” of adhering to the exclusionary rule in cases like those before us exceed the “benefits.” But the language of deterrence and of cost/benefit analysis, if used indiscriminately, can have a narcotic effect. It creates an illusion of technical precision and ineluctability. It suggests that not only constitutional principle but also empirical data support the majority’s result. When the Court’s analysis is examined carefully, however, it is clear that we have not been treated to an honest assessment of the merits of the exclusionary rule, but have instead been drawn into a curious world where the “costs” of excluding illegally obtained evidence loom to exaggerated heights, and where the “benefits” of such exclusion are made to disappear with a mere wave of the hand.

The majority ignores the fundamental constitutional importance of what is at stake here. While the machinery of law enforcement, and indeed the nature of crime itself, have changed dramatically since the Fourth Amendment became part of the Nation’s fundamental law in 1791, what the Framers understood then remains true today — that the task of combating crime and convicting the guilty will in every era seem of such critical and pressing concern that we may be lured by the temptations of expediency into forsaking our commitment to protecting individual liberty and privacy. …

If those independent tribunals lose their resolve, however, as the Court has done today, and give way to the seductive call of expediency, the vital guarantees of the Fourth Amendment are reduced to nothing more than a “form of words.” Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, (1920).

A proper understanding of the broad purposes sought to be served by the Fourth Amendment demonstrates that the principles embodied in the exclusionary rule rest upon a far firmer constitutional foundation than the shifting sands of the Court’s deterrence rationale. …

. …

At bottom, the Court’s decision turns on the proposition that the exclusionary rule is merely a

“‘judicially created remedy designed to safeguard Fourth Amendment rights generally through its deterrent effect, rather than a personal constitutional right.'”

quoting United States v. Calandra. The germ of that idea is found in Wolf v. Colorado, (1949). … The essence of this view, as expressed initially in the Calandra opinion and as reiterated today, is that the sole

“purpose of the Fourth Amendment is to prevent unreasonable governmental intrusions into the privacy of one’s person, house, papers, or effects. The wrong condemned is the unjustified governmental invasion of these areas of an individual’s life. That wrong … is fully accomplished by the original search without probable cause.”

(emphasis added). This reading of the Amendment implies that its proscriptions are directed solely at those government agents who may actually invade an individual’s constitutionally protected privacy. The courts are not subject to any direct constitutional duty to exclude illegally obtained evidence, because the question of the admissibility of such evidence is not addressed by the Amendment. This view of the scope of the Amendment relegates the judiciary to the periphery. …

Such a reading appears plausible, because, as critics of the exclusionary rule never tire of repeating, the Fourth Amendment makes no express provision for the exclusion of evidence secured in violation of its commands. A short answer to this claim, of course, is that many of the Constitution’s most vital imperatives are stated in general terms, and the task of giving meaning to these precepts is therefore left to subsequent judicial decisionmaking in the context of concrete cases. The nature of our Constitution, as Chief Justice Marshall long ago explained,

“requires that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objects designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves.”

McCulloch v. Maryland, (1819).

. …

When that fact is kept in mind, the role of the courts and their possible involvement in the concerns of the Fourth Amendment comes into sharper focus. Because seizures are executed principally to secure evidence, and because such evidence generally has utility in our legal system only in the context of a trial supervised by a judge, it is apparent that the admission of illegally obtained evidence implicates the same constitutional concerns as the initial seizure of that evidence. Indeed, by admitting unlawfully seized evidence, the judiciary becomes a part of what is, in fact, a single governmental action prohibited by the terms of the Amendment. …

The Court evades this principle by drawing an artificial line between the constitutional rights and responsibilities that are engaged by actions of the police and those that are engaged when a defendant appears before the courts. …

I submit that such a crabbed reading of the Fourth Amendment casts aside the teaching of those Justices who first formulated the exclusionary rule, and rests ultimately on an impoverished understanding of judicial responsibility in our constitutional scheme. …

As the Court further explained in Olmstead v. United States, (1928):

“The striking outcome of the Weeks case and those which followed it was the sweeping declaration that the Fourth Amendment, although not referring to or limiting the use of evidence in courts, really forbade its introduction if obtained by government officers through a violation of the Amendment. … But in the Weeks case and those which followed, this Court decided with great emphasis, and established as the law for the federal courts, that the protection of the Fourth Amendment would be much impaired unless it was held that … the evidence thereby obtained could not be received.”

That conception of the rule, in my view, is more faithful to the meaning and purpose of the Fourth Amendment and to the judiciary’s role as the guardian of the people’s constitutional liberties.

. …

What the Framers of the Bill of Rights sought to accomplish through the express requirements of the Fourth Amendment was to define precisely the conditions under which government agents could search private property so that citizens would not have to depend solely upon the discretion and restraint of those agents for the protection of their privacy. Although the self-restraint and care exhibited by the officers in this case is commendable, that alone can never be a sufficient protection for constitutional liberties. I am convinced that it is not too much to ask that an attentive magistrate take those minimum steps necessary to ensure that every warrant he issues describes with particularity the things that his independent review of the warrant application convinces him are likely to be found in the premises. And I am equally convinced that it is not too much to ask that well-trained and experienced police officers take a moment to check that the warrant they have been issued at least describes those things for which they have sought leave to search. These convictions spring not from my own view of sound criminal law enforcement policy, but are instead compelled by the language of the Fourth Amendment and the history that led to its adoption.

. … A chief consequence of today’s decisions will be to convey a clear and unambiguous message to magistrates that their decisions to issue warrants are now insulated from subsequent judicial review. Creation of this new exception for good faith reliance upon a warrant implicitly tells magistrates that they need not take much care in reviewing warrant applications, since their mistakes will, from now on, have virtually no consequence: if their decision to issue a warrant was correct, the evidence will be admitted; if their decision was incorrect but the police relied in good faith on the warrant, the evidence will also be admitted. Inevitably, the care and attention devoted to such an inconsequential chore will dwindle. …

. … The clear incentive that operated in the past to establish probable cause adequately because reviewing courts would examine the magistrate’s judgment carefully has now been so completely vitiated that the police need only show that it was not “entirely unreasonable” under the circumstances of a particular case for them to believe that the warrant they were issued was valid. The long-run effect unquestionably will be to undermine the integrity of the warrant process.

. …

When the public … demands that those in government increase their efforts to combat crime, it is all too easy for those government officials to seek expedient solutions. In contrast to such costly and difficult measures as building more prisons, improving law enforcement methods, or hiring more prosecutors and judges to relieve the overburdened court systems in the country’s metropolitan areas, the relaxation of Fourth Amendment standards seems a tempting, costless means of meeting the public’s demand for better law enforcement. In the long run, however, we as a society pay a heavy price for such expediency. … Once lost, such rights are difficult to recover. There is hope, however, that in time this or some later Court will restore these precious freedoms to their rightful place as a primary protection for our citizens against overreaching officialdom.

I dissent.

Excerpted by Alex Nobiletti

Nix v. Williams (1984)

467 U.S. 431 (1984)

Vote: 7-2
Decision: Reversed and Remanded
Majority: Burger, joined by White, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist, and O’Connor
Concurrence: White
Concurrence: Stevens
Dissent: Brennan, joined by Marshall

CHIEF JUSTICE BURGER delivered the opinion of the Court.

We granted certiorari to consider whether, at respondent Williams’ second murder trial in state court, evidence pertaining to the discovery and condition of the victim’s body was properly admitted on the ground that it would ultimately or inevitably have been discovered. …

On December 24, 1968, 10-year-old Pamela Powers disappeared from a YMCA building in Des Moines, Iowa. … Shortly after she disappeared, Williams was seen leaving the YMCA carrying a large bundle wrapped in a blanket; a 14-year-old boy who had helped Williams open his car door reported that he had seen “two legs in it and they were skinny and white.”

Williams’ car was found the next day 160 miles east of Des Moines in Davenport, Iowa. Later, several items of clothing belonging to the child, some of Williams’ clothing, and an army blanket like the one used to wrap the bundle that Williams carried out of the YMCA were found at a rest stop on Interstate 80 near Grinnell, between Des Moines and Davenport. A warrant was issued for Williams’ arrest.

Police surmised that Williams had left Pamela Powers or her body somewhere between Des Moines and the Grinnell rest stop where some of the young girl’s clothing had been found. On December 26, the Iowa Bureau of Criminal Investigation initiated a large-scale search. Two hundred volunteers divided into teams began the search 21 miles east of Grinnell, covering an area several miles to the north and south of Interstate 80. They moved westward from Poweshiek County, in which Grinnell was located, into Jasper County. Searchers were instructed to check all roads, abandoned farm buildings, ditches, culverts, and any other place in which the body of a small child could be hidden.

Meanwhile, Williams surrendered to local police in Davenport, where he was promptly arraigned. Williams contacted a Des Moines attorney, who arranged for an attorney in Davenport to meet Williams at the Davenport police station. Des Moines police informed counsel they would pick Williams up in Davenport and return him to Des Moines without questioning him. Two Des Moines detectives then drove to Davenport, took Williams into custody, and proceeded to drive him back to Des Moines.

During the return trip, one of the policemen, Detective Leaming, began a conversation with Williams, saying:

“I want to give you something to think about while we’re traveling down the road. … They are predicting several inches of snow for tonight, and I feel that you yourself are the only person that knows where this little girl’s body is … and if you get a snow on top of it, you yourself may be unable to find it. And since we will be going right past the area [where the body is] on the way into Des Moines, I feel that we could stop and locate the body, that the parents of this little girl should be entitled to a Christian burial for the little girl who was snatched away from them on Christmas [E]ve and murdered. … ”

“[A]fter a snow storm, [we may not be] able to find it at all.”

Leaming told Williams he knew the body was in the area of Mitchellville — a town they would be passing on the way to Des Moines. He concluded the conversation by saying: “I do not want you to answer me. … Just think about it. … ”

. … As they approached Mitchellville, Williams, without any further conversation, agreed to direct the officers to the child’s body.

The officers directing the search had called off the search at 3 p. m., when they left the Grinnell Police Department to join Leaming at the rest area. At that time, one search team near the Jasper County-Polk County line was only two and one-half miles from where Williams soon guided Leaming and his party to the body. The child’s body was found next to a culvert in a ditch beside a gravel road in Polk County, about two miles south of Interstate 80, and essentially within the area to be searched.

In February, 1969, Williams was indicted for first-degree murder. …

The jury found Williams guilty of first-degree murder; the judgment of conviction was affirmed by the Iowa Supreme Court. Williams then sought release on habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Iowa. That court concluded that the evidence in question had been wrongly admitted at Williams’ trial; a divided panel of the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit agreed.

We granted certiorari … in … Brewer v. Williams, (1977). This Court’s opinion noted, however, that although Williams’ incriminating statements could not be introduced into evidence at a second trial, evidence of the body’s location and condition

“might well be admissible on the theory that the body would have been discovered in any event, even had incriminating statements not been elicited from Williams.”

At Williams’ second trial in 1977 in the Iowa court … evidence of the condition of her body as it was found, articles and photographs of her clothing, and the results of post mortem medical and chemical tests on the body were admitted. The trial court concluded that the State had proved by a preponderance of the evidence that, if the search had not been suspended and Williams had not led the police to the victim, her body would have been discovered “within a short time” in essentially the same condition as it was actually found. The trial court also ruled that, if the police had not located the body,

“the search would clearly have been taken up again where it left off, given the extreme circumstances of this case, and the body would [have] been found in short order.”

(emphasis added).

. … The challenged evidence was admitted, and the jury again found Williams guilty of first-degree murder; he was sentenced to life in prison.

On appeal, the Supreme Court of Iowa again affirmed. That court held that there was, in fact, a “hypothetical independent source” exception to the exclusionary rule. …

. …

In 1980, Williams renewed his attack on the state court conviction by seeking a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Iowa. The District Court conducted its own independent review of the evidence and concluded, as had the state courts, that the body would inevitably have been found by the searchers. …

The Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed; an equally divided court denied rehearing en banc. That court assumed … that there is an inevitable discovery exception to the exclusionary rule, and that the Iowa Supreme Court correctly stated that exception to require proof that the police did not act in bad faith and that the evidence would have been discovered absent any constitutional violation. In reversing the District Court’s denial of habeas relief, the Court of Appeals stated:

“We hold that the State has not met the first requirement. It is therefore unnecessary to decide whether the state courts’ finding that the body would have been discovered anyway is fairly supported by the record.”

. …

We granted the State’s petition for certiorari, and we reverse.

The Iowa Supreme Court correctly stated that the “vast majority” of all courts, both state and federal, recognize an inevitable discovery exception to the exclusionary rule. We are now urged to adopt and apply the so-called ultimate or inevitable discovery exception to the exclusionary rule.

Williams contends that evidence of the body’s location and condition is “fruit of the poisonous tree,” i.e., the “fruit” or product of Detective Leaming’s plea to help the child’s parents give her “a Christian burial,” which this Court had already held equated to interrogation. He contends that admitting the challenged evidence violated the Sixth Amendment whether it would have been inevitably discovered or not. Williams also contends that, if the inevitable discovery doctrine is constitutionally permissible, it must include a threshold showing of police good faith.

. …

Wong Sun v. United States, (1963), extended the exclusionary rule to evidence that was the indirect product or “fruit” of unlawful police conduct, but there again the Court emphasized that evidence that has been illegally obtained need not always be suppressed, stating:

“We need not hold that all evidence is ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ simply because it would not have come to light but for the illegal actions of the police. Rather, the more apt question in such a case is whether, granting establishment of the primary illegality, the evidence to which instant objection is made has been come at by exploitation of that illegality, or instead by means sufficiently distinguishable to be purged of the primary taint.”

(emphasis added) (quoting J. Maguire, Evidence of Guilt 221 (1959)). The Court thus pointedly negated the kind of good faith requirement advanced by the Court of Appeals in reversing the District Court.

. …

The core rationale consistently advanced by this Court for extending the exclusionary rule to evidence that is the fruit of unlawful police conduct has been that this admittedly drastic and socially costly course is needed to deter police from violations of constitutional and statutory protections. This Court has accepted the argument that the way to ensure such protections is to exclude evidence seized as a result of such violations notwithstanding the high social cost of letting persons obviously guilty go unpunished for their crimes. On this rationale, the prosecution is not to be put in a better position than it would have been in if no illegality had transpired.

. …

It is clear that the cases implementing the exclusionary rule “begin with the premise that the challenged evidence is, in some sense, the product of illegal governmental activity.” United States v. Crews, (1980) (emphasis added). Of course, this does not end the inquiry. If the prosecution can establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the information ultimately or inevitably would have been discovered by lawful means — here, the volunteers’ search — then the deterrence rationale has so little basis that the evidence should be received. Anything less would reject logic, experience, and common sense.

The requirement that the prosecution must prove the absence of bad faith, imposed here by the Court of Appeals, would place courts in the position of withholding from juries relevant and undoubted truth that would have been available to police absent any unlawful police activity. Of course, that view would put the police in a worse position than they would have been in if no unlawful conduct had transpired. And, of equal importance, it wholly fails to take into account the enormous societal cost of excluding truth in the search for truth in the administration of justice. Nothing in this Court’s prior holdings supports any such formalistic, pointless, and punitive approach.

. … A police officer who is faced with the opportunity to obtain evidence illegally will rarely, if ever, be in a position to calculate whether the evidence sought would inevitably be discovered. … On the other hand, when an officer is aware that the evidence will inevitably be discovered, he will try to avoid engaging in any questionable practice. In that situation, there will be little to gain from taking any dubious “shortcuts” to obtain the evidence. Significant disincentives to obtaining evidence … also lessen the likelihood that the … inevitable discovery exception will promote police misconduct. In these circumstances, the societal costs of the exclusionary rule far outweigh any possible benefits to deterrence that a good faith requirement might produce.

Williams contends that, because he did not waive his right to the assistance of counsel, the Court may not balance competing values in deciding whether the challenged evidence was properly admitted. … We disagree.

Exclusion of physical evidence that would inevitably have been discovered adds nothing to either the integrity or fairness of a criminal trial. The Sixth Amendment right to counsel protects against unfairness by preserving the adversary process in which the reliability of proffered evidence may be tested in cross-examination. Here, however, Detective Leaming’s conduct did nothing to impugn the reliability of the evidence in question. … No one would seriously contend that the presence of counsel in the police car when Leaming appealed to Williams’ decent human instincts would have had any bearing on the reliability of the body as evidence. Suppression, in these circumstances, would do nothing whatever to promote the integrity of the trial process, but would inflict a wholly unacceptable burden on the administration of criminal justice.

Nor would suppression ensure fairness on the theory that it tends to safeguard the adversary system of justice. To assure the fairness of trial proceedings, this Court has held that assistance of counsel must be available at pretrial confrontations. … Fairness can be assured by placing the State and the accused in the same positions they would have been in had the impermissible conduct not taken place. However, if the government can prove that the evidence would have been obtained inevitably and, therefore, would have been admitted regardless of any overreaching by the police, there is no rational basis to keep that evidence from the jury in order to ensure the fairness of the trial proceedings. In that situation, the State has gained no advantage at trial and the defendant has suffered no prejudice. Indeed, suppression of the evidence would operate to undermine the adversary system by putting the State in a worse position than it would have occupied without any police misconduct. Williams’ argument that inevitable discovery constitutes impermissible balancing of values is without merit.

. …

. … But when, as here, the evidence in question would inevitably have been discovered without reference to the police error or misconduct, there is no nexus sufficient to provide a taint, and the evidence is admissible.

The Court of Appeals did not find it necessary to consider whether the record fairly supported the finding that the volunteer search party would ultimately or inevitably have discovered the victim’s body. However, three courts independently reviewing the evidence have found that the body of the child inevitably would have been found by the searchers. Williams challenges these findings. …

. … There was testimony that it would have taken an additional three to five hours to discover the body if the search had continued; the body was found near a culvert, one of the kinds of places the teams had been specifically directed to search.

On this record, it is clear that the search parties were approaching the actual location of the body, and we are satisfied … the body inevitably would have been found. The evidence asserted by Williams as newly discovered … does not demonstrate that the material facts were inadequately developed in the suppression hearing in state court, or that Williams was denied a full, fair, and adequate opportunity to present all relevant facts at the suppression hearing.

The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

JUSTICE BRENNAN, with whom JUSTICE MARSHALL joins, dissenting.

In Brewer v. Williams, (1977), we held that the respondent’s state conviction for first-degree murder had to be set aside because it was based in part on statements obtained from the respondent in violation of his right to the assistance of counsel guaranteed by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments. At the same time, we noted that,

“[w]hile neither Williams’ incriminating statements themselves nor any testimony describing his having led the police to the victim’s body can constitutionally be admitted into evidence, evidence of where the body was found and of its condition might well be admissible on the theory that the body would have been discovered in any event.”

To the extent that today’s decision adopts this “inevitable discovery” exception to the exclusionary rule, it simply acknowledges a doctrine that is akin to the “independent source” exception first recognized by the Court in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, (1920). In particular, the Court concludes that unconstitutionally obtained evidence may be admitted at trial if it inevitably would have been discovered in the same condition by an independent line of investigation that was already being pursued when the constitutional violation occurred. As has every Federal Court of Appeals previously addressing this issue, I agree that, in these circumstances, the “inevitable discovery” exception to the exclusionary rule is consistent with the requirements of the Constitution.

In its zealous efforts to emasculate the exclusionary rule, however, the Court loses sight of the crucial difference between the “inevitable discovery” doctrine and the “independent source” exception from which it is derived. When properly applied, the “independent source” exception allows the prosecution to use evidence only if it was, in fact, obtained by fully lawful means. It therefore does no violence to the constitutional protections that the exclusionary rule is meant to enforce. The “inevitable discovery” exception is likewise compatible with the Constitution, though it differs in one key respect from its next of kin: specifically, the evidence sought to be introduced at trial has not actually been obtained from an independent source, but rather would have been discovered as a matter of course if independent investigations were allowed to proceed.

In my view, this distinction should require that the government satisfy a heightened burden of proof before it is allowed to use such evidence. The inevitable discovery exception necessarily implicates a hypothetical finding that differs in kind from the factual finding that precedes application of the independent source rule. To ensure that this hypothetical finding is narrowly confined to circumstances that are functionally equivalent to an independent source, and to protect fully the fundamental rights served by the exclusionary rule, I would require clear and convincing evidence before concluding that the government had met its burden of proof on this issue. Increasing the burden of proof serves to impress the factfinder with the importance of the decision, and thereby reduces the risk that illegally obtained evidence will be admitted. Because the lower courts did not impose such a requirement, I would remand this case for application of this heightened burden of proof by the lower courts in the first instance. I am therefore unable to join either the Court’s opinion or its judgment.

Excerpted by Alex Nobiletti

Hudson v. Michigan (2006)

547 U.S. 586 (2006)

Vote: 5-4
Decision: Affirmed
Majority: Scalia with respect to Parts I, II, and III, joined by Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito and Parts IV, joined by Roberts, Thomas, and Alito
Concurrence in part: Kennedy
Dissent: Breyer, joined by Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg

Justice Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court.

We decide whether violation of the “knock-and-announce” rule requires the suppression of all evidence found in the search.

Police obtained a warrant authorizing a search for drugs and firearms at the home of petitioner Booker Hudson. They discovered both. Large quantities of drugs were found, including cocaine rocks in Hudson’s pocket. A loaded gun was lodged between the cushion and armrest of the chair in which he was sitting. Hudson was charged under Michigan law with unlawful drug and firearm possession.

This case is before us only because of the method of entry into the house. When the police arrived to execute the warrant, they announced their presence, but waited only a short time–perhaps “three to five seconds,”–before turning the knob of the unlocked front door and entering Hudson’s home. Hudson moved to suppress all the inculpatory evidence, arguing that the premature entry violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

The Michigan trial court granted his motion … the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed, relying on Michigan Supreme Court cases holding that suppression is inappropriate when entry is made pursuant to warrant but without proper “‘knock and announce.'” The Michigan Supreme Court denied leave to appeal. Hudson was convicted of drug possession. He renewed his Fourth Amendment claim on appeal, but the Court of Appeals rejected it and affirmed the conviction. The Michigan Supreme Court again declined review. We granted certiorari.

The common-law principle that law enforcement officers must announce their presence and provide residents an opportunity to open the door is an ancient one. … Since 1917, when Congress passed the Espionage Act, this traditional protection has been part of federal statutory law. … [I]n Wilson, we were asked whether the rule was also a command of the Fourth Amendment. Tracing its origins in our English legal heritage, we concluded that it was.

. …

. … From the trial level onward, Michigan has conceded that the entry was a knock-and-announce violation. The issue here is remedy. Wilson specifically declined to decide whether the exclusionary rule is appropriate for violation of the knock-and-announce requirement. That question is squarely before us now.

In Weeks v. United States, (1914), we adopted the federal exclusionary rule for evidence that was unlawfully seized from a home without a warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment. We began applying the same rule to the States, through the Fourteenth Amendment, in Mapp v. Ohio, (1961).

Suppression of evidence, however, has always been our last resort, not our first impulse. The exclusionary rule generates “substantial social costs,” United States v. Leon, (1984). … We have therefore been “cautio[us] against expanding” it, Colorado v. Connelly, (1986), and “have repeatedly emphasized that the rule’s ‘costly toll’ … ” Pennsylvania Bd. of Probation and Parole v. Scott, (1998) (citation omitted). We have rejected “[i]ndiscriminate application” of the rule, Leon, and have held it to be applicable only “where its remedial objectives are thought most efficaciously served,” United States v. Calandra, (1974)–that is, “where its deterrence benefits outweigh its ‘substantial social costs,” Scott, (quoting Leon).

. …

In other words, exclusion may not be premised on the mere fact that a constitutional violation was a “but-for” cause of obtaining evidence … we have “never held that evidence is ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ simply because ‘it would not have come to light but for the illegal actions of the police. …

. …

. … Until a valid warrant has issued, citizens are entitled to shield “their persons, houses, papers, and effects,” U. S. Const., Amdt. 4, from the government’s scrutiny. Exclusion of the evidence obtained by a warrantless search vindicates that entitlement. The interests protected by the knock-and-announce requirement are quite different–and do not include the shielding of potential evidence from the government’s eyes.

One of those interests is the protection of human life and limb, because an unannounced entry may provoke violence in supposed self-defense by the surprised resident. Another interest is the protection of property. Breaking a house (as the old cases typically put it) absent an announcement would penalize someone who “did not know of the process, of which, if he had notice, it is to be presumed that he would obey it. … ” Wilson [v. Arkansas (1995)], (quoting Semayne’s Case). The knock-and-announce rule gives individuals “the opportunity to comply with the law and to avoid the destruction of property occasioned by a forcible entry.” Richards [v. Wisconsin, (1997)]. And thirdly, the knock-and-announce rule protects those elements of privacy and dignity that can be destroyed by a sudden entrance. … In other words, it assures the opportunity to collect oneself before answering the door.

What the knock-and-announce rule has never protected, however, is one’s interest in preventing the government from seeing or taking evidence described in a warrant. Since the interests that were violated in this case have nothing to do with the seizure of the evidence, the exclusionary rule is inapplicable.

Quite apart from the requirement of unattenuated causation, the exclusionary rule has never been applied except “where its deterrence benefits outweigh its ‘substantial social costs,” Scott, (quoting Leon). The costs here are considerable. In addition to the grave adverse consequence that exclusion of relevant incriminating evidence always entails … imposing that massive remedy for a knock-and-announce violation would generate a constant flood of alleged failures to observe the rule … The cost of entering this lottery would be small, but the jackpot enormous: suppression of all evidence, amounting in many cases to a get-out-of-jail-free card. … Unlike the warrant or Miranda requirements, compliance with which is readily determined … what constituted a “reasonable wait time” in a particular case … is difficult for the trial court to determine and even more difficult for an appellate court to review.

Another consequence of the incongruent remedy Hudson proposes would be police officers’ refraining from timely entry after knocking and announcing. As we have observed, the amount of time they must wait is necessarily uncertain. If the consequences of running afoul of the rule were so massive, officers would be inclined to wait longer than the law requires–producing preventable violence against officers in some cases, and the destruction of evidence in many others. We deemed these consequences severe enough to produce our unanimous agreement that a mere “reasonable suspicion” that knocking and announcing ” … would be dangerous or futile, or that it would inhibit the effective investigation of the crime,” will cause the requirement to yield. Richards.

Next to these “substantial social costs” we must consider the deterrence benefits, existence of which is a necessary condition for exclusion. … To begin with, the value of deterrence depends upon the strength of the incentive to commit the forbidden act. Viewed from this perspective, deterrence of knock-and-announce violations is not worth a lot. Violation of the warrant requirement sometimes produces incriminating evidence that could not otherwise be obtained. But ignoring knock-and-announce can realistically be expected to achieve absolutely nothing except the prevention of destruction of evidence and the avoidance of life-threatening resistance by occupants of the premises–dangers which, if there is even “reasonable suspicion” of their existence, suspend the knock-and-announce requirement anyway. Massive deterrence is hardly required.

. …

We cannot assume that exclusion in this context is necessary deterrence simply because we found that it was necessary deterrence in different contexts and long ago. That would be forcing the public today to pay for the sins and inadequacies of a legal regime that existed almost half a century ago. …

. …

In sum, the social costs of applying the exclusionary rule to knock-and-announce violations are considerable; the incentive to such violations is minimal to begin with, and the extant deterrences against them are substantial–incomparably greater than the factors deterring warrantless entries when Mapp was decided. Resort to the massive remedy of suppressing evidence of guilt is unjustified.

A trio of cases–Segura v. United States, (1984); New York v. Harris, (1990); and United States v. Ramirez, (1998)–confirms our conclusion that suppression is unwarranted in this case.

. …

If the search in Segura could be “wholly unrelated to the prior entry,” when the only entry was warrantless, it would be bizarre to treat more harshly the actions in this case, where the only entry was with a warrant. …

In the second case, Harris, the police violated the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights by arresting him at home without a warrant, contrary to Payton v. New York, (1980). Once taken to the station house, he gave an incriminating statement. We refused to exclude it. …

United States v. Ramirez, involved a claim that police entry violated the Fourth Amendment because it was effected by breaking a window. We ultimately concluded that the property destruction was, under all the circumstances, reasonable, but in the course of our discussion we unanimously said the following: “[D]estruction of property in the course of a search may violate the Fourth Amendment, even though the entry itself is lawful and the fruits of the search are not subject to suppression.” Had the breaking of the window been unreasonable, the Court said, it would have been necessary to determine whether there had been a “sufficient causal relationship between the breaking of the window and the discovery of the guns to warrant suppression of the evidence.” What clearer expression could there be of the proposition that an impermissible manner of entry does not necessarily trigger the exclusionary rule?

For the foregoing reasons we affirm the judgment of the Michigan Court of Appeals.

It is so ordered.

Justice Breyer, with whom Justice Stevens, Justice Souter, and Justice Ginsburg join, dissenting.

In Wilson v. Arkansas, (1995), a unanimous Court held that the Fourth Amendment normally requires law enforcement officers to knock and announce their presence before entering a dwelling. Today’s opinion holds that evidence seized from a home following a violation of this requirement need not be suppressed.

As a result, the Court destroys the strongest legal incentive to comply with the Constitution’s knock-and-announce requirement. And the Court does so without significant support in precedent. At least I can find no such support in the many Fourth Amendment cases the Court has decided in the near century since it first set forth the exclusionary principle in Weeks v. United States, (1914).

Today’s opinion is thus doubly troubling. It represents a significant departure from the Court’s precedents. And it weakens, perhaps destroys, much of the practical value of the Constitution’s knock-and-announce protection.

This Court has set forth the legal principles that ought to have determined the outcome of this case in two sets of basic Fourth Amendment cases. I shall begin by describing that underlying case law.

The first set of cases describes the constitutional knock-and-announce requirement, a requirement that this Court initially set forth only 11 years ago in Wilson v. Arkansas, Sabbath v. United States, (1968) (suppressing evidence seized in violation of federal statutory knock-and-announce requirement); Miller v. United States, (1958) (same). In Wilson, tracing the lineage of the knock-and-announce rule back to the 13th century. …

. … We further concluded that there was

“little doubt that the Framers of the Fourth Amendment thought that the method of an officer’s entry into a dwelling was among the factors to be considered in assessing the reasonableness of a search or seizure.”

And we held that the “common-law ‘knock and announce’ principle forms a part of the reasonableness inquiry under the Fourth Amendment.” Thus, “a search or seizure of a dwelling might be constitutionally defective if police officers enter without prior announcement.” United States v. Banks, (2003); United States v. Ramirez, (1998); Richards v. Wisconsin, (1997).

The second set of cases sets forth certain well-established principles that are relevant here. They include:

Boyd v. United States, (1886). In this seminal Fourth Amendment case, decided 120 years ago, the Court wrote, in frequently quoted language, that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions apply

“to all invasions on the part of the government and its employés of the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life. It is not the breaking of his doors, and the rummaging of his drawers, that constitutes the essence of the offence; but it is the invasion of his indefeasible right of personal security, personal liberty and private property.”

Weeks … decided 28 years after Boyd, originated the exclusionary rule. The Court held that the Federal Government could not retain evidence seized unconstitutionally and use that evidence in a federal criminal trial. …

Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, (1920) … created an exception to (or a qualification of) Weeks’ exclusionary rule. The Court held that the Government could not use information obtained during an illegal search to subpoena documents that they illegally viewed during that search. Writing for the Court, Justice Holmes noted that the exclusionary rule “does not mean that the facts [unlawfully] obtained become sacred and inaccessible. If knowledge of them is gained from an independent source they may be proved like any others. … “. …

Wolf v. Colorado, (1949), and Mapp v. Ohio, (1961) … considered whether Weeks’ exclusionary rule applies to the States. In Wolf, the Court held that it did not. … In Mapp, the Court overruled Wolf. Experience, it said, showed that alternative methods of enforcing the Fourth Amendment’s requirements had failed. …

. …

For another thing, the driving legal purpose underlying the exclusionary rule … deterrence of unlawful government behavior, argues strongly for suppression. … In Weeks, Silverthorne, and Mapp, the Court based its holdings requiring suppression of unlawfully obtained evidence upon the recognition that admission of that evidence would seriously undermine the Fourth Amendment’s promise. All three cases recognized that failure to apply the exclusionary rule would make that promise a hollow one. … Indeed, this Court in Mapp held that the exclusionary rule applies to the States in large part due to its belief that alternative state mechanisms for enforcing the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees had proved “worthless and futile.”

. …

The Court has declined to apply the exclusionary rule only:

(1) where there is a specific reason to believe that application of the rule would “not result in appreciable deterrence,” United States v. Janis, (1976); United States v. Leon, (1984) (exception where searching officer executes defective search warrant in “good faith”); Arizona v. Evans, (1995) (exception for clerical errors by court employees) … or

(2) where admissibility in proceedings other than criminal trials was at issue. …

Neither of these two exceptions applies here. …

I am aware of no other basis for an exception. The Court has decided more than 300 Fourth Amendment cases since Weeks. … But in every case involving evidence seized during an illegal search of a home … the Court … has … upheld (or required) the suppression of the evidence at trial. In not one of those cases did the Court “questio[n], in the absence of a more efficacious sanction, the continued application of the [exclusionary] rule to suppress evidence from the State’s case” in a criminal trial. Franks v. Delaware, (1978).

I can find nothing persuasive in the majority’s opinion that could justify its refusal to apply the rule. …

Neither can the majority justify its failure to respect the need for deterrence, as set forth consistently in the Court’s prior case law, through its claim of “substantial social costs”–at least if it means that those “social costs” are somehow special here. The only costs it mentions are those that typically accompany any use of the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary principle: (1) that where the constable blunders, a guilty defendant may be set free (consider Mapp itself); (2) that defendants may assert claims where Fourth Amendment rights are uncertain (consider the Court’s qualified immunity jurisprudence), and (3) that sometimes it is difficult to decide the merits of those uncertain claims. … The majority’s “substantial social costs” argument is an argument against the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary principle itself. And it is an argument that this Court, until now, has consistently rejected.

The majority, Michigan, and the United States make several additional arguments. In my view, those arguments rest upon misunderstandings of the principles underlying this Court’s precedents.

The majority first argues that “the constitutional violation of an illegal manner of entry was not a but-for cause of obtaining the evidence.” But taking causation as it is commonly understood in the law, I do not see how that can be so. Although the police might have entered Hudson’s home lawfully, they did not in fact do so. Their unlawful behavior inseparably characterizes their actual entry; that entry was a necessary condition of their presence in Hudson’s home; and their presence in Hudson’s home was a necessary condition of their finding and seizing the evidence. At the same time, their discovery of evidence in Hudson’s home was a readily foreseeable consequence of their entry and their unlawful presence within the home.

. …

. … As support for this proposition, Michigan rests on this Court’s inevitable discovery cases.

This claim, however, misunderstands the inevitable discovery doctrine. Justice Holmes in Silverthorne, in discussing an “independent source” exception, set forth the principles underlying the inevitable discovery rule. That rule does not refer to discovery that would have taken place if the police behavior in question had (contrary to fact) been lawful. The doctrine does not treat as critical what hypothetically could have happened had the police acted lawfully in the first place. Rather, “independent” or “inevitable” discovery refers to discovery that did occur or that would have occurred (1) despite (not simply in the absence of) the unlawful behavior and (2) independently of that unlawful behavior. The government cannot, for example, avoid suppression of evidence seized without a warrant (or pursuant to a defective warrant) simply by showing that it could have obtained a valid warrant had it sought one. Instead, it must show that the same evidence “inevitably would have been discovered by lawful means.” Nix v. Williams [(1984)],(emphasis added). …

. …

Thus, the Court’s opinion reflects a misunderstanding of what “inevitable discovery” means when it says … “Whether that preliminary misstep has occurred or not, the police … would have discovered the gun and the drugs inside the house.” Despite the phrase “of course,” neither of these statements is correct. It is not true that, had the illegal entry not occurred, “police would have discovered the guns and drugs inside the house.” Without that unlawful entry they would not have been inside the house; so there would have been no discovery.

Of course, had the police entered the house lawfully, they would have found the gun and drugs. But that fact is beside the point. The question is not what police might have done had they not behaved unlawfully. The question is what they did do. Was there set in motion an independent chain of events that would have inevitably led to the discovery and seizure of the evidence despite, and independent of, that behavior? The answer here is “no.”

. …

How can Justice Scalia maintain that the evidence here–a gun and drugs seized in the home–is “not the fruit” of the illegal entry? The officers’ failure to knock and announce rendered the entire search unlawful, Wilson, and that unlawful search led to the discovery of evidence in petitioner’s home. Thus, Harris compels the opposite result than that reached by the Court today. Like the Payton rule at issue in Harris, the knock-and-announce rule reflects the “reverence of the law for the individual’s right of privacy in his house.” Miller. … Like the confession that was “excluded, as it should have been,” in Harris, the evidence in this case was seized in the home, immediately following the illegal entry. …

. …

. … [E]xperience … provides confirmation of what common sense suggests: without suppression there is little to deter knock-and-announce violations.

There may be instances in the law where text or history or tradition leaves room for a judicial decision that rests upon little more than an unvarnished judicial instinct. But this is not one of them. Rather, our Fourth Amendment traditions place high value upon protecting privacy in the home. They emphasize the need to assure that its constitutional protections are effective, lest the Amendment ‘sound the word of promise to the ear but break it to the hope.’ They include an exclusionary principle, which since Weeks has formed the centerpiece of the criminal law’s effort to ensure the practical reality of those promises. That is why the Court should assure itself that any departure from that principle is firmly grounded in logic, in history, in precedent, and in empirical fact. It has not done so. That is why, with respect, I dissent.

Excerpted by Alex Nobiletti