U.S. Supreme Court Rules On Evidence Collection

Here's the situation: A man with a known criminal past - let's call him Joe - heads over to the impound yard to retrieve something from his truck.

A sheriff's detective finds out Joe is on his way to the department, so he asks a clerk to check for any outstanding warrants. None come up.

The investigator asks a clerk in the neighboring county to run a check on Joe. Bingo. Joe's got a warrant for felony failing to appear. The investigator and a patrol deputy wait for Joe to leave the impound yard before pulling him over.

Joe gets arrested. The cops search his pockets and find the drug methamphetamine; a pistol is found in Joe's car. That's a big no-no for a felon like Joe.

With Joe still handcuffed in the backseat, the investigator asks the neighboring county to fax over a copy of the warrant. They can't find it. Turns out, that warrant expired five months ago.

While the warrant's a bust, the investigator still has Joe on charges of possession of a controlled substance and a weapons charge. Joe argues that the search was a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights because the warrant was no good.

Who's right?

On Jan. 14, the U.S. Supreme Court sided 5-4 with law enforcement, saying the police did not willfully act negligent in the arrest. If there was reason to believe that the deputies falsified the warrant or committed a similarly shady act, then the exclusionary rule would apply.

The exclusionary rule is a way to exclude evidence from criminal cases when the defense can prove it was obtained through underhanded tactics or even carelessness.

In Joe's case, it was a clerical error that led to the arrest.

Writing for the dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argues for a more stringent interpretation of the exclusionary rule. Her concern is that the electronic databases that law enforcement relies heavily on these days are not well-monitored or kept up to date.

"Inaccuracies in expansive, interconnected collections of electronic information raise grave concerns for individual liberty," Ginsburg wrote.

To be "arrested, handcuffed, and searched on a public street simply because some bureaucrat has failed to maintain an accurate computer data base," evokes the kind of general warrants that "outraged" the authors of the Bill of Rights, according to Ginsburg.

Circuit Judge Stephen Rushing, president of the Hernando-Citrus Inns of Court, said it's important to weigh the cost to society versus an individual's rights in these types of cases.

Judges have to decide whether it's worth letting a dangerous criminal loose in society because police followed poor procedure, he said.

"It used to be (if a cop) stepped over the line, the bad guy gets cut free," he said. "The evolution has been to (use) a little more common sense."