In the movie, Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan enters premises of a suspect without a warrant and then later tortures the suspect. In the premises he finds a rifle which is the murder weapon used in earlier murders. The suspect reveals the location of a girl who is buried alive.
The police chief tells him that because of this the villain, Scorpio, will go free. All of the evidence is inadmissible and so there’s no point in bringing Scorpio to trial.
So:
1 - Is the movie factually correct? Would the evidence be excluded?
2 - Could a lawyer argue some kind of exigent circumstances? Note: Callahan brings this up, to which the chief replies “Yes, but she was already dead.” to which Callahan says “Sure, but I didn’t know that.”
My second line of inquiry is earlier in the movie Callahan stabs Scorpio in the leg (Scorpio is wearing a mask). The suspect he tortures has a knife wound in his leg. Scorpio at that time injured Callahan, threatened to kill him, let the girl die and shots another officer with a machine gun.
So:
1 - Could Scorpio be brought up on any charges related to this as it takes place before the warrantless search and torture?
2 - How much of an Callahan’s testimony going to be compromised by Callahan’s subsequent torture?
Note, the movie was made in 1971, so I’d be especially interested if perhaps any of this would have changed since then.
I always said, if I hadn’t of gone into science I would have loved to be a lawyer. I love the analysis of the law!
Yes. Illegally obtained evidence is subject to the exclusionary rule under the Fourth Amendment (and in this case, under the Fifth Amendment.) The only way to bring in the evidence would be to prove that the police would have found it anyway (“inevitable discovery”) or that an unrelated investigation had already discovered it (“independent source.”) These are high bars.
There are exceptions to the warrant requirement, but I won’t go into them here because there are a lot of them, and none would remotely apply under these facts. The exigent circumstances exception is one of them, but if I’m understanding the plot correctly (I haven’t seen the movie) it’s not relevant; the warrant requirement violation must be based on exigent circumstances that are known to the police. For example, if Harry heard the girl’s screams.
Presumably in the “Good Old Days” the police would deny any such torture or illegal entry took place, the whole department would back up the story and make up some reason how it happened “legally”, the guy probably couldn’t afford anything more serious than an beginner lawyer, and the judge might disallow questioning that alleged a police conspiracy? There’s plenty of people railroaded back then with a lot less evidence.
Well, in the Good Old Days we didn’t have the exclusionary rule, at least in most state prosecutions. The Fourth Amendment wasn’t incorporated against the states until 1961. In theory, the remedy before that was to sue the police (though some states adopted the exclusionary rule in their own statutes or constitutions.) So you’d go to prison, but possibly get some money damages. The Fifth Amendment prohibition on self-incrimination wasn’t incorporated against the states until 1965.
In the movie, all they know is that Scorpio has sent the police a message that he has buried a girl alive and she has enough oxygen to last until 3 AM. He also sent along with some evidence (the girl’s clothes positively IDed by the girl’s mother) that he had in fact kidnapped her.
He wants $250,000 dollars (hey it was the 70s, that was a lot of money), or he’ll let her die. When Callahan delivers the money, Scorpio assault Callahan, threatens to kill him, says he’s going to let the girl die anyway, and just when he is about to kill him Inspector Gonzalez intervenes and is shot by Scorpio. Callahan stabs Scorpio in the leg, which is how he identifies him later (Scorpio was wearing a mask at the time).
All of this takes place prior to the warrantless search and prior to the torture.
Oh and thanks so much for your replies so far Really Not All That Bright.
It’s all fiction, of course. In the Real World, any Dirty Harry would probably have only one movie in him. After that, he’d get his ass fired and wouldn’t be around to make any more movies. Maybe not so much in the Good Old Days.
Callahan is portrayed as being very aware that he could get his ass fired for some of his stunts. Remember that famous scene where he asks “Do you feel lucky, punk?” towards the end of the movie? IIRC this happens in a forest near a creek or pond. Callahan shoots the guy, then pulls out his badge and tosses it into the water.
I always got the impression that this was the whole point of the Dirt Harry movies, beyond entertainment.
An exploration of the tensions created by the relatively recently imposed restraints upon police methods as they deal with lawless criminals, what happens when they go too far, what IS too far, …
I agree. I had not seen “Dirty Harry” in a very long time, and watched it because it was on and I like to have something on while I work. I found that it is a much more thoughtful movie that I would have predicted. There’s isn’t that much of a focus on action or violence compared to more modern action movies, and specifically cop movies. It was interesting, because that scene (where the chief chews on Callahan and tells him the suspect is going to be let go) has been parodied in other movies, it has become practically a cliche. However, in this movie, which I think is the original version of this sort of scene, it doesn’t come across as being goofy, but instead of raising this very point. Does the law go too far in protecting the bad guys rights? That’s why I found RNATB’s comment above really interesting. If these things had just been incorporated into the states, it makes that scene even more compelling because of its temporal context.
Look, I’m not saying “Dirty Harry” is going to change anybody’s life, and the sequels definitely stray more towards the “Yeehah! Violence!” (especially the ones in the 80s) but this movie really surprised me.
I see it as an extension of the “ticking time bomb” argument: “Look, we know he’s guilty, why can’t we beat the information out of him?” And by extension, why should obviously bad people have rights at all?
But then, this is a variation on the Western genre, where the state is a remote and ineffective force and it’s up to you to defend yourself from the obvious bad guys with lethal force.
I kind of like the “Law and Order” variation, where they arrest the obvious bad guys in the most embarrassing situation, or harass them at work so they lose their minimum-wage job - only to discover that 'Oops, they didn’t do it" but no apology, no setting it right.
In the movie, they let the guy go - just walk out - even though they could presumably very easily prove he’d just shot one cop (and beat the hell out of Harry and threatened to kill him). Hell, he had Harry’s knife in his leg!
Even if they had zero evidence that he was linked to the dead girl other than the tainted confession and gun, there is no way he would just walk out a free man under these circumstances.
They play up the conflict for effect - to show the law as an ass, and Harry’s vigilantism as perhaps morally justified as a means of dealing with a monster. In the next movie in the series, Magnum Force, they go the other route - in that one, the cop/vigilantes are the monsters, and Harry is the (reluctant) champion of the legal system!
So-called testilying is rampant even today. Cops lie: [INDENT][INDENT]A 1987 study from Chicago found that 76 percent of officers agreed that that they frequently bent the facts to establish probable cause; 48 percent said that judges were right in tossing police testimony as untrustworthy.
Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, publicly stated in the 1990s:
“It is an open secret long shared by prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges that perjury is widespread among law enforcement officers … police lie to avoid letting someone they think is guilty, or they know is guilty, go free.”[/INDENT][/INDENT] In a high profile case like the one Callahan is working on, the idea that [del]the Zodiac Killer[/del] Scorpio would just walk is humorous.
If I read one of Alan Dershowitz’ books correctly, he said that a judge actually said to a cop, “Is that the best you can do?” And, then, let the testimony stand.
