Funny. Mine are all about warts.
People, whatever misunderstanding existed between Bricker and myself has been cleared up. Let’s drop it.
I feel that justice and the law should have the goals of protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty. Sometimes, in guaranteeing the protection of the innocent, it’s necessary to also apply protection to the guilty. And in a few situations, in seeking to punish the guilty, innocents are unfortunately also hurt. But I can’t see any sense in a procedure that exclusively protects the guilty. And that’s what the exclusionary rule seems to be to me.
Let’s say the police decide to go a-raiding in my neighborhood. They’re feeling rowdy so they figure they don’t need no steenkin’ warrants. They go from house to house, smashing in doors and tearing apart people’s homes. Now everyone in my neighbourhood suffered from having their privacy violated and their property damaged. For most of us that was the end of it - the police didn’t find any evidence of any crimes during their highly illegal searches. But in two of the houses, they did find some evidence of crime - one guy had a bag of heroin and one guy had an illegal automatic rifle. Those two guys were arrested. But within hours their lawyers were having judges throw out the evidence based on the fact that if was obtained via an illegal search. These guys certainly benefited from the exclusionary rule.
So now you’ve got a situation where the only people who actually received any benefit from the exclusionary rule were the only two people who were actually guilty of a crime. How screwed up is that?
I realize that as a practical matter, the exclusionary rule does offer some theoretical benefit to innocent people as well. It probably inhibits the police from performing many illegal searches (which is its intent), some of which were undoubtedly against innocent people. But the effect is overwhelmingly indirect. It’s like “trickle-down” civil rights - it offers so much legal protection to guilty people that some of it overflows and protects innocent people.
How would you propose to deter police from illegal searches?
Civil liability.
Twice in my life, I’ve had cops arrive at the door to serve an arrest warrant to someone I’d never heard of.
Once was at a friend’s house (they didn’t know the person with the warrant either) where they had lived for over two years. The person on the warrant had a hispanic name. I’m a 6’5" white guy. When they asked for my ID, I asked them if they had a discription of thier suspect and how tall is he? I finally showed them my ID as friend’s wife was looking paniked.
Second time was at a hotel in Vienna Austria. I’d been living in the room for nearly two weeks at that point. Not being overy fluent in german, and not knowing what my leagle rights were in that country, I showed the little man my passport and he went on his way.
In both these cases they knocked. In both cases they were just sure they were in the right place. The Austrian cop was plain clothed, and not very big. If he’d come in with out knocking, I very well might have taken him on.
No-knock warrants need to be used rarely at most, and I’d say never would be better.