Majority’s Lack of Enthusiasm for Exclusionary Rule Could Play Out in New Case
The U.S. Supreme Court may create another exception to the exclusionary rule when it decides a case accepted yesterday involving a man who was mistakenly arrested.
“Justices on the current Supreme Court have made no secret of their desire to carve more exceptions out of the nearly 100-year-old exclusionary rule,” the New York Times reports. “On Tuesday, the court accepted a new case that could provide a route toward that goal.”
The story says a 2006 majority opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia in Hudson v. Michigan “expressed deep reservations” about the usefulness of the rule. The decision refused to bar evidence obtained by police officers who entered a home with a search warrant but did not knock and announce their presence before rushing in.
The new case, Herring v. United States, asks whether evidence may be admitted at trial if it was obtained from an arrest based on mistaken information from police files.
Herring was litigated as part of a student project at Stanford Law School’s Supreme Court litigation clinic. The law school was the first to launch such a clinic, and several others followed, the ABA Journal reported in a February article.
