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The Supreme Court ruled today that evidence gained from an illegal search or unlawful arrest is admissable as evidence provided the search or arrest arose from a clerical error over a warrant — i.e, as long as the officers involved believed they had a legal warrant or probable cause.
Now, consider this in view of the various occasions on which it has been admitted that as many as 50% of the records in some government databases may be in error.
The way I see it, if I violate a law through negligence or error, that doesn't get me anywhere; I'm still liable. The government and its agents should be held to the same standard. If they make an illegal search or arrest because of negligence or an error, it's still an illegal search or arrest, and anything they find should still be inadmissable. I can see and understand the arguments to the contrary, but balanced against them is the slippery slope that if any illegal search or arrest can be excused by saying "Oops", then anyone can get away with making an illegal search or arrest, and what remains of the Fourth Amendment protection may as well be written in chalk on the bottom of a swimming pool.
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I see both sides of the issue, and it is a sticky one. I do think, though, that when it comes to the results of errors, the more ability you have to really fuck up somebody's life with the consequences of your errors, the higher the standard you should be held to. It's that whole "with power comes responsibility" thing.
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One thing that Roberts discusses in the opinion is that the purpose of the exclusionary rule is deterrence and the reason why they ruled this way is that there doesn't seem to be any real likelihood that excluding evidence would have deterred this particular 4th Amendment violation (given the facts as stipulated, this doesn't really seem to be in dispute).
I've cleverly forgotten the name of the case, but back in 1995, there was a similar ruling made. The difference was that they ruled that a court fucking up this kind of thing wouldn't required exclusion of evidence. The reasoning was the same.
The somewhat interesting part (from the political POV, if not a legal one) is that 7 of the 9 justices were on the court at the time. Of those 7, all voted the same way as they did back then and Ginsberg (who wrote the dissent back then) doesn't give any weight to that precedent in her dissent this time.
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