Will Hauptman*
Introduction
The Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule is experiencing death by a thousand cuts. Since the Supreme Court created the rule,[1] its opinions have whittled away at the rule’s application with various exceptions and limitations.[2] So it is today that the Court only finds exclusion appropriate where the benefits of suppressing evidence outweigh its costs.[3] That rarely happens, says the Court. After all, what benefit could outweigh the cost of letting the guilty go free?
Apparently not the benefit of deterring the violation of an elementary Fourth Amendment principle: that no officer may conduct an investigatory stop absent reasonable suspicion of criminal wrongdoing.[4] At least not in Utah v. Strieff.[5] In that case, decided last summer, the Court held admissible drug-related evidence that an officer obtained after a concededly unconstitutional stop.[6] Why? Because the officer, immediately after stopping Edward Strieff, discovered that Strieff had an outstanding arrest warrant, and this discovery sufficiently attenuated the connection between the unconstitutional stop and the officer’s discovery of the evidence.[7]
This Comment discusses Utah v. Strieff in the larger context of the exclusionary rule’s movement toward meaninglessness. Continue reading “What Remains of the Exclusionary Rule?”