The Fourth Amendment and Good Faith: Ten Years and Counting
| Publication year | 1994 |
| Pages | 1073 |
1994, May, Pg. 1073. The Fourth Amendment and Good Faith: Ten Years and Counting
It has been nearly a decade since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion in United States v. Leon.(fn1) The Leon case provided judicial sanctification of a precept that has since slowly gained a foothold in constitutional law. The decision represented a significant change in search and seizure law by providing a "good faith" exception to the exclusionary rule's treatment of Fourth Amendment violations by law enforcement officials. Proponents of the exclusionary rule, a well-established principle of the Fourth Amendment, decried the effort and found the new principle unsettling.
This article discusses the principles of good faith as set forth in Leon, as well as the legal and judicial history of Colorado's approach to the good faith exception.
The exclusionary rule is so well established in constitutional law that many legal scholars consider it an inseparable part of the Fourth Amendment. Yet it is, in reality, little more than a judicially created remedy to safeguard against illegal police conduct. Because it was not constitutionally created, it could be (and eventually was) changed. In sum, "the rule is a judicially created remedy designed to safeguard Fourth Amendment rights generally through its deterrent effect, rather than a personal constitutional right of the party aggrieved."(fn2)
Some observers, and a minority of judges, have argued that the exclusionary rule has the separate function of ensuring the court's integrity. The U.S. Supreme Court has apparently rejected this view by holding that the exclusionary rule's prime purpose is to deter future unlawful police conduct:
The rule is calculated to prevent, not to repair. Its purpose is to deter---to compel respect for the constitutional guaranty in the only effectively available way---by removing the incentive to disregard it.(fn3)
Colorado began addressing the issues raised as a result of the rigid application of the exclusionary rule as early as 1981, when the passage of CRS § 16-3-308 took effect. CRS § 16-3-308 did statutorily what Leon later did constitutionally--- that is, provide that if law enforcement acted in good faith as it transgressed the boundaries of the Fourth Amendment, the resulting evidence would not be suppressed. Because of the statute's wording, however, the next few years saw significant problems for prosecutors when they attempted to use the statute as a good faith exception. The Colorado statute proved to be much more restrictive than its later federal constitutional counterpart, providing relief for mistakes of fact but not of law.
The first Colorado court decision relating to good faith was in 1983 in People v. Quintero.(fn4) The Quintero case was an early attempt by Colorado prosecutors to capitalize on the good faith trend---too early, however, because the U.S. Supreme Court had not yet officially sanctioned the good faith exception. At the time Quintero was decided, only a dissenting opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Stone v. Powell(fn5) provided any significant federal support for modifying the exclusionary rule.
Factually, Quintero presented a number of interesting issues and may not have been local prosecutors' best bet at persuading the Colorado courts on the good faith exception, due to the fact that it concerned a mistake of law and not of fact. The case involved a witness who observed the defendant peering into the windows of a nearby residence. The same defendant was later seen by the witness carrying a television partly hidden by his shirt to a bus stop and acting "antsey" (sic). The witness called the police, and officers eventually arrested the suspect. However, at the time of the arrest, the witness had not yet told the officers what she had seen.
The Colorado Supreme Court found the arrest lacking in probable cause. A primary factor in this determination was that at the time of the arrest, the police had no report of a burglary and, other than the items discovered in the suspect's possession, no reason to believe a burglary had occurred. The prosecution asserted good faith under CRS § 16-3-308,
arguing that based on the information then available, the officers acted in good faith in believing they had probable cause for the arrest.
The Supreme Court quickly rejected this assertion, ruling that the statute had no application here and stating: "The lack of probable cause to arrest cannot be remedied by resort to the good faith exception or the inevitable discovery rule."(fn6) The court reiterated that except for the dissent in Stone, the U.S. Supreme Court did not recognize a...
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