U.S. Supreme Court: Negligent police conduct does not require evidence's suppression.

• Author: Ziemer, David

Byline: David Ziemer

The exclusionary rule doesn't bar evidence discovered after executing an invalid arrest warrant, provided the error was only negligent, and was attenuated from the arrest.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote for the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 14, To trigger the exclusionary rule, police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system.

At a minimum, the holding merely extends the court's prior precedent in Arizona v. Evans, 514 U.S. 1 (1995), from errors by court staff to negligence by police personnel.

However, it could lay the grounds for a future holding that limits the exclusionary rule to deliberate and reckless police conduct, but not when a police officer is merely negligent.

The case began when Bennie Dean Herring drove to a county sheriff's department in Alabama to retrieve something from his impounded truck.

An officer familiar with Herring asked the county's warrant clerk to check if he had any outstanding arrest warrants. When she found none, he asked her to check with her counterpart in a neighboring county.

Informed that an outstanding arrest warrant existed in that county, the officer arrested Herring.

Based on evidence recovered pursuant to the search incident to arrest, Herring was charged in federal court with drug and firearm offenses.

The district court denied his motion to suppress the evidence, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed, concluding that application of the exclusionary rule would not serve any deterrent purpose.

The Supreme Court accepted review and affirmed. Four justices dissented, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer both penning dissents.

Relying heavily on its precedents in both Evans and U.S. v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984), the majority acknowledged that a Fourth Amendment violation occurred, but concluded that the exclusionary rule did not compel suppression of the evidence.

In Leon, the court held that, when police execute a search warrant that is invalid for lack of probable cause, the exclusionary rule does not apply if the police acted in objectively reasonable reliance on the warrant.

In Evans, the court held that the exclusionary rule does not apply when police reasonably rely on mistaken information in a court's database that an arrest warrant was outstanding.

The court noted the three reasons supporting the holding in Evans:

(1) the...