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Comment by charonn0 | Hacker News Reader

> The lower court ruled in Houston's case that, even if the long-term warrantless surveillance breached Houston's Fourth Amendment rights, the video evidence of his carrying weapons on the property would not be excluded at trial because the authorities said they held a good-faith belief that the spying was constitutional.

Ignorance of the law is no defense, unless your job is to defend the law?

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The purpose of the exclusionary rule and the "fruit of the poisonous tree" is to prevent the police from purposely violating the 4th amendment. There is no other reason why illegally obtained evidence shouldn't be used to convict a criminal.

So the good-faith exemption exists to make sure technical violations that occurred during a good faith attempt at following* the constitution don't result in a criminal going free.

Think about it. If your mom gets murdered and the cops get a warrant that for some reason wasn't technically valid, would you want the murderer to get off scott free? How that that serve justice.

I think the court may be misapplying the good-faith exemption. In my jurisdiction it only applies only in situations where there was a defective search warrant. But each state may be different.

TL;DR; it doesn't make it legal, but it also doesn't give you a get out of jail free card.

>If your mom gets murdered

I wouldn't be happy if the police screwed up for any reason. But violating rights in one case makes it more likely that rights will be violated in other cases. Better to let one guilty person go free than to injure and possibly lock up a hundred innocent people.

>But violating rights in one case makes it more likely that rights will be violated in other cases.

So find another way to punish it. Why should that get some off of a criminal charge. Most of world has no such rule.

And the point of a good-faith exemption is because allowing good-faith fucks up to be used as evidence doesn't increase (much) the likelihood of violations.

>Better to let one guilty person go free than to injure and possibly lock up a hundred innocent people.

But throwing out ill gotten evidence after it was obtained doesn't decrease the chances of locking up innocent people.

Hey, it's the same argument that one makes against the death penalty, but the public at large still doesn't care and they want the guilty to be punished even if it means false positives.

>The purpose of the exclusionary rule and the "fruit of the poisonous tree" is to prevent the police from purposely violating the 4th amendment. There is no other reason why illegally obtained evidence shouldn't be used to convict a criminal.

Even if we accept this, allowing the police to claim ignorance gives a loop hole to allow for illegally obtaining evidence. That is why the evidence must be obtained legally, not 'I thought it was legal but it wasn't'.

That's why the rule is typically narrowly tailored for actual good-faith attempts at following the law. It's not for situations where the police just ignorantly violate the 4th amendment.

Nice appeal to emotion here.

Thank you.

You're assuming good-faith on the part of the police. Then using an emotional counter argument. Think about that. A police officer really believes that you're a terrible person and guilty of some terrible crime; and use that to justify a tiny little lie by pretending s/he didn't know that they couldn't do X.

Of course sane people do not want guilty people to go free. What's wanted here, and what's important here, is not that the guilty go free, but that the innocent aren't subject to harassment, embarrassment, and all sorts of other -ments from the government. And before you ask, yes, it's okay with me if some murders go unsolved due to the absence of pervasive surveillance, or even the overly liberal application of the "good-faith" exception.

I'm not assuming it. The court has to find that it was a good-faith. Otherwise the evidence is thrown out. It's not an assumption but a conclusion.

The cops can already lie to cover up a 4th amendment violation.

Would regular foot patrols, with police wearing body cams constitute, unconstitutional surveillance.

Oh, wait. There's a panopticon surrveilance blimp watching all of us, from hundreds of miles away anyway.

https://theintercept.com/2014/12/17/billion-dollar-surveilla...

What's a webcam on a telephone pole, then?

How does a judge parse the difference?

Jurisdiction and Jurisprudence?

That's right, you can't expect professional law enforcers to know the laws!

Seriously, the precedent that ostensibly allows this is very dangerous because it essentially allows police to feign ignorance in order to bypass 4A protections.

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