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Comment by mark-r | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately there is still parallel construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Honest question: can illegally obtained evidence be used to get a search warrant?

No, if a warrant is obtained using illegal evidence, then you poison the warrant and all the evidence arising from it.

Parallel construction happens way less frequently than people think it does, since it requires that there be an actual parallel path to the evidence that would have been available at the time the evidence was improperly obtained. It's basically only upheld when evidence was collected improperly through one means (i.e., a confession without Miranda disclosure), but could have been collected properly through other means available at the time of the improper collection (i.e., if the contents of the confession would have been revealed by a standard CSI search).

> Parallel construction happens way less frequently than people think it does

This seems like a rather vague claim

I used to be a public defender before I went into corporate and tax practice. Out of roughly 100,000 cases that went through the local PD office while I was there, fewer than 10 involved parallel construction.

Including the two neighboring counties, out of nearly 750,000 criminal cases during that time, only about 3 or 4 dozen involved parallel construction, and most of those were gang cases in which the parallel construction involved one of the gang members turning on his homies.

It's big news in local legal circles when the prosecution tries to use parallel construction to get evidence into the record because it happens so rarely.

It does happen more frequently at the federal level, but they also have significantly more resources to conduct investigations along parallel paths.

Those are the cases where the parallel construction was caught, right? What about all the cases where parallel construction was used and successfully kept secret?

I don’t think you have to be mirandized to give a confession, no?

Not a lawyer nor intimately familiar with the subject, so until someone more knowledgeable chimes in and at risk of making a fool of myself:

I believe it depends on context. If you're in police custody and being questioned, you need to be read your Miranda rights. If the police show up to your door and you suddenly blurt out a confession, I don't think it matters.

That's mostly correct, but it gets even more contextual: if you confess right when you greet the police, your confession is admissible.

However, once the police start asking questions, they have to show they had not created a "custodial" situation in which the suspect was not free to leave (or in this case, to close the door and tell the police to fuck off). In most states, the burden is on the defendant to show that a custodial situation was created; in some states, that is presumed and the police have to show that a custodial situation was not created.

You do have to be Mirandized if the prosecution expects to use that confession--or any evidence derived from that confession (under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine)-in court.

For the record--I am former public defender. And I successfully used the failure to properly Mirandize a client successfully many times to block the prosecution from introducing evidence.

I think you would to use that in court - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_v._Arizona - IANAL.

Yes. If the magistrate fails to notice the illegal-ness of the evidence and gives the warrant, it is valid nonetheless.

If the illegal-ness later comes to light would a court consider evidence from the 'valid' warrant tainted? Always, sometimes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

In the specific case you're talking about, always.

IANAL, but my understanding is that evidence obtained from an invalidated warrant is disallowed, unless the court finds that it was inevitable that the state would have discovered the evidence.

Nope. If the government fooled the magistrate, it is disallowed. However if the magistrate has failed to decode the law correctly and issued an unlawful or unconstitutional warrant, the evidence obtained by the warrant can be used in court.

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