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Comment by bshipp | Hacker News Reader

As long as the material presented in court is acquired via legal methods, no laws are being broken, are they? Now, if officers use legal loopholes to take illegally-acquired evidence and somehow make it legal, that's a practice that should be rooted out and those involved prosecuted. But as long as officers can construct a legal case completely independent of the poisonous tree, what's the issue?

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That’s a perfectly logical stance to take, but I think it hinges on :

”Now, if officers use legal loopholes to take illegally-acquired evidence and somehow make it legal, that's a practice that should be rooted out and those involved prosecuted.”

If in practice illegal practices, are not rooted-out or prosecuted, and actually condoned, I think one would need to look askance at the entire concept…

That makes perfect sense. I'm no lawyer and am only discussing this out of idle curiosity, so I'm sure my comments were a naive take. The situation I'm envisioning is an audio recording from a 2-party consent state outlining the existence of evidence. Since that cannot be the legal basis of a warrant, an officer might wander through the neighborhood talking with associated citizens to try and independently establish the need for a warrant based on various witness statements. No evidence has been falsified or created out of thin air, and there's no hope of a conviction if the suspected building doesn't contain damning evidence.

However, I fully recognize how such a process might be abused and the need for a very firm legal hand to avoid accidentally becoming an authoritarian state.

The officer has no probable cause to do what you suggest without the illegally obtained information in the first place.

If they were only able to construct a "legal" case through the knowledge gained by the fruit of a poisonous tree, then the new tree should be treated as tainted as well. But that's not the law.

They can and do violate the law (without consequence) until they find a foothold that allows them to fabricate the appearance of a legally obtained chain of evidence. Then, they fully suppress the evidence about how that information was originally obtained.

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