This is the basic idea of the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule. The exclusionary rule was supposed to deter police misconduct (e.g., searching a house without a warrant, thereby violating the Fourth Amendment) by preventing them from using evidence they never should have had. But the deterrence rationale doesn't hold up that well when the police reasonably (and that's key) believed that they were acting lawfully.

You're conflating "holding accountable" and "letting benefit".

The question isn't whether the police officers who initiated the tower dump should go to jail or be fired, but whether the evidence they obtained would be admissible. It shouldn't be.

Also, a cell tower dump is not an act in good faith - neither in 2020 nor in 2025, regardless of whether the court lets it slide or not.

> It is not reasonable to hold someone accountable for doing something illegal in 2020 that was only determined to be illegal in 2025.

Tell that to a financial regulator and see where it gets you. That's how it works for everyone else. Just because a law hasn't been clarified yet doesn't stop it from being applied to your past actions after courts have clarified it.

If a warrant is later found unconstitutional, that means it was always legally invalid, not newly illegal in 2025.

Sure, if the thing in question were someone being tried with a crime.

Rather, it's the opposite. It's not "punishing" police to say "hey, you can't use this evidence". That's not a punishment for them, they shouldn't personally be offended by that. And we certainly shouldn't be comparing that outcome to as if the police are being put behind bars.

We shouldn't be putting people behind bars with bad evidence just because we didn't know it was bad when we got it. No, we should retroactively say "hey, we can't use that evidence". If that hurts the police's fee fees I don't think that should come into play. I don't think that's a metric we should be optimizing for.