That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason to punish them for it.
It's not punishing the police. It's not allowing them to use evidence that they shouldn't have been allowed to gather.
Fining them, firing them, and/or jailing them for breaking the law; those would be ways of punishing them. That's not what is being discussed here. Admittedly, we pretty much _never_ punish police no matter what they do, so it's kind of a moot point.
I expect anyone that was convicted due to this dragnet would now be able to appeal.
At the moment, I would believe they were both wrong, and that the officer broke the law. I _think_ the judge also broke the law, but I don't know exactly how that works.
If there is a chain of command in any police department or Sheriff's Office, then the judge is not going to jump that chain and interpose herself in giving orders to a lowest-level officer who is on-the-ground and doing things.
The order's going to go to the office of their commander, who's going to evaluate it, and then it'll go through proper channels, so by the time your hypthetical "Police Officer in Summary Execution of 40 Innocent Consumers" then the order's been interdicted or validated as totally within the law as they interpret it?
Please do not ascribe judgements to me that I am not making. I was simply asking questions to clarify a typical process that may be hypothetically followed. Thank you.
> They were allowed to gather the evidence - they had a warrant from a judge. The judge erred, not the police.
And that statement makes it very clear that, if the judge gives the ok to do something, then the judge is at fault; and _not_ the person that actually does the thing. I disagree with this. The person who does the thing is responsible for their own actions. The judge may _also_ be at fault, but that doesn't absolve the officer who took the action.
Your response (in the context of what I said)
>> if a judge tells a police officer they can do something
> Who commands the police officer to do things? Is it his/her superior, or the judge directly?
Seems to indicate you think I said the judge is the one who ordered the officer to do the thing. I didn't. I said the judge gave permission for it.
To be very clear, in a situation where
1. Tier 1 officer orders Tier 2 officer to have a thing done
2. Tier 2 officer orders Tier 3 officer to do the thing
3. Judge authorizes Tier 3 officer to do the thing
4. Tier 3 officer does the thing
If "the thing" is clearly illegal (to a reasonable person), then ALL of those individuals are at fault. And Tier 3 officer clearly broke the law when doing the thing.
I believe that
Not where people's most fundamental rights are concerned. What it would do is cause judges to err on the side of caution before making a ruling that would violate the constitution which is exactly what we want judges to do.
Right now there is currently zero accountability. At best, when a judge violates people's constitutional rights some small number of those people will be able to get an unjust ruling overturned at which point they might be released from prison or might get some monetary payout at the expense of taxpayers, but the judge is still free to do whatever they want without consequence knowing that at least a few people will be unable to assert their rights.
Considering that unaccountable judges are where we're starting from, I think having a means to make judges accountable can only improve things. Given the choice between judges being able to violate people's rights without any accountability or a system where judges have some level of accountability for the most egregious violations of our rights, even while that system requires us to make sure that it isn't being clearly abused, I think we're better off with the option to get some accountability where it's needed.
It doesn't need to be a perfect system to be a better one, and it feels like we could put some guardrails in place to keep the amount of obvious abuse down. It's difficult to believe that judges willfully violating people's rights without consequence is an unsolvable problem, let alone one that couldn't possibly be improved somehow.
But more fundamentally, the system you're proposing doesn't just incentivize judges to err on the side of caution, it incentivizes them to never rule in favor of the government and just punt the decision to the next level. If the cost of ever being overturned on appeal in favor of an individual's rights is losing their job, while there is no corresponding downside of ruling the other way, there's basically no reason to ever risk granting a warrant, for example.