Hacker News Reader

Comment by aqme28 | Hacker News Reader

How does this not throw the case into "fruit of the poisoned tree" territory? If they used illegal tracking to further gather evidence, shouldn't all of that evidence be thrown away?

View on HN

Yes and no. There are a number of ways in which illegally obtained evidence, or FOTPT evidence can still be admitted. These are: attenuation, independent source, inevitable discovery, and good faith. Roughly stated, attenuation is when something is too far down the line of causation, time, or there is a voluntary act of free will by the defendant to separate the illegality from the evidence, and the balance rests in favor of admission. Independent source is kind of like parallel construction: if the investigator also discovered the evidence in a legal way completely independent of the illegal search, the evidence will be admitted. Inevitable discovery extends this to evidence which, despite not being discovered legally, would have discovered the evidence regardless of the illegal search. Finally, the good faith exception will allow in evidence where law enforcement is relying in good faith on a warrant which is defective, or that they are proceeding legally pursuant to common law or statute. I've mostly summarized here the sides of the coin that will admit evidence poisoned by an unlawful search, but there are other doctrines that will tip it into the excluded category.

Has the cellphone collection they used been ruled illegal? I just thought they withdrew because they didn't want to share the tech they are using to collect the evidence.

AKAIK no, that does seem to be their tactic. I just wanted to give an overview of the law surrounding the exclusionary rule, especially since many here think parallel construction and similar tactics equal automatic and sure exclusion.

In the article it says the prosecutors dropped the evidence found from the resulting home search.

"Finally, Seidel said prosecutors would drop all evidence found during the search of the home — including, authorities have said, a .45-caliber handgun and the cellphone."

That could be why they backed off, withdrawing that evidence rather than reveal their tracking methods.

It did. They dropped all evidence found during the search of the home, including the phone itself and a handgun found inside.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com