The underlying argument here seems to be that if the evindence was procured via unlawful means, then Ulbricht should go free even he is guilty of the crime.
It seems to me as a quaint way to practice justice. What is the rationale behind this? Isn't it the court's job to establish guilt?
This specific case might not be a great example to reason about, but if this was a rapist or killer that should be set free despite being screamingly obvious guilty, just because the cop was a crook too, how could that possibly be morally justified? Two wrongs does not make one right, if you ask me.
Edit: An explanation would be nice, instead of the downvotes. Is it that questions about the justice system is off topic here?
The general idea is that the integrity of the criminal justice system is at least an order of magnitude more important than the outcome of any particular case.
> Isn't it the court's job to establish guilt?
No, that's the prosecutors' job.
The Court's job is ensure that the defendant receives due process.
It's arguably impossible to have a perfect justice system. So, you have to try to construct the best one you can.
While the exclusionary rule does allow guilty people to go free, that negative is arguably overwhelmingly outweighed by keeping innocent people out of prison, providing equal protection to all, and maintaining public faith in the criminal justice system.
One can argue that the system as implemented doesn't do such a good job of providing those three outcomes, but if we assume it does, wouldn't you agree maintaining such a system is more important than ensuring every last (actual) criminal who makes it to trial is convicted?
> The general idea is that the integrity of the criminal justice system is at least an order of magnitude more important than the outcome of any particular case.
If for some reason only one lesson on civics were taught in 12 years of schooling, this would be a top candidate for that lesson.
Not really this is one of those rules that makes people think they can win court cases that they can't really win. The idea that if you catch the police in a small error you can get off in a criminal case. You have to catch the police in a big error that they based the case off, or a serious breach of your rights. This will hardly ever work.
There are others :
1) If I follow the law I won't lose a case. Cute. Try being unreasonable to a judge and see how that works (A popular one : tell the judge that because a car accident happened on your own property, you got to set traffic law governing that accident. Technically correct. Try it)
2) If they don't have proof I can't be convicted. (and sometimes : video is not proof). False (well the video thing is true). The big mistake here is civil versus criminal cases. If it's not the government suing you, or "technically" not the government, e.g. mall security, then proof is not required, and video is perfectly admissible. Even if you are not recognizable on the video, but there's good reason to think it's you (e.g. a credit card record). Second, witness statements from people watching video can be accepted sometimes.
3) If the opposing party makes one tiny mistake I can get off scott-free. False. The justice system's job is to make the smallest possible change to the arrangement that makes it legal. If you sign a contract "I will kill my firstborn and pay $200" (extreme, ridiculous example), obviously you do not have to kill anyone, you will however, be on the hook for the payment. Interesting cases result from the use of "or" instead of "and".
This goes for government integrity too. Suppose Ulbright's lawyers get this one. The next thing that happens is the judge telling the prosecutor to go home, have a good night sleep, start the case from scratch and try again (in the same court case). If he succeeds, that's fine (of course he might not be able to).
4) With a lawyer I can tie up any case for any amount of time. No you can't. Ridiculously complex contract law cases, yeah sure (even then best take a good lawyer). Not paying your car repair bill, no.
5) They can't get to me if I move/hide/other state/other country/... Might be true. Not true for any place worth living. So good luck with that.
These things should be taught, with a few example cases illustrating what can happen. It would lessen the load on the justice system by 50%.
>While the exclusionary rule does allow guilty people to go free, that negative is arguably overwhelmingly outweighed by keeping innocent people out of prison, providing equal protection to all, and maintaining public faith in the criminal justice system.
But should we be letting guilty people go free? It's not like they'll ever come after me.
> The Court's job is ensure that the defendant receives due process.
Thank you for being the first commenter to give an answer to the actual question.
However, I do not think it really holds water. It does not seem to be the case that the prosecutor is the one to actually establish guilt. The guilty verdict is reached by a jury and a judge.
These get to value evidence according to a multitude of reasons, one of which is if it was acquired legally.
> wouldn't you agree maintaining such a system is more important than ensuring every last (actual) criminal who makes it to trial is convicted?
Oh, absolutely. The question is why principle would help? To put it very blunt, "if we let a few criminals loose then the police will stop breaking the law" does simply not make sense to me.
The widespread idea in the comments below that police somehow "profits" when someone is convicted does not make sense to me either.
Blackstone's Formulation, "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer", is a very influential idea in Western Justice systems. The idea is that the government has a stronger duty to protect innocent people than to punish guilty people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_formulation
It's to discourage police from overstepping their bounds. In any particular case you might figure that it's in the public's interest to just put these people away regardless of how the evidence was procured, but the people who designed the system saw government overreach as an existential threat in a way that no small-time criminal attacking individuals one-at-a-time could be.
It's not just about punishing the cops, though. The problem is that illegal searches are Fourth Amendment violations -- which we take very seriously -- and this seems to be the best way of preventing them.
Usually constitutional violations are handled in a compensatory manner, but it probably wouldn't work to rely on lawsuits for 4th Amendment violations. How much to compensate for a police officer illegally searching your backpack? Probably a nominal amount, and certainly not enough to prevent police from committing illegal searches in the future -- it would just be considered part of the cost of securing a conviction, and illegal searches would be rampant. And it's hard to imagine the victims of most of these illegal searches being able to find lawyers to take the cases (not worth it).
Excluding illegally obtained evidence (the "exclusionary rule") is the best way we've come up with to consistently protect these rights. The obvious downside is that we throw out tons of perfectly good evidence and lose lots of convictions, which is why the rule seems absurd to many people, especially lawyers from other countries. But we're essentially forced by the constitution to consider illegal searches a more serious evil than a missed conviction.
It's a tough call either way, but I think the founding fathers made a good decision on this one. Either way, it's worthwhile understanding what their motivations were.
Very well, I think. Look at data from Amnesty International for example, for more information about the prevalence of torture in the world.
I don't want to name specific countries (I've had enough of the downvotes) but it should be deeply obvious that this poisoned fruit doctrine has no correlation to police misconduct. (As would be expected, the risk of letting a criminal walk free is not much of a personal risk to take.)
It's not at all obvious to me that poisoned fruit doctrines have no correlation to police misconduct, and I think it's not obvious to the many people I've talked about this with in meatspace. Do you have sources to back up that claim?
In England evidence from an illegal phone tap could be used to convict someone, but the people doing the tapping would also face prosecution for that criminal offence.
No prosecution in England is automatic. Police gather evidence and present that to the criminal prosecution service who then decide whether or not to push a prosecution. Private citizens can push for something to be prosecuted and in rare events they can prosecute themselves.
English courts are pretty keen to prosecute corrupt police officers.
I don't think this evidence would count as fruit of the poisonous tree based on exceptions 1 and 2.
1. This investigation couldn't have been the result of other, illegally obtained evidence. It started from the publicly known Silk Road site, and didn't rely on previously known information about DPRs identity, nor on any "lucky coincidences" that could be set up using other information.
2. The vulnerability was easy to encounter even by accident. Unless it took a very large number of login attempts to activate the CAPTCHA, any serious investigation would hit upon this.
If they really had his info from an illegal search, they could make a better story without forging evidence by using parallel construction, e.g. claim that they investigated him based on his Stack Overflow posts.
It's because of such rules the police won't enter your home without a warrant. If they did so, and found evidence of a crime - it would be thrown out. These rules exist to make sure the police have no incentive to enter your home unless they have a warrant (or evidence of a crime in progress)
It protects the population at large from an unrestrained law enforcement system from intruding upon you in a multitude of ways.
It's designed to try and avoid a moral hazard where a rogue police office may choose to suffer the consequences of an illegal search (if indeed a case could be brought) in order to get the evidence he or she needs.
>The underlying argument here seems to be that if the
evindence was procured via unlawful means, then Ulbricht
should go free even he is guilty of the crime.
If they don't provide the packetlogs, it's not that the evidence is procured via unlawful means, it's that there's no evidence!
And if there's no evidence, why would you claim that Ross is guilty of the crime?
As another poster pointed out, it is that the purity of the criminal justice system is more important than any given case.
In any case there is more than just the accused on trial. Always and ever the system is on trial as well. If it were not then there would be insufficient checks and balances. Most importantly, putting the system on trial routinely is necessary, because while one man (one murderer, one rapist, one thief) can do a considerable amount of harm to others and society if set free in error the system is capable of doing much, much more damage if it is allowed to become corrupt, abused, misused, etc.
One serial killer might kill hundreds. A corrupt system can kill thousands, or millions.
You are being down voted because there are people here who cannot conceive that there might be people here from other countries that have working, fair, justice systems built on different rules than the US justice system, and so that take different approaches to things, and so the US way of handling something might seem strange to such a person.
Not a confession for example, because such evidence is not trustworthy. Not because it was procured illegally. Those are two very separate questions.
If a police tortured someone, he or she should be brought to justice and possibly jailed for the crime. But indenpendently of that, if that produced absolutely irrefutable evidence of another crime, then that evicence should be allowed to stand on its own. It is what the word evidence means (a mathematical evidence, for example, is just as valid no matter how it was procured).
And it's not "my" logic. I'd venture a guess that it is the most common way to practice justice in the world: That the purpose of a court is to establish guilt.
As I said earlier, evidence is evidence. It is not illegal or legal for the purpose of establishing guilt. It can be more or less trustworthy, but legality does not play into it.
The appropriate questions to ask in that situation would be "does this evidence really say what we think it does", and "are there reasons to believe this evidence is fabricated?", not "how was it procured?".
The people responsible for a warrantless search should of course be brought to justice, and at least lose their jobs, but as a separate matter.
I suggest you read the SCOTUS opinions in the cases that generated the exclusionary[1] and other "prophylactic" rules. The judiciary has created several, including this one and the Miranda warnings[2], in order to protect the integrity of the judiciary. The opinions lay out why the court felt it necessary to do so.
Thank you for taking the time to actually answer the question, despite the sea of downvotes.
That is quite heaving reading for someone not up to speed with the US justice system. I have to admit I will save it for a rainy day.
The Miranda readings does also come off quite strange to an outsider, but the reasons behind it is much more obvious as a matter of educating the public.
Do you think there would be many people calling for the resignation of a rogue cop who flagrantly violated the law but in the process managed to solve a much higher than average number of crimes?
Fortunately, the populace does not decide justice. Judges and lawyers are not elect, for this very reason.
But we shouldn't go too deep with the hypothetical questions. In most (western, civilized) parts of the world evidence is evidence. And they have lesser problems with police brutality, pretty much any way you look at the data (from bullets fired to people's conceptions).
A judge is supposed to be neutral, but a prosecutor isn't. This isn't an issue of brutality, we would need stats on the number of illegal searches conducted in different countries and we would need to know that these stats were accurate. This might be difficult because most illegal searches probably go unreported.
Constitutional rights are not quaint. Protecting them is not quaint. The idea that letting some criminals walk free would be a good way to deter police from breaking these laws seems very much so, at least to an outsider. That is why I asked.
It seems to me as a quaint way to practice justice. What is the rationale behind this? Isn't it the court's job to establish guilt?
This specific case might not be a great example to reason about, but if this was a rapist or killer that should be set free despite being screamingly obvious guilty, just because the cop was a crook too, how could that possibly be morally justified? Two wrongs does not make one right, if you ask me.
Edit: An explanation would be nice, instead of the downvotes. Is it that questions about the justice system is off topic here?