WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that evidence seized in an improper arrest does not always have to be thrown out by the courts, provided the error was the “result of isolated negligence” on the part of the police.
The conservative justices held sway in a 5-4 decision that upheld the drug and gun-possession conviction of an Alabama man who had been arrested only because a computer mistakenly indicated that a warrant had been issued for his arrest.
Chief Justice John Roberts said the incident was more of a “bookkeeping” error than an attempt by police to skirt the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.
“We conclude that when police mistakes are the result of negligence such as that described here, rather than systemic error or reckless disregard of constitutional requirements,” the evidence obtained need not be barred from use at trial, Roberts wrote. He was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
The decision prompted an immediate debate about whether the decision was a logical extension of previous rulings or a dramatic change in how the court views the Fourth Amendment.
Dissenters said the opinion dramatically weakened the protections of the “exclusionary rule,” which enforces the Fourth Amendment and is meant to deter the police from breaking the law in order to obtain evidence against suspects.
“The most serious impact of the court’s holding will be on innocent persons wrongfully arrested based on erroneous information in a computer database,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote. She was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Stephen Breyer.
She said the decision would give law enforcement great leeway in justifying arrests and little incentive to fix problems such as defective computer databases.
There is no dispute that officers in Coffee County, Ala., did not have cause to arrest Bennie Dean Herring in 2004, but they did not know it at the time. Herring was well-known to law enforcement, and when he showed up to retrieve something from his impounded truck, officers checked for arrest warrants.
A clerk in a neighboring jurisdiction said there was one, and officers promptly arrested him and then found methamphetamine in Herring’s pocket and a pistol — which, as a felon, he could not possess — in his truck. The clerk called about 15 minutes later to say the computer was mistaken and the warrant had been withdrawn.
Herring argued to lower courts that the evidence should have been suppressed because the rescinded warrant meant his arrest was illegal.
But Roberts wrote that the judicially created exclusionary rule did not provide that such evidence be automatically kept from juries. He said justices decided in 1995 that a similar computer mistake — in that case, attributable to judicial personnel — was a “good-faith” error that did not warrant throwing out an arrest.
Wednesday’s decision extends that to law-enforcement personnel.
“As laid out in our cases, the exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence,” Roberts wrote. “The error in this case does not rise to that level.”
