Friday, June 16

Orwellian

Is anyone else at all concerned about today's SCOTUS ruling upholding the use of evidence obtained from an illegal search?

"Without such a rule ... police know that they can ignore the Constitution's requirements without risking suppression of evidence discovered after an unreasonable entry."
Justice Stephen Breyer, in the dissent

Is it me or is this just the first step down the road to eliminating the exclusion rule entirely? Search warrants? Who needs one when anything they find is admissible, even if it was illegally obtained?

This is something I would have thought inconceivable and utterly ridiculous four years ago. If someone had said to me four or five years ago that the Supreme Court would be actively dismantling out privacy and search and seizure protections, I'd have laughed and told them they'd been reading too much Orwell - that's what we have a Constitution for, to protect us from such. How far have we fallen if something as radical as this is now not only plausible, but now entirely possible, if not likely.

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