United States v. Leon is a case about the Fourth Amendment\u2019s exclusionary rule and if it should be applied to cases in which a warrant given by a judge turns out to be without substantiation for probable cause.\u00a0 This case began with two men, Pasty Stewart and Armando Sanchez, who were suspects of drug dealing.\u00a0 \u00a0The suspects were identified by someone without proof of reliability and the police began surveillance.\u00a0 This surveillance led them to another suspect, known to have a criminal history with drugs, Ricardo Del Castillo.\u00a0 The police through investigation of Castillo\u2019s records, were led to discover a known drug dealer, Alberto Leon.\u00a0 Knowledge from a second informant was then surfaced.\u00a0 All this information led to an affidavit constructed by Officer Cyril Rombach, which resulted in a warrant being given.\u00a0 With this warrant, police searched the alleged identified houses and places of drug activity and found a large amount of drugs.\u00a0 The four suspects were then arrested.<\/p>\n
The defense argued that the evidence be given the exclusionary rule because the lack of reliability of the first informant and their outdated information gave a lack of probable cause for a warrant to be issued.\u00a0 The government argued the police officer\u2019s actions were in \u201cgood faith\u201d and therefore the evidence should not be discarded.<\/p>\n
Justice White writes the majority opinion in a 6-3 vote breakdown.\u00a0 White concluded that the evidence did not fall into the exclusionary rule because of many reasons including cost\/benefit analysis and the absence of deterrence.\u00a0 The most prominent reason though was that the officer was reasonable in believing that the judge properly issued the warrant and he acted on that warrant \u201cin good faith.\u201d\u00a0 I believe that the court\u2019s decision was correct.\u00a0 Officer Rombach brought what he thought gave probable cause for a warrant and was granted it.\u00a0 An officer should not have to question a judge\u2019s actions because a judge\u2019s job is separate from theirs.\u00a0 Officers are simply relying on the information relayed, it is not their job to analyze the judge\u2019s actions also.\u00a0 Although, I also found the dissenting opinion written by Justice Brennan thought-provoking.\u00a0 When reading the Fourth Amendment and exclusionary rule how they were written, they state that people will be protected from the usage of evidence received from unreasonable searches and seizures.\u00a0 The search is technically, when going strictly by the text, unconstitutional because there was no probable cause to lead to a warrant.\u00a0\u00a0 The warrant would not be valid and then a lack of probably cause would protect Leon from the search.\u00a0 This would be a strict constructionist reading of it.\u00a0 Although the majority of Justices expanded the interpretations of the text to allow for their ruling and were loose constructionists, which I agree was necessary in this case.<\/p>\n
In the majority opinion a lot of the reasons that led the Justices to their decisions were circumstantial to this case specifically.\u00a0 I believe that since the majority of Justices did not set a very clear bar on what falls into the exclusionary rule this will result in them getting many more cases about the same topic.\u00a0 One immediate question that comes to mind is what exactly constitutes \u201cgood faith.\u201d\u00a0 The steps to achieving it were laid out but also similarly vague and up to interpretation.\u00a0 A definite implication of this case is that many similar cases regarding the exclusionary rule will arise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
United States v. Leon is a case about the Fourth Amendment\u2019s exclusionary rule and if it should be applied to cases in which a warrant given by a judge turns out to be without substantiation for probable cause.\u00a0 This case began with two men, Pasty Stewart and Armando Sanchez, who …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60377],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-v-leon","column","twocol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/fys-rca-bowie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/fys-rca-bowie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/fys-rca-bowie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/fys-rca-bowie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3192"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/fys-rca-bowie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/fys-rca-bowie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/fys-rca-bowie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/fys-rca-bowie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/fys-rca-bowie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}