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Exclusionary Rule Pros And Cons

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In an effort to enforce the legality of law enforcement conduct, the judiciary established the exclusionary rule to bar illegally or unconstitutionally obtained evidence in a criminal trial (Jurkowski, 2017). The rule's primary purpose is to deter law enforcement from violating laws and infringing on the constitutional rights of citizens. There are, however, several exceptions to this rule.

One such exception is that of good faith, in which the officer involved did not knowingly or deliberately violate a law or an individual's constitutional right; this is often the result of an honest mistake or a clerical error. In the 1984 case United States v. Leon, the authorities executed a search warrant which was later found to be invalid due to insufficient …show more content…

On Christmas Eve in 1968, a young girl was reported missing after an event at the YMCA in Des Moines, Iowa (Harr et al., 2015). The culprit, Robert Williams, eventually turned himself into the police in Davenport, Iowa and was to be returned to the police in Des Moines. During the drive, despite not being allowed to interrogate, the officer made the "Christian Burial Speech" which resulted in Williams divulging the location of the young girl's body. A trial ensued, Brewer v. Williams, in which the Supreme Court overturned a conviction because Williams' Sixth Amendment right to counsel had been violated and his confession was inadmissible. During the retrial, Nix v. Williams, the court allowed the use of the child's body as evidence -even though the confession was not-because a search party would have inevitably discovered her without the confession (Forbes, 1987).

References:

Forbes, J. (1987). e Inevitable Discovery Exception, Primary Evidence, and the Emasculation of the Fourth Amendment,. Fordham Law Review, 55(6). Retrieved March 15, 2018, from https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol55/iss6/14/.

Harr, J. S., Hess, K. M., Orthmann, C. M., & Kingsbury, J. (2015). Constitutional law and the Criminal Justice System. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.

Jurkowski, S. (2017, June 22). Exclusionary Rule. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/exclusionary_rule

Justia. (2018). Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533 (1988). Retrieved March 15, 2018, from

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