Judicial Integrity Essay Example

of evidence despite constitutional violations, leaving the Fourth Amendment right to protect itself through a set of anachronistic remedies announced over six decades ago in Wolf v. Colorado. Despite the Roberts Court’s assurances that the exclusionary rule can be ignored due to the increasing professionalism of police forces and greater availability of civil rights suits, we will show that the alternative remedies mentioned in Wolf have not progressed as far as the Roberts Court would have us believe.

As this article will argue, the true cost of the crude balancing test used to determine whether to apply the exclusionary rule is the damage levied upon the Fourth Amendment. In failing to apply a remedy to an acknowledged constitutional violation, the Court is sacrificing its judicial integrity for the sake of a criminal conviction and threatening the legitimacy of a just government. As Justice Brandeis explained in Olmstead: In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously.

Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means--to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal-- would bring terrible retribution.

Against that pernicious doctrine this Court should resolutely set its face. Somewhere along the way, the Court has forgotten that judicial integrity is a substantial benefit to

the enforcement of constitutional rights and a legitimate cost associated with any decision that impliedly sanctions government misconduct. Part IA of this article provides a brief history of the foundations of the exclusionary rule, paying particular attention to the Court’s original interest in safeguarding judicial integrity.

Part IB traces the rise of the deterrence rationale and the genesis of the balancing test, which have correlated with a trend towards deemphasizing the majesty of the Fourth Amendment through the curtailment of its principal remedy. Part II will analyze the decisions in Herring and Hudson to highlight the Roberts Court’s recent efforts to curtail application of the exclusionary rule. Finally, Part III will argue that an attack upon the exclusionary rule is an attack upon the Fourth Amendment right itself, which stands little chance of being observed without the constitutional support of the Supreme Court.

The Foundations of Modern Exclusionary Rule Doctrine

The Initial Role of Judicial Integrity The Supreme Court first applied the exclusionary rule as a remedy to a Fourth Amendment violation in Weeks v. United States. In Weeks, the Court suppressed evidence that was unlawfully obtained by federal officers and introduced into a federal prosecution. The Court addressed two concerns that were accomplished by suppressing unlawfully seized evidence.

First, the remedy would enable courts to fulfill their obligatory duty of giving effect to the Fourth Amendment right. In the unanimous opinion, Justice Day explained that without the remedy of suppression, “the protection of the 4th Amendment… is of no value. ”Weeks emphasized the “great principles” of the Constitution and expressed an unwillingness to sacrifice these fundamental rights to aid the conviction of one criminal. The exclusionary rule was

thus conceived as a necessary adjunct to the Fourth Amendment right itself.

In addition, application of the exclusionary rule protected the legitimacy of governmental action by demonstrating that courts would not defer to the enforcement authorities when their conduct resulted in constitutional violations. “Unlawful seizures” Justice Day explained, “should find no sanction in the judgments of the courts, which are charged at all times with the support of the Constitution. ” Thus, the benefits of judicial integrity were understood as giving effect to the Fourth Amendment while at the same time ensuring that courts would not sanction unlawful seizures.

Justices Holmes helped solidify these twin goals of judicial integrity through his majority opinion in Silverthorne and separate dissent in Olmstead. In Silverthorne, Holmes established the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine and reiterated Weeks’ emphasis upon exclusion as a necessary protection of the Fourth Amendment right. Holmes declared that the failure to exclude the unlawfully obtained evidence “would reduce the Fourth Amendment to a form of words. ” In his dissent in Olmstead, Holmes sympathized with the difficult choice facing justices to either sustain a conviction of a known criminal or sanction an unlawful search.

However, he emphasized that it is “a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part. ” The application of the exclusionary rule was severely limited in Wolf v. Colorado, which, for over a decade following its decision, restricted the exclusionary rule to federal prosecutions. While acknowledging that the exclusion of evidence may be an effective remedy, Justice Frankfurter’s majority opinion suggested that equally effective methods of addressing the constitutional violations could be found through the

“remedies of private action” and the “internal discipline of the police.

In dissent, Justice Murphy exposed the Court’s choice to defer to alternative remedies as a choice to sanction the unlawful conduct: “lternatives are deceptive. Their very statement conveys the impression that one possibility is as effective as the next. In this case their statement is blinding. For there is but one alternative to the rule of exclusion. That is no sanction at all. ”Justice Murphy explained that the only truly effective remedy to a Fourth Amendment violation was to exclude the evidence.

The other remedies were “illusory” because there was little evidence to suggest that they provided any positive deterrence. In addition, Justice Murphy echoed the judicial integrity concerns of Justices Day and Holmes by reiterating that the Fourth Amendment required suppression to be given effect and admonishing the Court for sanctioning “lawlessness by officers of the law,” which would have a “tragic effect upon public respect for our judiciary. ” A decade later, the majority opinion of Elkins associated these concerns with the “imperative of judicial integrity.

Elkins barred use of the so-called “silver platter” doctrine, a practice whereby federal prosecutors avoided the exclusionary rule remedy by encouraging state officers to unlawfully obtain evidence on their behalf. The Court emphasized the importance of preventing courts from serving as “accomplices in the willful disobedience of a Constitution they are sworn to uphold. ” Just a year later, Mapp v. Ohio applied the exclusionary rule for Fourth Amendment violations to all state actions and prosecutions.

The egregious Fourth Amendment violation in Mapp involved a warrantless search of defendant’s home that culminated in the police officers breaking the window of

the back door and, once inside, ransacking the house indiscriminately. In reviewing the Ohio Supreme Court’s decision to sustain the conviction despite the blatant Fourth Amendment violations, the Court declared that “we can no longer permit that right to remain an empty promise. ”Justice Clark’s majority opinion explained that the application of the exclusionary rule grants ndividuals their constitutional rights, but, more importantly for the courts, it conferred “that judicial integrity so necessary in the true administration of justice. ”

Significantly, Mapp reiterated the policy first expressed in Weeks that the exclusionary rule was a necessary adjunct to the Fourth Amendment right. In overruling Wolf, Justice Clark explained that the remedy was “an essential ingredient of the Fourth Amendment” and “part and parcel of the Fourth Amendment’s limitations. Without the exclusionary rule, Clark continued, the Fourth Amendment would be “valueless” and “so neatly severed from its conceptual nexus with the freedom from all brutish means of coercing evidence as not to merit this Court’s high regard as a freedom ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty. ’”The Rise of Deterrence The Mapp decision represented a high water mark for the exclusionary rule and the Supreme Court’s concern for judicial integrity. As the Court’s disenchantment with the exclusionary rule became more apparent, its desire to maintain judicial integrity began to recede into footnotes.

Among justices interested in curtailing the remedy, the deterrence rationale rose in prominence. Ultimately, a balancing test emerged highlighting deterrence as the sole benefit with the substantial social costs of exclusion weighing strongly against application of the disfavored remedy. The benefit of deterring police misconduct was not among the original justifications presented for the exclusionary

rule in Weeks. Over the course of the next century, however, deterrence has occupied a growing centrality to the point that it is now considered the only benefit and purpose of the exclusionary rule.

The language of deterrence was first mentioned in passing as a potentially beneficial purpose of the exclusionary rule in Wolf’s majority opinion. Five years later, in Irvine v. People of California, Justice Jackson suggested that the remedy provided only a “mild deterrent at best. ” It was not until Elkins that deterrence was established as one of the rule’s important goals. Writing for the majority, Justice Stewart explained that “its purpose is to deter-to compel respect for the constitutional guaranty in the only effectively available way-by removing the incentive to disregard it. In the evolution of Supreme Court jurisprudence concerning the exclusionary rule, the specific holding in Elkins regarding the “silver platter” doctrine has been of relatively minor importance.

Yet, its language of deterrence has been the fundamental citation for justices seeking to limit the application of the exclusionary rule by suggesting that the doctrine is aimed at accomplishing just one policy objective. Mapp followed closely on the heels of Elkins, and was significant in two important respects beyond its landmark application of the exclusionary rule to the states.

Mapp was the first case to reinforce the deterrence language of Elkins, although it did so alongside its emphasis upon judicial integrity. Mapp is also significant because it signaled the emergence of the argument, in Justice Harlan’s dissent, that the exclusionary rule should be limited to instances where it serves a deterrent effect. Harlan emphasized that since the exclusionary rule “is aimed at deterring,” it

should only be applied when it can achieve this goal, providing a first glimpse of one of the critical arguments in favor of curtailing the remedy. Just four years later, Linkletter v. Walker was the first to deny the application of the exclusionary rule to a Fourth Amendment violation by focusing on deterrence as the primary purpose of the remedy.

The Court refused to apply the holding in Mapp retroactively by finding that suppression would fail to accomplish the only justification for the rule, which was “based on the necessity of providing an effective deterrent to illegal police action. In dissent, Justice Black found the narrowed emphasis upon deterrence, as opposed to the Court’s obligation to give effect to the right itself, “a rather startling departure from many past opinions. ”To the extent the Court even addressed judicial integrity, it managed to obscure the concept entirely by suggesting that an opposite holding would cause such an administrative burden that the “integrity of the judicial process” would be negatively affected.

Following Linkletter’s lead, the Court continued to devalue the role of judicial integrity in United States v. Calandra, in which the Court held that the exclusionary rule was not applicable to grand jury proceedings. Demonstrating how far the ideal of judicial integrity had fallen, Justice Stewart managed only to address the consideration in a footnote to his majority opinion and then only to dismiss the dissent’s concerns. Calandra also began to unravel the concept that the remedy was part and parcel of the Fourth Amendment right, arguing that it was a “judicially created remedy” rather than a “personal constitutional right.

Calandra’s historical significance is also due to the fact

that it introduced the now familiar balancing test to the exclusionary rule analysis, restricting application of the remedy to instances where the deterrence purpose would be “most efficaciously served. ”Balanced against the benefit of deterrence was the cost of suppressing reliable evidence. In applying the balancing test, the Court held that “any incremental deterrent effect” of the rule was outweighed by the rule’s substantial interference with grand jury proceedings. Justice Brennan’s dissent classified the opinion as a “downgrading of the exclusionary rule” and a rejection of the “historical objective and purpose of the rule. ”

Brennan pointed out the legacy of the remedy as an “enforcement tool” that gives both “content and meaning to the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees” and prevents the appearance of judges as accomplices to illegal government conduct. These two historical goals of judicial integrity, Brennan argued, were being discounted “to the point of extinction” by the Court. For a short period following Calandra, the language of judicial integrity persisted despite the Court’s declining interest in its preservation. In U. S. v. Peltier, the Court denied application of the exclusionary rule while determining that the concern of judicial integrity was not “sufficiently weighty” to compel application of the remedy.

In Brown v. Illinois, the Court again refused to suppress unlawfully obtained evidence, but still suggested that the consideration of judicial integrity was a principal concern alongside deterrence. Clarifying its decision not to apply the rule, the Court in Brown held that the remedy should be limited to cases where “the deterrent value of the exclusionary rule is most likely to be effective, and the corresponding mandate to preserve judicial integrity… most clearly demands that the

fruits of official misconduct be denied. ”Yet, the language of co-equal consideration suggested by Brown belied the freefall of judicial integrity amidst the rise of deterrence and the corresponding “slow strangulation” of the exclusionary rule through the balancing test.

In Stone v. Powell, the rising centrality of deterrence as the prime purpose of exclusion was used as a justification for curtailing the application of the exclusionary rule within an increasingly simplified balancing test. Stone helped to substantiate the balancing approach articulated in Calandra by explaining that it was implicit within previous applications of the exclusionary rule. Concerned more with the “ultimate question of guilt or innocence,” rather than the constitutional violation, the Court bemoaned the high cost of suppressing “the most probative information bearing on the guilt or innocence.

Solidifying the two factors it would consider in its balancing test, the Court held that the “substantial social costs” of setting the guilty free, far outweighed the “incremental benefit” of deterring one police officer. Significantly, Justice Powell’s majority opinion began to redefine the meaning of judicial integrity altogether by suggesting that applying the exclusionary rule bears the risk of generating disrespect for the administration of justice by affording a “windfall” to a guilty defendant. Justice Powell then dismissed the original understanding of judicial integrity as a “rhetorical generalization” that was “fatally flawed. ”

The majority opinion hypothesized that rigid adherence to judicial integrity would require exclusion even if the criminal defendant assented to the inclusion of the unlawfully seized evidence, a hypothetical that bordered on absurdity itself. Thus, the Court explained that “while courts, of course, must ever be concerned with preserving the integrity of the judicial process, this

concern has limited force as a justification for the exclusion of highly probative evidence. Stone was decided on the same day as U. S. v. Janis, which bestowed another significant blow to the Fourth Amendment right by further redefining the meaning of judicial integrity.

While again just acknowledging the consideration in a footnote, Justice Blackmun’s opinion suggested that the “primary meaning of judicial integrity” was limited to ensuring that “the courts must not commit or encourage violations of the Constitution. Described in this fashion, Blackmun effectively conflated the concern for judicial integrity within the rationale of deterrence.

The Court then proceeded to use the same cost-benefit balancing test to restrict the exclusionary rule from application to habeas corpus claims. Amidst another decision to apply no remedy to a constitutional violation, Justice Brennan watched helplessly as the Fourth Amendment continued to be assaulted by the Court. Exasperated, Brennan could muster nly a terse response that merely pointed to the dissent he issued just one year prior in Peltier: If a majority of my colleagues are determined to discard the exclusionary rule in Fourth Amendment cases, they should forthrightly do so, and be done with it.

This business of slow strangulation of the rule, with no opportunity afforded parties most concerned to be heard, would be indefensible in any circumstances. But to attempt covertly the erosion of an important principle over 61 years in the making as applied in federal courts clearly demeans the adjudicatory function, and the institutional integrity of this Court.