What is the exclusionary rule?

0:00[MUSIC] Exclusionary rule is a rule that if evidence is unconstitutionally obtained, that is the government got the evidence as a result of Fourth Amendment violations, they can't use that evidence in court. What happens is the defendant, that is the person charged, will file a motion to suppress. That is a motion before the court saying, you can't use this evidence, government.

0:27You're not allowed to show the jury the evidence of my guilt, as a way of deterring the government from violating the law in the first place. This goes back to a 1914 decision called Weeks v. United States, in which the Supreme Court said that that is in fact a remedy for Fourth Amendment violations, that the evidence can't be used. Now, it sounds very broad when you hear about the history of it. Turns out that the exclusionary rule is available as a possibility in some cases, but there are a lot of exceptions to the exclusionary rule. It actually is not applied that often because of all these exceptions, but it's always in the background as a possible remedy for violations of the Fourth Amendment. Here's the basic idea. If the government's unlawful search or seizure led directly to the discovery of evidence, that evidence will probably be suppressed as a violation of the defendant's constitutional rights.

1:26It has to be the defendant's own constitutional rights, but if there's a really direct connection, the officer breaks into someone's house without any cause, finds drugs in their kitchen, that's likely to lead to suppression. The tricky part is that sometimes that causal relationship is not so direct. Sometimes, for example, the government would have found that unconstitutional evidence some other way, or even there's someone else in the government who did find that evidence some other way. In that situation, there isn't a direct causal connection between the constitutional violation and the discovery of the evidence. In those situations, usually the court say that evidence can be used against a person because it wasn't really directly discovered as a result of the constitutional wrong. There's a category that's the core direct connections, those lead to suppression, and then that's it.

2:18If it's a less direct connection, those exceptions to the exclusionary rule usually end up applying and saying the evidence can nonetheless come in. Mapp v. Ohio involves a search of a house that was owned by a woman named Dolin Mapp. They appeared at her home and they claimed to have a search warrant. She asked them for the search warrant, and they realized, well, we actually don't have a search warrant.

2:40They pretended to have a search warrant. She grabbed it from them, and she ran into the house. They chased in after her. They ended up searching the house and finding evidence, not directly implicating her, but nonetheless that led to charges against her. The question in that case was whether the exclusionary rule applies to the states.

2:58The Fourth Amendment directly only applies to the federal government, but the 14th amendment to the constitution, and in particular, the due process clause of the 14th amendment does apply to the states, and so a big issue, especially in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s was whether the Bill of Rights, in particular, the Fourth Amendment applies to state violations. The Supreme Court had held in a 1949 case Wolf v. Colorado, that the exclusionary rule doesn't apply to the states, but that the right, the Fourth Amendment does. That meant that the police were supposed to follow the Fourth Amendment, but if they didn't, well, no suppression remedy. In Mapp v. Ohio in 1961, the Supreme Court says, we're overturning that part of Wolf v. Colorado. We think the exclusionary rule needs to apply to the states. The reason was, the states really were not

3:50following Fourth Amendment rules without the Exclusionary Rule. The thought was, you need to have that threat of suppression, that threat of losing your case in order to ensure that the states had an strong incentive to follow the Fourth Amendment. Basically, if you're a police officer and you want to make sure that people that are searched, the evidence it's ultimately uncovered, actually can lead to criminal prosecutions, and the exclusionary rule aligns your incentives with following the law. If you break the law, that evidence won't be admitted, and the people who've committed the crimes can't be convicted. What's your incentive if you want to make sure people can be convicted? You want to follow the law, so there aren't Fourth Amendment violations. That was the basic idea underlying Mapp v. Ohio.

4:35It applies the exclusionary rule to the states, and since most policing is at the state level, not the federal level, that's a hugely important decision, maybe the most important Fourth Amendment decision ever decided. [MUSIC]