Over at the Weekly Standard, William Tucker notes gleefully that the exclusionary rule is but one Bush Supreme Court appointment away from extinction.
Tim Lynch’s 1998 Policy Analysis is about all you’ll need to thoroughly refute Tucker’s general thesis. But two specific passages in Tucker’s broadside on the Fourth Amendment are worth addressing:
What makes the exclusionary rule so absurd is that it only protects people who are guilty of crimes. If the police come to your house, knock down your door, ransack your home, throw all your belongings in the street, and find no incriminating evidence, then the exclusionary rule offers you no compensation whatsoever. Only if evidence turns up that shows you to be guilty of something are you rewarded.
This argument — that the exclusionary rule “only protects the guilty” — is a common refrain on the right. Strictly speaking, Tucker’s right. Once the scenario he outlines has taken place, the exclusionary rule offers no remedy. But Tucker and critics like him ignore the rule’s deterrent value. The exclusionary rule helps ensure that fewer of those incidents happen in the first place.
If police know in advance that evidence gathered from ill-conisidered searches performed without adequate investigation won’t hold up in court, they’re more likely to take the necessary precautions to ensure that bad searches don’t happen. That means fewer scenarios like the one Tucker lays out, and fewer of the all-too-real incidents that clutter this map.