SCOTUS Says Cops Can Use Evidence Found After Illegal Stops

Everything is stemming from an illegal stop, though. The court can try and justify it all they want, but the fact is the drugs were only found because the officer stopped the guy illegally.

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It’s worse than a stop being illegal, so long as a cop has probable cause, the stop is legal.

The issue of what qualifies as probable cause it what’s nebulous. A broken taillight, a brief whiff of what a cop thinks is weed, an object that might resemble a weapon, maybe you’re tired after a long day and driving home slightly erratic


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Yeah, you know you’re in shithole territory when you’re one of the top 3 worst decisions in the entire history of the US. Even if someone is a fan of Roe v Wade, this still makes the top 2.

Fuck.

In my opinion it doesn’t matter–outstanding warrant or not (and yes it has to be outstanding), this is effectively nullifying one of the key protections. Because you know you can issue a warrant for a fucking late PARKING TICKET. There are people who don’t even know they have warrants for traffic violations out. Speed in Colorado, forget to pay the fine, lose the ticket
boom, you’re fucked when you get stopped and fruit of the poisoned tree is totally allowed.

There’s a reason this was a prime enumerated right in the BoR
this may be phrased technically, but practically speaking it is the exact same as nullifying it.

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Exactly. Warrant before stop, fine. Warrant after stop no fucking way.

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Separate and legitimate cause for detention is still fruit of an illegal stop, firstly. Secondly


You could still have detained him without searching the vehicle. This assumes the same “separate and legitimate cause for detention” but without gutting enumerated Rights in the same manner that the court did. I would have been unhappy with this decision as well, but not nearly as much. Allowing search evidence to be admissible is beyond the pale.

-I have been looking for a story covering the cause of the stop and found this
-Drugs were found on arrestee’s person
-If the drugs are “fruit of the poisonous tree,” then so is the arrest for the outstanding warrant. Again, how would Utah make that right? Release the guy, void the arrest record, let him go home, and then renew the warrant and start searching for him again?
-I thought this was a traffic stop until I read this

Do I agree with the way this went down? No. But that’s because I oppose the criminalization of victimless activities.

If you see this decision as violating some principle that has existed since the founding of the United States, read the bit about the exclusionary rule in this article(and please research it further if you doubt it-the article may be wrong). If the progressives on the court really want to do something to improve relations between various communities and their police forces, well, I’m sure that they will get the opportunity to reject a drug or traffic charge itself by coming up with a way that such laws are unconstitutional
I’m not holding my breath.

I’m curious what do you define as “victimless activities”?

Activities in which one does not employ force or fraud to harm another.

I’ve been on vacation all week so I’m catching up on all the shit that went down.

To make a stop an officer needs “reasonable suspicion” that a crime or violation has occurred. To conduct a search an officer needs “probable cause.”
In this case was the tip of narcotic activity reasonable suspicion? Probably not and it should have ended at that therefore making the stop unconstitutional. I think what the judges focused on was the search, separating it from the stop. An unconstitutional stop should void anything following it.
Had the officer known about the warrant prior to the stop, all bets are off. But from what I understand that was not the case.

This one is being misunderstood. The stop may not have been legal, but the car already had a legal warrant out on it. The search happened after the warrant was discovered. One bad action is not a get out of jail free card. The search was legal. So what if the stop was not? Those are different subjects. Punish the cop for the illegal stop.But the search was done in good faith, the warrant the search was based on had nothing to do with the illegal detainment, therefore the search was legal. They could only get three uber liberal judges to decent from this ruling. It was not even close, those three judges are constant fools. They could not even swing all the liberals to their side. There is no doubt this would have been a 6-3 ruling if the court was fully staffed.

But the search was not based on the stop. It was based on an older and valid warrant.

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I understand what the judges said. They are treating the two separately: Stop=illegal Search=legal.

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Again, what should become of the warrant? This person’s arrest had already been warranted by the court system. If the warrant did not exist and the rest of the case was the same, this likely would be a totally different decision.

A person with an outstanding warrant has no reasonable expectation of privacy or right not to be found-that is all this decision is saying. It’s not even an interesting decision. It would have been more interesting if the defendant had refused to identify himself and walked off, the officer had then arrested him for failing to identify himself, and the officer had then found out about the warrant and drugs.

Despite the race-baiting by the progressive justices, this decision is pretty narrow in scope.

Like I’ve said, I disagree with everything that happened, but not because it violated a right the arrestee didn’t attempt to exercise.

Let’s say that, instead of some prohibited drug in his pocket, the arrestee had been wearing a backpack containing the severed head of a toddler whose headless body was found on a nearby riverbank a year prior in an incident which had never turned up a suspect; and the officer had initiated an investigation that led to the arrestee being charged with the kidnapping and murder of said toddler after the arrestee’s confession to the murder. The rest of the incident is the same. Should the toddler’s head and the suspect’s confession not be admissible in court? Should the officer lose his job?

Exactly these rulings do effect murder cases in the same way they effect an once of weed. So it is best to use the extreme to make your simple and very accurate point. An illegal act by a cop, does not invalidate a legal warrant that was issued before the illegal stop. No one would say anything if a cop had just randomly ran the plates in a parking lot.

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I think this is a great example of why you can never trust the NYT’s to give you an accurate description of a court case. That head line makes it sound like the evidence was found based on an illegal stop. No the search was based a legal warrant.

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What about unintentional harm to another because the person doing the harm was drunk or high?

I would actually go so far as to say that the stop was not illegal, because the arrestee had no legal right to be walking free. It was pure luck that the man the officer stopped had an outstanding warrant, and I would be fine with the officer being either liable in civil court or being charged with abduction had the warrant not existed.

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Was force or fraud used to cause harm? I said nothing of intent.