Page 26 - FMJournal_2017_FINAL

SCENES FROM FIRST MONDAY IN OCTOBER 2016

Court held that a suspect did not have a rea- applied the good-faith exception in a case
sonable expectation of privacy over the num- where the police reasonably relied on erro-
bers dialed on a phone. There, a robbery vic- neous information concerning an arrest. The
tim started receiving threatening calls from the Court extended Evans in a case where police
defendant, so police had the telephone com- employees erred in maintaining records in a
pany install a “pen register” on the defendant’s warrant database, holding that the exclusion-
landline to record any numbers dialed. Id. at ary rule does not apply to “isolated negligence
737. The Court held that the suspect could attenuated from the arrest.” Herring v. United
not invoke the Fourth Amendment because he States, 555 U.S. 135, 137 (2009).
had effectively waived his expectation of pri-
vacy by voluntarily conveying the dialed num- Most recently, in Davis v. United States, 564

bers to a third party, the telephone company, U.S. 229 (2011), the Court decided that sup-
“expos[ing] that information to its equipment pressing evidence obtained in violation of the
in the ordinary course of business.” Id. at 744– Fourth Amendment is not warranted when law
46. enforcement officers relied on binding appel-
late precedent that explicitly authorized the
While the third-party doctrine has generally particular police practice in question, even
acted as a limitation on Fourth Amendment if that settled law is later overturned. Davis,
protections, many lower courts have expressed however, did not reach “the markedly different
doubt over the relevance of the doctrine in the question whether the exclusionary rule applies
context of advancing technology. In addition, when the law governing the constitutionality of
Justice Sotomayor has weighed in on this is- a particular search is unsettled.” Id. at 250 (So-
sue, albeit in dicta. See United States v. Jones, tomayor, J., concurring).
565 U.S. 400, 417–18 (2012) (Sotomayor, J.,
concurring) (“More fundamentally, it may be F. Relevant Cases on the Harmless Error Rule
necessary to reconsider the premise that an
individual has no reasonable expectation of Not all Fourth Amendment violations require
privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to reversal. See Chapman v. California, 386 U.S.
third parties.”). 18 (1967). The government bears the burden
of proving that such a constitutional error was
E. Relevant Cases on the Good Faith Exception harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. Id. at
23–24. If there is a reasonable probability that
In United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 922 the evidence complained of contributed to the
(1984), the Court held that the exclusionary conviction, then the error cannot be consid-
rule does not apply when the police conduct a ered harmless. Id. “[T]o determine whether
search in “objectively reasonable reliance” on the error was harmless under Chapman the
a warrant later held invalid. The error in such question this court must ask is whether, absent
a case rests with the issuing magistrate, not the improperly admitted [evidence], it is clear
the police officer, and “punish[ing] the errors beyond a reasonable doubt that the jury would
of judges” is not the office of the exclusion- have returned a verdict of guilty.” United
ary rule. Id. at 916. Applying that same logic, States v. Wolf, 879 F.2d 1320 (6th Cir. 1989).
the Court extended the good-faith exception
to searches conducted in reasonable reliance
on subsequently invalidated statutes. Illinois
v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340, 349–50 (1987). And in
Arizona v. Evans, 514 U.S. 1 (1995), the Court

18 FIRST MONDAY IN OCTOBER JOURNAL