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Several years ago, two upstate New York state troopers pulled over a U-haul van going 70 miles an hour on a desolate stretch of road at 2 A.M. Hunting season had just begun, and the police officers were looking for hunters from New York City with illegal firearms. They asked the driver of the van, Leonardo Turriago, if they could check his trunk. Turriago agreed, and the troopers found a dead body, hacked to pieces and stored in several difference boxes. After Turriago and his two companions were arrested, investigators found that the murder was linked to a busted drug deal and the body was being transported to the countryside for burial. Turriago and his co-conspirators were never convicted. An appellate court ruled that the police did not have a reasonable basis to suspect that a crime had taken place, and therefore their search of the van was improper. Furthermore, the court found that the troopers had intimidated the defendants into agreeing to a search of the vehicle. Note that the court did not question the obvious guilt of the accused. Instead, it found that the police officers had not lived up to the letter of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees that citizens shall be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. The so-called exclusionary rule requires that any evidence obtained through government violations of the Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Amendment may not be introduced by the prosecution at trial as proof of the defendant's guilt.

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A Question of Police Procedure
The New York state troopers did not mistakenly arrest an innocent person. Rather, their errors were procedural. The purpose of criminal procedure rules is, of course, to ensure that government law enforcement officers and prosecutors do not infringe on the constitutional rights of defendants, particularly the right to due process of law. After all, a criminal prosecution brings the force of the state, with all of its resources, to bear against the individual. The exclusionary rule, like the Miranda requirements, is designed to safeguard the rights of individuals against the immense power of the state.
The exclusionary rule, however, differs from Miranda rights in that it is not designed as a specific remedy for defendants whose constitutional rights have been violated. Rather, its goal is to deter police officers from violating the constitutional rights in the first place. So, for example, if the New York state troopers had read Leonardo Turriago his Miranda rights, after he which he voluntarily admitted to a murder, that admission would admissible, even if any evidence of the dismembered body in the U-Haul would be kept out as "fruit of the poisoned tree."

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Arguing for the Exclusionary Rule
It may seem unfair and unjust that obviously guilty defendants such as Leonardo Turriago should go free because "searching for illegal firearms" was not a reasonable enough reason for the police to stop the U-Haul. For supporters of the exclusionary rule, however, focusing on any individual case misses the point. The exclusionary rule, along with other procedural guidelines, promotes our society's commitment to constitutional values. In other words, the trade-off, in which some of the guilty are spared punishment to protect the rights of all citizens, is "worth it."

The Deterrent Effect The primary justification for the exclusionary rule is that is deters wrongdoing by the police. Because they know that they will lose convictions unless they follow proper procedures, the reasoning goes, law enforcement officers will be less likely to break the rules in gathering evidence. Police officers are aware that if they do not read a suspect her or his Miranda rights, and subsequent admission will be kept out of court. Alternatively, if they do not properly obtain a warrant to search an apartment, any contraband they find will be similarly inadmissible. Thus, police officers are more likely to follow Miranda and get a warrant.
Indeed, defenders of the exclusionary rule point to the dramatic increase in the use of warrants following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Mapp v. Ohio (1961), which established that the rule applied to both federal and state law enforcement officers. In Cincinnati, for example, local police officers averaged zero to seven warrants a year before Mapp and 89 to113 warrants a year after the Court's decision. In Boston, the annual use of warrants rose from 176 to 267 before Mapp and 560 to 940 after the ruling.

Minimal Impact Supporters of the exclusionary rule also reject the contention that it has allowed substantial number of guilty defendants to go free. One researcher believes that, despite occasional cases like the one involving Leonardo Turriago and the New York state troopers, the impact of the exclusionary rule is negligible with regard to violent criminal offenses. In his study of 7,500 cases in three states, only 40 defendants were acquitted because of the suppression of physical evidence, and judges never applied the exclusionary rule when the offense involved murder, rape, armed robbery, or unarmed robbery.
Even when the exclusionary rule is applied-most often in trials involving drug offenses-prosecutors are usually able to get a conviction based on other, untainted evidence. One survey covering nearly 3,000 federal criminal cases found that motions to suppress evidence based on violations of the Fourth Amendment were only granted 1.3 percent of the time, and in half of the cases where the motion was granted the defendant was convicted anyway. Thus, it would seem that the "cost" of the exclusionary rule in suppressed evidence is relatively low when compared to its "benefit" of deterring police misconduct.

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Arguing against the Exclusionary Rule
Critics of the exclusionary rule contend that the rules ultimate impact is difficult to determine because we cannot measure actions that police officers did not take for fear of straying outside legal boundaries. Professor Paul Cassell of the University of Utah has noted that the rate at which law enforcement officers solve crimes dropped from 60 percent to 45 percent (where they have remained) after the Miranda rules went into effect in 1966.

Maximum Impact The problem with the exclusionary rule, some contend, is that it costs convictions that the Constitution does not forbid. If, for example, law enforcement agents could have easily procured a warrant to search a suspected drug dealer's home, but they fail to do so and enter the house anyway, any evidence they find will be inadmissible. The Fourth Amendment by itself does not dictate this result, as it was a reasonable search. Only shoddy police work in failing to obtain a warrant allows the suspect to go free-a result that is not necessarily required by the Fourth Amendment.
Procedural requirements can also place a heavy burden on police officers. Now deceased New York state trial judge Harold J. Rothwax contended, "the law is so muddy that the police can't find out what they are allowed to do even if they wanted to." Rothwax felt that if a police officer took a six month sabbatical to study the intricacies of search and seizure law, "he wouldn't know any more than he did before he started… yet we expect cops to always know at every moment what the proper action is."

"Testilying" There is also resistance to the idea that low suppression of evidence rates is the result of compliance with constitutional standards by police. Many observers believe that a great deal of "excludable" evidence is allowed in courtroom, thanks to police perjury. In fact, lying by police officers to convict the guilty and avoid the consequences of the exclusionary rule is so common in some jurisdictions that the officers themselves have come up with a name for it: "testilying."
Testilying can come in any number of forms. If, for example, a police officer unlawfully stops and searches a car and finds illegal firearms in the back seat, he or she can falsely claim on the witness stand that the driver of the ran a stop sign and the guns were in plain view. In one survey, 81 percent of Chicago-area judges, prosecutors, and public defenders expressed the belief that police officers would rather change their testimony than change their behavior to comply with rules of procedure. Far from promoting proper police behavior, some conclude, the exclusionary rule encourages police deception and subterfuge.

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The Final Word
There is little doubt that the exclusionary rule has had an influence on police behavior. The use of warrants skyrocketed following its inception, and police training in proper rules of procedure has become commonplace in precincts across the nation. It would be naïve to assume, however, that low levels of evidence suppression are solely linked to better police work. "Fourth Amendment fraud" on the part of law enforcement certainly limits the effectiveness of the exclusionary rule, while judicially created exceptions to the rule provide judges with the discretion to discard it in a number of circumstances.

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