Exclusionary Rule

In a landmark supreme court case, called the united states versus weeks, the supreme courts created a rule to our criminal procedure called the exclusionary rule. What the exclusionary rule means is that if the police obtain evidence against you in violation of your constitutional rights, they cannot use that evidence against you to prove your guilt or innocence at a trial. An example of this would be police searching your home without a search warrant. If they found illegal item in your home during that search, they could not be used against you at trial. Now the important thing to remember about the exclusionary rule, however, is that it does not mean you are automatically free to go. It only means that that particular piece of evidence is
Now over time the Supreme Court has looked at the exclusionary rule a number of times and as the supreme court became more conservative in the 1970s and the 1080s, they began to carve out exceptions to the exclusionary rule. The classic exception come from a case called United States verses Leon, and it is called the "good faith" exception. What that means is if the police officer obtains evidence in a good faith belief that they have complied with your constitutional rights, that evidence can still be used against you even if we later find out that there was a problem with the search and seizure. So if the police go to a judge, obtain a warrant, search your home and find drugs, they find out a week later that there was a problem with the warrant and that technically it was an illegal search. The drugs still come in against you because the officers acted in a good faith belief that they had played by the rules. The Supreme Court has repeatedly said that the exclusionary rule is to prevent us against rogue police officers not against clerical errors or errors on behalf of the