Gutting The Fourth Amendment
July, 1982
When the cops arrest a criminal and the courts turn him loose on a "legal technicality," the culprit, often, is the exclusionary rule--the rule of law holding that a person cannot be convicted on evidence that the police obtain illegally. In Dick Tracy, in TV cop shows, even in real life, it works like this: Everybody knows that a defendant is as guilty as sin, but a crafty lawyer gets the evidence suppressed on the ground that a search was conducted without a proper warrant, or a warr...
