CRJS355(5) - Research Paper Example

Seizure of property in plain view should involve no invasion of privacy and be presumptively reasonable (Hemmens & Gerherd, 2010 ). Plain sight discovery are always common during contacts made by somebody to the officers, detentions, and traffic stops. Even though most of the evidence acquired in this manner may be accepted in court, sometimes part of them may be suppressed. The logic rule of evidence states that ‘what a person knowingly exposes to the public, even at his home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection’ as supported by Hemmens and Gerherd 2010.

Evidence obtained is always not just useful because an officer of law has seen it. The fact that matters is whether he attained it lawfully so that the prosecutor can use it in court. For the investigator to legally invoke plain sight seizure he must consider if he had made a lawful discovery of the evidence. He must have had the legal right of being in the location from which they initially saw, smelled, or felled the evidence. Investigators upon discovering evidence, they must have a probable cause to believe that the evidence is indeed criminal evidence.

Plain view discovery is not always us simple us such, especially when the evidence are to be used in the court of law. Investigators are not allowed to obtain evidence in a place where the suspect reasonably expected privacy. They must have the legal right to enter the place. The exclusionary rule was developed by the courts to deter the federal and the government from violating the right of unreasonable searches and seizures. Evidences observation in plain view is not a search, and it is also settled that evidences obtained in the course of unlawful search or seizure is not plain view evidence.

Therefore the Supreme Court regarded the fourth amendment exclusionary rule as a remedy required by the constitution principle, courts have decided to use deliberate and culpable test to determine whether to admit evidence obtained as a result of seizure which is unconditional as a result of an officer’s error. Evidences that are obtained without questionable search violating the exclusionary rule could ultimately be admissible as evidence in the court. Exclusionary rule does not apply when police officer’s act with objectively reasonable reliance on a search warrant later found to be invalid (Henning, 1995).

Investigators, who mistakenly rather than intentionally violate constitutional rights, are deterred from future violation by the exclusion law. The doctrine of exclusion by good faith harms the innocent defendants in three ways: juror resistance, juror error, and perverse screening effect. It has therefore, been difficult for the court to find any distinction between investigators error and third-party error. The court held that investigators violation in obtaining evidence did not trigger the exclusionary rule.

In justifying the holding of some cases, courts have noted that the logical inconsistency between exclusion in cases involving non-police errors, cannot logically contribute to the deterrence of Fourth Amendment violations. But the errors that are made by the investigators in finding evidences and filling them have resulted to high faulty paperwork. By court allowing these errors in good faith doctrine the scope of its impact remains to be seen. The errors such us record keeping which may lead to false arrest, unlawful acquisition of evidence could only justify