Defendant was arrested multiple times because he was an identity theft victim. The state could not repeatedly claim the good faith exception under Herring after they were on notice defendant was an identity theft victim after the first arrest. State v. Scott, 2014-Ohio-392, 6 N.E.3d 101 (8th Dist. 2014):
{¶23} In this matter, the evidence indicates that Scott was first arrested because of mistaken warrant information on December 19, 2012. Later that same day, the mistake was detected, and he was released from a county warrant and a fugitive warrant on “order of release from the Adult Parole Authority” signed by Detective Hall. Immediately following his release, Scott made a police report with Officer Maguth and explained that he had been the victim of identity fraud and erroneously arrested in connection with a warrant for Wiley. Officer Maguth confirmed Scott’s statement with the jailer, then faxed his report to the record management unit and financial crimes unit for follow-up. Scott was then rearrested on the same mistaken information on January 17, 2013, despite his claims that there had been another mistake. According to Gerren, the fugitive warrant for Wiley continued to list Scott as an alias until Gerren removed it from the Adult Parole Authority database on February 19, 2013, after speaking with Scott’s trial counsel.
{¶24} In undertaking our analysis of this matter, we must first note that this matter involves two separate warrantless arrests of Scott. With regard to the first arrest on December 19, 2012, by application of Leon and Herring, this court would apply the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule in connection with any evidence obtained at the time of the first arrest because of the erroneous information linking Scott to the warrant for Wiley. With regard to the second arrest from the same erroneous information, however, we are compelled to reach a different result. The record clearly establishes that despite Scott’s December 19, 2012 release from jail upon the discovery of the erroneous information, his meeting with the police, and the police report identifying him as a victim of identity fraud, the warrant information was never withdrawn or corrected. The same error continued to link him to Wiley, and the error remained uncorrected until defense counsel was able to obtain a correction, which was well after the second arrest.
{¶25} Therefore, this court concludes that the department was on notice of the erroneous information for almost a month prior to the second arrest. Further, because the erroneous information remained uncorrected until after the second arrest, this matter involves the “reckless, or grossly negligent conduct, or * * * recurring or systemic negligence” condemned in Herring. Moreover, neither this court nor the parties can locate a single case authorizing application of the exclusionary rule to a situation involving two separate and successive erroneous arrests based upon the same erroneous information where the police are on notice of the error immediately after the first arrest. In our view, application of the good faith exception cannot be repeatedly invoked to immunize unlawful arrests from the application of the exclusionary rule.
{¶26} Under the unique circumstances presented herein, we conclude that there has been grossly reckless conduct, as well as recurring, sustained, and systemic negligence that the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule is not applicable and the evidence obtained in connection with the January 17, 2013 arrest must be suppressed.
So, analogous to the dog bite cases: Your dog gets one bite. After that, you’re on notice it’s a dangerous animal.
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced." —Williams v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold, J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today." — Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property." —Entick v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth Amendment." —United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth." —Chapman v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable." —Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected." —Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” —United States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.” —United States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need." —Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Let it Bleed (album, 1969)
"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration camp]
“Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a man is realising that it’s all rotten. Realising how to celebrate that rottenness, that’s freedom.” – John le Carré, The Night Manager (1993), line by Richard Roper
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime." —Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)
The book was dedicated in the first (1982) and sixth (2025) editions to Justin William Hall (1975-2025). He was three when this project started in 1978.
