PA essentially rejects Herring; arrest and search on recalled warrant void

Arrest on a recalled, and therefore expired, arrest warrant already served nine days earlier was void, despite the officer’s good faith. Since there is no good faith exception in Pennsylvania, the product of the arrest is invalid. Exclusion here would encourage government to keep its warrant files current. [This case essentially rejects SCOTUS’s Herring.] Commonwealth v. Johnson, 2014 Pa. LEXIS 424 (February 18, 2014):

The Commonwealth has not explained why exclusion of the evidence seized here, unlike the exclusion of the evidence seized in Edmunds, would not vindicate the privacy interests of Pennsylvania citizens, or would forward some other value that was not at issue or sufficiently acknowledged in Edmunds. Indeed, under the rationale articulated in Edmunds, there is at least as much reason to afford an exclusionary remedy in the expired arrest warrant scenario as in the defective search warrant scenario. The mistake in Edmunds was made by the magistrate assessing probable cause; the executive branch (there, embodied by the police executing the warrant) did nothing wrong. This case involves an arrest warrant, not a search warrant, but the defect leading to suppression below did not involve a mistake in the judicial issuance of a warrant without probable cause. Rather, the lapse arose somewhere in the executive branch — not with the arresting officer, but with whoever was responsible for purging executed warrants in a timely fashion.

Thus, this case, unlike Edmunds, involves a situation where application of the exclusionary rule would not only serve the same privacy-based function it was deemed to serve in Edmunds, but also would serve some generalized deterrence function. In this regard, it is worth noting that appellee already suffered the authorized compromise of his liberty via a prior arrest on the same warrant. Application of the exclusionary rule may encourage the executive to adopt more efficient measures to purge executed arrest warrants and thereby to better ensure the privacy rights of Pennsylvanians.