D.S.D.: “Good faith is not a magic lamp for police officers to rub whenever they find themselves in trouble.”

Warrantless entry was not “sanitized” by an ex post facto search warrant. “‘Good faith is not a magic lamp for police officers to rub whenever they find themselves in trouble.’” Leon involved no police misconduct; this case does. United States v. Long, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 78229 (D. S.D. February 3, 2014):

In Leon, the case that created the exception and that the Government seeks now to invoke, the police did not ever violate the law. They simply relied in good faith on a magistrate’s error. In Long’s case, however, there was (1) an illegal entry of his store and observations made of items in the interior of it; and (2) oral testimony, in support of a search warrant request, which relied exclusively on the prior entry and observations. Deterrence, Leon holds, is not needed to remedy judicial errors. But police misconduct must be deterred through the suppression of evidence.

“Good faith is not a magic lamp for police officers to rub whenever they find themselves in trouble.” Officer Spargur’s presumptively unconstitutional entry into and search of the OC Store was an unequivocal Fourth Amendment transgression. Leon instructs courts to pay” [c]lose attention” to the “remedial objectives” of the exclusionary rule, and apply it only in those cases where the purpose of deterrence can be furthered. This is precisely such a case. It is not, as Leon was, a case where an officer acted in objective good faith in obtaining a warrant to search a commercial establishment. Instead, it was an attempt to sanitize illegal behavior that had just occurred, collect additional fruits and skirt the tentacles of the rule. The Court is unwilling to provide Officer Spargur, police and the Government with their magic lamp and allow them to use it to avoid the harsh penalty of suppression. All of the evidence tribal police seized from the OC Store, under the auspices of the July 28 telephonic warrant, must be suppressed as the poisonous fruit of an illegal search.

To apply Leon’s good-faith exception to the fruits of an unlawful entry — because officers later obtained a warrant based on the entry and what an officer earlier saw inside the place sought to be searched — would effectively allow the exception to swallow the rule itself. While pared down by Leon and other cases, the rule has not been eliminated and still is available to deter police misconduct that runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment.