SCOTUS cert. grant, another exclusionary rule case on identity evidence from an illegal stop

Tolentino v. New York, 09-11556, cert. granted November 15, 2010. SCOTUSBlog is here. The opinion below is People v. Tolentino, 2010 NY Slip Op 2643, 14 N.Y.3d 382, 926 N.E.2d 1212, 900 N.Y.S.2d 708 (2010), posted here back on April 1. From the New York Court of Appeals decision:

As the Farias-Gonzalez court pointed out, the policy rationale of the exclusionary rule would not be served by its application to identity-related evidence. The social costs of excluding such evidence are great: courts and the government are entitled to know who defendants are, since permitting defendants to hide their identity would undermine the administration of the criminal justice system and essentially allow suppression of the court’s jurisdiction. On the other side of the equation, there are few deterrence benefits. The Constitution does not prohibit the government from requiring a person to identify himself to a police officer. In addition,

“even if a defendant in a criminal prosecution successfully suppresses all evidence of his identity and the charges are dropped, the Government can collect new, admissible evidence of identity and reindict him. This is so because identity-related evidence is not unique evidence that, once suppressed, cannot be obtained by other means” (Farias-Gonzalez, 556 F3d at 1188-1189 [citation omitted]).

As a result, “[t]he application of the exclusionary rule to identity-related evidence will have a minimal deterrence benefit, as its true effect will often be merely to postpone a criminal prosecution” (id. at 1189).

Nor do we believe that “[t]oday’s opinion [will] give[ ] law enforcement an incentive to illegally stop, detain, and search anyone for the sole purpose of discovering the person’s identity and determining if it matches any government records accessible by the police” (dissenting op at 390). Police are already deterred from conducting illegal car stops because evidence recovered in the course of an illegal stop remains subject to the exclusionary rule.

While the Supreme Court has held that fingerprint evidence—evidence the dissent describes as “paradigmatic identity evidence” (dissenting op at 389)—may be subject to the exclusionary rule (Davis v Mississippi, 394 US 721, 724 [1969]), Davis, as well as Hayes v Florida (470 US 811, 815 [1985]), is distinguishable from this case in two ways. First, the defendants in those cases were illegally stopped for the purpose of obtaining evidence—fingerprints—that would connect the defendants to crimes under investigation. The “identity evidence” was not preexisting. Second, the fingerprints were used, not to establish the identities of the individuals apprehended by the police and subject to the jurisdiction of the court, but to connect those individuals’ fingerprints to latent prints recovered from the crime scene. The evidence established defendants’ “identities” as the perpetrators, but not their “identities” in the sense relevant here. Our decision today would not alter the outcome of those cases. We merely hold that a defendant may not invoke the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine when the only link between improper police activity and the disputed evidence is that the police learned the defendant’s name.

The cert grant here was a surprise to both me and SCOTUSBlog, which has nothing yet on the case.

Update: I was thinking about this last night, and I now think that this is one of those cases where they took it just to further limit the exclusionary rule.