A search in Mexico was authorized by defendant’s landlord, which Mexican officers believed was valid and represented it to be valid. It’s not clear it was valid, but, assuming the search was invalid, the good faith exception still applies. State v. Johnson, 2013 WI App 140, 352 Wis. 2d 98, 841 N.W.2d 302 (2013):
¶9 Johnson asserts that the circuit court erred when it found that landlord consent is a valid exception to Mexican law requiring a warrant to search a residence. The State apparently concedes that the record does not support a finding that Mexican law includes an exception for landlord consent. Accordingly, we assume that the search was not legal under Mexican law and turn to an analysis of whether the fruits of the illegal search were properly admitted.
Good Faith Exception to the Exclusionary Rule
¶10 Wisconsin has followed the lead of the United States Supreme Court in adopting a good faith exception to the exclusionary rule, State v. Eason, 2001 WI 98, ¶64, 245 Wis. 2d 206, 629 N.W.2d 625, stemming from the belief that evidence should be admissible when it is “obtained in the reasonable good-faith belief that a search or seizure was in accord with the Fourth Amendment.” United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 909 (1984) (citation omitted). Our courts have applied the exception for an unlawful search carried out in reliance on a facially valid search warrant, Eason, 245 Wis. 2d 206, ¶73, or on clear and settled precedent, Dearborn, 327 Wis. 2d 252, ¶46. Johnson does not argue that the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule should not be extended to cases involving reliance on foreign authorities conducting foreign searches. We agree that the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule is appropriate in this context.
¶11 Employment of the good faith exception in this case is in accord with our supreme court’s instruction that application of the exclusionary rule should be restricted to cases where the rule’s remedial objectives will be best served, focusing on the efficacy in deterring future Fourth Amendment violations.
Id., ¶35. The threat of suppression of evidence by a United States court is unlikely to have any effect on the legal opinions provided by Mexican authorities to United States law enforcement officials or how Mexican authorities conduct a search on their soil. More importantly, it would not alter the behavior of United States law enforcement officials who have relied on the assurances of foreign authorities that a search is legal. See Leon, 468 U.S. at 916. Holding American law enforcement officials “to a strict liability standard for failings of their foreign associates would be even more incongruous than holding law enforcement officials to a strict liability standard as to the adequacy of domestic warrants.” Peterson, 812 F.2d at 492.
¶12 In applying the good faith exception to this case, we must decide whether United States law enforcement officials involved in the search of Johnson’s Mexican residence “acted in the objectively reasonable belief that their conduct did not violate the Fourth Amendment.” Dearborn, 327 Wis. 2d 252, ¶33 (citation omitted). It is clear that they did so. It was objectively reasonable for American law enforcement to believe in the legality of a joint Mexican-American search under the control of Mexican law enforcement that was carried out based on contact between the FBI liaison to Mexico and his counterpart in Mexico who contacted the head law enforcement officer in Baja California who advised as to how a warrantless search could occur.
¶13 Johnson argues that United States law enforcement officers should have conducted a separate inquiry into Mexican law to confirm the information received from the Baja California attorney general. Such an argument is without merit as we presume high-ranking Mexican law enforcement personnel know their own laws. As United States law enforcement authorities were objectively reasonable in relying on the assurances of Mexican authorities that the search of Johnson’s residence was legal under Mexican law, the circuit court’s denial of Johnson’s motion to suppress evidence was proper.
Really shortens the choice of law consideration, doesn’t it? See § 9.03 of the Treatise.
Consider also the self-validation of the search: “Of course it’s legal. We do this all the time.”
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"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.
