Nothing prevents police or prosecutors from using inadmissible evidence, they just can’t produce it in court.
From your link:
“The doctrine is subject to four main exceptions. The tainted evidence is admissible if:
- it was discovered in part as a result of an independent, untainted source”
Nothing prevents police or prosecutors from using inadmissible evidence, they just can’t produce it in court.
That statement by itself is clearly false. The police cannot illegally search you and use that evidence as a means to find additional evidence, and then present that evidence in court as if it was untainted.
What I gather you meant now was that parallel construction allows them to do this. Parallel construction is the process by which unlawful evidence is used to direct the attention of LEOs, who, after plainly observing some other crime or probable cause indicator, then conduct a search.
I know what parallel construction is, but what I do not know is why you believe the process is common. Do you have any evidence for the frequency with which it is used? The revelation that it had ever happened was a major news story just a few years ago. Is it your belief that it was common practice, and that even though there are something like 500,000 working law enforcement agents in the US, somehow the secret never got out until recently?
To be very clear: I believe parallel construction has happened and will happen again in the future, but I do not believe it is routine or that any process at CBP is tuned to amplify it.
When the police find a guy carrying $500,000 in his car, do you really think that was random chance?
> That statement by itself is clearly false.
No the statement is true. Detectives act on hearsay evidence all the time (which is inadmissible). They use everything they know about a suspect to drive an investigation.
Inadmissible means only that it can't be presented in court. While a jury must ignore inadmissible evidence, police have no such requirement. Most of their work is outside the courtroom, the trial is just the presentation at the end.
Isn't the problem that illegal (dragnet) searches still happen?
Police only need one warrant or one instance of probable cause to "deploy Stingray" in a city block, and then flag suspicious things, and then use the legal search conducted by the border patrol, to check what was suspicious.
Of course, the practicality of flagging a lot of people for minor things (that somehow are or become a crime when crossing a border) and then keeping those records somehow shared with the CBP in secret for all these years is simply not there.
(1) There were posts on HN around the time of the Snowden news of border agents presenting private emails, in one instance someone was traveling as a tourist but had email inviting them to perform as a musician
(2) In individual stories I read of searched phones, the agent already knew where to look (for example, went directly to an app with discussion arranging paid hookups)
We already know that parallel reconstruction is common for surveillance used by law enforcement (DEA, local police using Stingray, etc) so that seems more believable than random spot checks on .007% of people.