Re:US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitu...
by plagiarist on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @02:08PM
(#48736774)
I guess I am a 4A absolutist.
The original case is clear that that person's rights were violated. It certainly is reasonable for the officers to believe they could conduct a search in that case, so they should not have consequences. (Officers that do unreasonably violate rights should experience consequences, they currently don't.) But there's nothing in there curing the violation of rights.
It's so weird to me that this is possible. If that happened with other rights, it'd feel like, "oh, yeah, definitely these soldiers shouldn't have been allowed to live here. They do now, though, and will continue to. Sorry."
Also, the good faith exception is supposed to be relatively weak - it's supposed, at least originally, to only apply in cases where the officers performing the illegal action had no reasonable way of knowing that it is illegal; the original case is quite clear - a search was conducted in one state based on an out-of-state warrant, and that warrant itself was later deemed to have been improperly issued. I find it quite reasonable to say that the officers conducting the search had no reasonable way of knowing that this warrant was problematic. If the good faith doctrine was watered down so much that an "oops, I didn't know I was breaking the law" from an officer is enough, then the problem lies with these standards, not with the principle.