concluding that government had “considerable leverage” over illegal aliens who testified to avoid prosecution and deportation
How later courts described this case
- concluding that government had “considerable leverage” over illegal aliens who testified to avoid prosecution and deportation
- where, in a prosecution for harboring and concealing illegal aliens, testimony of illegal aliens had been procured by the government as the result of an illegal search and was prompted by the government’s promise to allow the witnesses to voluntarily depart without prosecution if they testified, the witnesses’ decisions to testify could not accurately be characterized as intervening acts of free will of sufficient independence to purge the primary taint of the unlawful search, and the exclusionary rule would therefore not be relaxed so as to allow admission of such witnesses’ testimony
- government promised to not prosecute illegal aliens in exchange for testimony
- when affidavit fails to satisfy first prong of Aguilar-Spinelli, there was no probable cause
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
OAKES, Circuit Judge
tconcurring):
I agree with everything that Judge Mansfield has said in his opinion and join therein. I would add only that, as Professor Amsterdam has so aptly pointed out, criticism of the exclusionary rule has been directed, as was the Government’s argument in this case, at the rule as if it were a means to “deter” specific episodes of past unconstitutional police behavior. In fact, the exclusionary rule should be looked at as *36 the principal means for ensuring governmental performance of the obligations imposed by the Fourth Amendment upon the system of criminal justice as a whole. See Amsterdam, Perspectives on the Fourth Amendment, 58 U.Minn.L.Rev. 349, 432 (1974). The misdirected criticism of the exclusionary rule stems from an unduly narrow view of the Fourth Amendment which conceives of it as a collection of protections of individual spheres of interest, rather than as a broad regulatory canon of Government pertaining to law enforcement procedures which keeps us all secure against the conduct it condemns. See Amsterdam, supra, 58 U.Minn.L.Rev. at 367; United States v. Barbera, 514 F.2d 294 , 299 n.12 (2d Cir. 1975).