Rights for Criminals

Criminal rights should be limited in my opinion. By that I mean that if someone's convicted of a crime, they should experience some deprivation of their freedom and if they're dangerous, they should be kept away from the rest of us for a period of time to protect the rest of us.

On the other hand someone who's legally accused of a crime should have a number of rights, because their opponent is the government and the government has a wide variety of tools that individuals don't.

One of the rights we tend to take for granted is the right provided by the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution, to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. That right has been amplified by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court over the years. We have the right to remain silent, when questioned by police officers, so we avoid saying something that could be used against us in court. We also have the right to be told of that right to silence.

Also, police cannot stop anyone at anytime to search for anything, just because they want to. You and I may have nothing to fear from such a search (OK, I'm not too sure about you), but we have the right to move about freely without fear of such a stop for no reason. One of the things that's become part of the law on this subject is that the police have to have what's called "probable cause" to stop you to search for evidence of a crime.

A number of decades ago, the Supreme Court formulated something called the exclusionary rule. That rule was designed to discourage police misconduct when it came to going too far in searches and seizures. This isn't to suggest that there was a lot of police misconduct, but it did happen occasionally. The exclusionary rule says that if a police officer stops you and doesn't have probable cause or doesn't advise you of your right to remain silent, and evidence is developed as a result of those failures, that evidence will be excluded from any later court hearing.

As said, the rule isn't designed to protect the criminal who is stopped. It's designed to stop the police from mistreating all or any of us, because it teaches that criminals may go free if the police don't conduct themselves properly.

A recent case narrows all of our rights. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that if the police make a stop based on a warrant and find evidence of a crime, that evidence can be used even if the police records on the warrant were wrong.

Here's what happened. The defendant was driving in front of a police car and the police did what they have the absolute right to do. They ran the license plate and found that there was an outstanding warrant for the owner of that plate. They had the right to stop the person if there was a warrant and they had the right to arrest him and search his car. All legit.

But the problem was that the police's records were in error. The warrant had been recalled and there was no outstanding warrant. The problem is that the police, in the belief that the warrant was legitimate, found drugs in the possession of the defendant and prosecuted him for this additional crime. The defendant said that since there was no warrant, there was no probable cause for the stop and therefore, the evidence should be excluded.

The prosecutor admitted that if it hadn't been for being told of the warrant there was no probable cause.

The Court said that the police acted in good faith (there's no question that the officers did) and that in weighing the benefits of excluding the evidence and letting the criminal off the hook versus enforcing the law when the police acted in good faith, they would allow the evidence to be used.

Opinion: This decision is dead wrong.

Again, if you assume that the rights of the non-criminal are at risk when police powers of search and seizure are broadened, this becomes important. But let's look at the use of the rule and its effect.

If that evidence had been excluded, while it's true that the individual criminal would've gone free, the fact is that police departments around the country would be encouraged to clean-up their record keeping so that a mistaken stop based on a non-existent warning wouldn't result in a case being thrown out.

Instead, police are now encouraged to keep old warrant records on their lists, because it provides an excuse to make a stop and allows the evidence so discovered to be used. I've never had a warrant issued against me, but if one had been mistakenly issued or issued correctly and then withdrawn, I could be at constant risk of being stopped for nothing. In some states that could result in an arrest for possession of a small amount of drugs, and there are many problems associated with police stops of men of minority groups, too complex to discuss in this posting.

But the bottom line reality is that all of our rights have been diminished by the 5-4 decision, and we can only hope this will be corrected in a subsequent decision.

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