The idea is that if the police tell the truth in their warrant application of what they are looking for and why, the judge issues a search warrant, and the police lawfully execute the warrant, then there's no point in suppressing the evidence just because, years later, it's determined that the warrant should not have issued.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception

'Good faith' is given when chain of custody is broken. 'Good faith' is given way too much. Either the 4th Amendment is serious enough to have power/force over law enforcement/judicial, or it doesn't. And with good faith, it doesn't.

'our side violated the law but because of the divisions of power, our side didn't violate the law and we are going to give good faith to our side that our side was acting in good faith'. It's all window dressing to say 'the fourth amendment is superseded by other factors that a judge get's to decide at their discretion and the fourth amendment is not in fact the law of the land, a judge can overrule it with 'good faith''.

Ignorance of the law is when you claim you didn't follow the law because you were unaware it existed.

This is a case where the court believes police did know the law and did try to follow it in good faith -- that's how they got to their conclusion that it's constitutional -- and that no court had yet reached a different conclusion in that district, until now.

These are distinctly different situations.

here's a Washington Post article lamenting that Google was cutting back on how long they hold location data and how hundreds of people wouldn't have been prosecuted without it- https://archive.ph/r7afb

> the Court will not order any evidence suppressed.

this keeps him from getting off scott free

To me there is a fundamental difference between lies like:

1. "Your buddy in the next room already ratted you out."

2. "Sign this admission and you'll only get 6 months, tops. If you don't, we can seize your house and your mother will be living on the streets. "

But if the police believed, in good faith, that a particular search was legal and reasonable, based on the fact that a judge authorized them to perform it, then excluding the resulting evidence doesn't serve that purpose.

Update: This is not a new thing. The good-faith exception has been in U.S. law for decades. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception . You may not like it, but it's not something the judge just made up out of thin air.

Yeah yeah, they work for “the people” “the tax payer” whatever. They work for the government. They get their paychecks from the same place.

What are you expecting here? This isn’t equal.

Docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67397036/united-states-...

Order: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nvd.162...

https://plover.com/~mjd/misc/cell-tower-dump-opinion.pdf

If the target of the warrant itself is the carrier/telecom - probably constitutional, but I imagine there'd need to be a pretty good explanation.

If the target of the warrant itself is a single customer of the carrier/telecom - Absolutely unconstitutional.

E.g. You can't get the transaction history of every customer of a bank just because one of its customers is a suspect.

(Edited for clarity.)

At least the weasel words allow/recognize that the decision is made on a branch of unknown strength. The branch may snap if other judges overrule, or it may be found to be a main branch if other judges uphold the decision. I'm not a legal scholar, but that's the first I've heard of this type of acknowledgement. However, seems like the courage ran out at that point instead of denying the evidence to be used, and letting it go to appeal to test the thickness of that branch.

The police officers applied to a judge for a warrant. The judge gave them the warrant. Now another judge says that the warrant should not have been issued in the first place. How is that the police's fault? How would you hold them accountable?

Whether the police violated the constitution in good faith or not is irrelevant when it comes to the rights of the accused.

But the declaration that cell tower dumps are illegal now disincentivizes future police from relying on dumps, since they now know (or should know) that such evidence will be thrown out. And more to the point, magistrate judges will stop issuing warrants for cell tower dumps.

> Bram v. United States, 168 U.S. 532 (1897), was a United States Supreme Court case that ruled that an alleged confession to a crime, in order to be admissible, must not be obtained by threats or violence, nor by any direct or implied promises, however slight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_v._United_States

The ruling was later applied to the states as well in Malloy v. Hogan

> The Court held that the Fifth Amendment's exception from compulsory self-incrimination is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment against abridgement by a state. When determining if state officers properly obtained a confession, one must focus on whether the statements were made freely and voluntarily without any direct or implied promises or improper influence.

https://www.oyez.org/cases/1963/110

The "you will get X years instead of Y years" has repeatedly been found to make testimony inadmissible. You might be confusing it with plea bargains which are legal but don't involve the police and are actually binding agreements. The prosecutor cannot lie to you about what you will receive in return for your cooperation.

"courage ran out"

...

"I'm not a legal scholar,"

:/

I'd at least avoid the mind-reading.

The question isn't whether the police officers who initiated the tower dump should go to jail or be fired, but whether the evidence they obtained would be admissible. It shouldn't be.

Also, a cell tower dump is not an act in good faith - neither in 2020 nor in 2025, regardless of whether the court lets it slide or not.

Rather, it's the opposite. It's not "punishing" police to say "hey, you can't use this evidence". That's not a punishment for them, they shouldn't personally be offended by that. And we certainly shouldn't be comparing that outcome to as if the police are being put behind bars.

We shouldn't be putting people behind bars with bad evidence just because we didn't know it was bad when we got it. No, we should retroactively say "hey, we can't use that evidence". If that hurts the police's fee fees I don't think that should come into play. I don't think that's a metric we should be optimizing for.

Tell that to a financial regulator and see where it gets you. That's how it works for everyone else. Just because a law hasn't been clarified yet doesn't stop it from being applied to your past actions after courts have clarified it.

police investigating canvas for witnesses, canvas for ring doorbells cams, and ... canvas for cell towers.

identical, not analogous.

The defendants rights were violated, but there is no doubt about the legitimacy of the data, and what it implies. Police now know they cannot use this method in the future, so suppressing the evidence in this particular case does not disincentivize anything, as long as its made clear that it cannot be done in the future.

This is obviously false. It would disincentivize the police from collecting evidence without first ensuring that the method of collection was legal.

but can you hold them to that in any manner or does each officer need to be told officially and continue to plead ignorance of the law until they are in some documented way informed of it? can you plead ignorance of the law if you know it's not legal to dump all traffic from a cell phone tower but no one said that it's not legal to dump all the traffic from a web server (assuming for the sake of argument the obv interpretation that this ruling applies to all data stores that contain data from multiple people)? Every time you need to violate the constitution can you just have the new guy do it? Does declaring this illegal actually do anything to protect the rights of people who did nothing wrong and had their data seized and pored over by police anyway?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frazier_v._Cupp

I fear like many other old assumptions about criminal justice that isn't a close match to reality.

They all get their paycheck straight out your paycheck before you even think about it. It's absolutely brilliant. No one would actually pay for most the horse-shit we get in return if you had to sign the check.

Because there is nothing prohibiting it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

How could you live in the world without breaking the law if you didn't know what the law was?

What baffles me is the hypocrisy in the political party that wants more government and regulation is the same one that hates the men who enforce it.

Yet plea bargaining is basically a promise in exchange for a confession (guilty plea), and that's why it's not allowed basically anywhere except the US.

> In some ultra-exclusive communities, city police are literally reduced to Dashers and grocery getters

Care to name a few?

How often does this actually happen in criminal matters?

Instead, you get human beings who are shielded by a thin piece of paper who can summarily execute you, then say "whoops, my bad".

Police are nothing more than State-sponsored gang members.

So this isn’t really a good argument even if we ignore the fact that it’s a non sequitur.

A better argument is that the good faith exception, while making sense in principle, can easily be abused by the police to make illegally obtained evidence look like it was done in good faith, and therefore the exception itself should be removed because of how difficult it is to actually gauge and enforce.

My interview tapes are hilarious.

This isn't good advice only for people who have possibly committed a crime but also (and especially) for those who are confident that they have not. The police are asking you questions to "get to the bottom of it" and they encounter people every day who do think they can lie to get out of a crime; they think you might try to lie to get out of a crime. They won't trust your words but they will verify your words. If your words turn out to be false, then they'll tell the judge/jury that you lied to them, not that you were mistaken; in the absence of stronger evidence (against someone else) they might claim you were possibly even intending to direct their investigation toward a red herring with your falsehoods.

The only revision to this advice I've heard in the past decade-and-a-bit: tell the police your real first and last name if they ask. It's not always a requirement but some states have "stop and ID" laws, which means you have to identify yourself to law enforcement during a "lawful detention" (other states instead require it after an arrest).

Also note that there are good-faith defenses to all sorts of crimes, because (for example) there is a difference between knowingly defrauding a customer and just making a mistake.

That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason to punish them for it.

It disincentivizes constitutional crapshoots where they throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It incentivizes using already known-good techniques where possible.

“This method” is also frequently scoped very narrowly. Next time they can get the data from a slightly different place, and it’s suddenly a new case. Or they filter the time or device info slightly differently. There are a bajillion permutations one could argue about in good faith.

In those cases, suppressing the evidence would go a long way to disincentivize actions the police know are likely unconstitutional but there's enough uncertainty for plausible deniability.

I wish I had as much confidence in a finger wag as you do but unfortunately I think it'll work more like Pavlov.

Maybe their paychecks don't come from the federal government nominally but in practice it's highly intermixed.

Sometimes very literally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_Los_Angeles_Count...

Or employing illegal aliens. "But they told me they had work visas, and they showed me what later turned out to be expertly-counterfeited visas!" Why shouldn't that get you off the hook, if true?

What they cannot do is violate certain constitutional rights to do so without triggering exclusion.

“Oh really? I live in Queens. You got a team of monkeys working on this or something?”

The judge erred in granting the warrant, the police violated the above statute. Them being unaware would be an affirmative defense, that does require admission of the above crime.

Yes, next time they do it the data cannot be used in court as it was already declared anti-constitutional by that Circuit and good faith argument cannot be used. Good faith and not knowing the law are different; good faith can be used when the law is not clear enough and there was no rule to clarify.

It happens very often with 2A restrictions that are overturned by courts, but they are in effect for years and when they are repelled by courts then similar laws are passed just to be repelled years later, but during all the years there is an anti-constitutional law in place with prohibitions. So police cannot do cell searches, but local governments can enact anti-constitutional laws with intention and wipe rights successfully, for example laws that mandates telecom companies to provide the data to the police.

Many of today's lawmakers no longer have that intent, but the system as a whole still keeps running in a manner that allows tools of that nature to be used against targeted individuals and populations.

For example I can find a lot of Australian lawyers discussing plea deals.

> There are three main types of plea deals in Australia:

> Charge Bargaining – The defendant pleads guilty to a lesser charge than initially filed. For example, a charge of aggravated assault may be reduced to common assault.

> Sentence Bargaining – The defendant pleads guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence recommendation from the prosecution.

> Fact Bargaining – The prosecution and defence agree on which facts will be presented to the court, potentially influencing sentencing outcomes.

https://newsouthlawyers.com.au/plea-deals-in-australia-what-...

If you just mean that plea deals are not used by inquisitorial systems then obviously that makes sense.

The legal precedent for this goes back decades, and it's been argued by many people better-informed than you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception

Their police force is 15 for a community of 41 homes[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Creek,_Florida [2] https://www.indiancreekvillagefl.gov/police/police-staff-dir...

Cody Wilson -- Went to a sugar daddy website that verifies IDs to ensure all 'escorts' are 18 which is a pretty good faith way to do it IMO. Woman seemingly had fake ID at some point, and also lied and turned out to be like 16 or 17. At some point later she underwent counseling at school and admitted she was an escort, after which a criminal investigation happened and Mr. Wilson was arrested. As a strict liability crime, there was no defense that due diligence was done to ensure the escort was 18.

A friend was a career LAPD detective, and he gave me the talk. He said because I’m a nice guy I might try to help the police by explaining what I saw in detail. He was adamant that I never ever do that, because in the absence of someone to pin it on, they would find a way to pin it on me. He saw it as literally their job.

No matter what, even if you are just standing there when something happens, don’t talk to the police.

Not long ago a guy was put in jail for creating business-card sized metal sheets with the image of a 'lightning link' (machinegun conversion device) on it. Not the actual device, just a picture of it etched <0.001" into the metal. Clearly just art, and even when the ATF cut it out they could not get it function as a machine gun. They gave it to an actual machinist, and even after a day he could not get it to function as a machine gun. They could only get it to do anything by literally jamming it into the gun and making it do hammer follow, which every AR-15 can do with the parts already in it.

Up until the guy was convicted I don't think anyone had any idea a picture of a machine gun on a metal card was a machine gun. They even convicted the guy advertising it, who never as far as I know actually distributed one.

And people wonder why American's are apathetic to it all. A judge can just wave away constitutional violations all day/every day because 'good faith'.

What is one to do if they have material information and a vested interest in crimes being solved and getting the right people be held responsible?

They did, however, violate the Fourth Amendment. Per the court.

I don't even think they are all that interested in getting to the truth of the matter, they are mostly concerned with getting an arrest and conviction. If it'll be easier to throw you behind bars than to find and arrest the dangerous person who actually committed the crime they aren't all going to choose more work and risk "officer safety" when they can just take you and call it a day. Especially not if they're already prejudiced against you or you bruised their fragile ego somehow.

Juries usually don't decide sentencing, and even if they did I don't think that would matter with crimes viewed as wrong in themselves (mala in se) though it might with crimes viewed as wrong because they are prohibited (mala prohibita).

It's not punishing the police. It's not allowing them to use evidence that they shouldn't have been allowed to gather.

Fining them, firing them, and/or jailing them for breaking the law; those would be ways of punishing them. That's not what is being discussed here. Admittedly, we pretty much _never_ punish police no matter what they do, so it's kind of a moot point.

Under civil asset forfeiture they are literally allowed to go out and rob people independent of what any taxes might be.

The problem here is that the police ALREADY have systems upon systems upon systems in place to ensure they never have to take accountability, ever. Police _literally_ get away with murder, but more importantly, they routinely get away with lesser offenses.

I mean, if we can't even charge someone like Chauvin without first burning down a few cities, could you just imagine how many clerical errors get swept under the rug? How much false evidence is floating around? How many innocent people are behind bars?

Not saying there was a conspiracy here, but bad judges exist and arranging for a warrant is possible even for honest judges. If you are a policeman and you want to kill someone, get a judge to sign a "no knock" warrant, get in their house and shoot them, it happened many times; there were cases when the warrant was not even for the address of the poor guy that was killed and last year the warrant was for someone that borrowed a lawn mower from the judge who signed it and did not return it. So the warrant excuse is not so good.

This level of civic and legal ignorance is a large part of why our country is in the mess that it is.

CSAM and child sexual assault are one of the few areas of criminal law where we confer (in my opinion, correctly) absolute liability.

Broadly speaking, I think more cops have been convicted of duty-related crimes than unsuspecting random convicted of and punished for a crime they didn’t know they committed.

The police showed up and took my statement, in which I said I didn't hear a car, so I assume he just ran off.

They took me in about two weeks later for an official statement. Then told me I had to take a polygraph because my stories didn't match. The story didn't change. The officer at the scene wrote that I said I saw the guy run off.

I was shitting bricks. A cop friend of my parents told me that this was common. They didn't have a suspect, I was a young kid, so they were just trying to get me to admit to it. He said they would tell me I failed the polygraph test and to just come clean.

That's what they did. They tried to pin it on me, but I legit didn't do it, so I would never confess. Even after they tried the 'you'll only get probation of you confess now, but if this goes to trial you'll be tried as an adult' nonsense.

And that's the story of how I learned to never, ever, ever speak to a police officer without legal counsel, even if you're straight up the victim in the situation.

What a fucking mess this country is in terms of policing.

If you are told to care about a number, you will care about a number.

I'm not sure how on earth someone could be remorseful for a mala prohibitum victimless offense while simultaneously maintaining they in good faith thought they were following the law. Any expression of those two views simultaneously would in practice be seen as not much more than "sorry I got caught -- doing something I thought was legal."

In that case, even the Navy, which almost never does this to felons, terminated him with an honorable discharge and even let him run up all his liberty time before releiving him.

What justification do you have for the view that it is right that in some US states you can be convicted of a crime despite never having done anything wrong, with no negligence, no recklessness, no intent, no knowledge, nothing? Because that goes against the most fundamental precept of criminal law: the requirement of both actus reus and mens rea. With no guilty mind there is no criminal liability.

In my origin country they require witnesses to sign off witness statements. This isn’t the case here, in the US?

How you were summoned? Was it official? What if you’d shown with lawyer?

I think that now it’s already established that polygraphs are bullshit. Could you refuse it?

At the moment, I would believe they were both wrong, and that the officer broke the law. I _think_ the judge also broke the law, but I don't know exactly how that works.

Not where people's most fundamental rights are concerned. What it would do is cause judges to err on the side of caution before making a ruling that would violate the constitution which is exactly what we want judges to do.

Witness statements are supposed to be signed. I never even saw the reports from any of the cops I interacted with. I think they were just lying the entire time.

They told me I didn't need a lawyer if I was innocent. And because I was 16 or 17, I believed them. I'm hindsight, I would've had a lawyer immediately.

It's a fucking mess, but it's pretty standard practice at the garbage police station where I grew up. I'm assuming it's like that in more places.

Subsequently, it's your answers that are admissable in court, not the results. If you're ever given a polygraph, they will ask you to lie on a question or two "as a baseline." Refuse to do that. They will use it against you.

Definitely, unless ordered by a judge. He needed a lawyer to advise him.

Judge Magit violated the amendment by issuing the warrant.

I expect anyone that was convicted due to this dragnet would now be able to appeal.

I take it fentanyl is some illegal drug, but some people can legally sell drugs (licensed apothecaries). If they go for a license, get it approved, then sell a drug, and then it turns out the license is invalid due to no fault of their own and should not have been issued, I don't think anyone is surprised if the apothecary is not on the hook for that. But I'm not a lawyer, much less a judge, so who knows what they'd actually rule

In the example where "someone told me to do it", you're glossing over evidence (this was in writing, not hearsay). In the example of addictive substances, you can be reasonably expected to do your own research and not take a random person's written word for it. The analogy is so hyperbolic, I don't get the impression you're trying to reasonably think about this case

If there is a chain of command in any police department or Sheriff's Office, then the judge is not going to jump that chain and interpose herself in giving orders to a lowest-level officer who is on-the-ground and doing things.

The order's going to go to the office of their commander, who's going to evaluate it, and then it'll go through proper channels, so by the time your hypthetical "Police Officer in Summary Execution of 40 Innocent Consumers" then the order's been interdicted or validated as totally within the law as they interpret it?

But more fundamentally, the system you're proposing doesn't just incentivize judges to err on the side of caution, it incentivizes them to never rule in favor of the government and just punt the decision to the next level. If the cost of ever being overturned on appeal in favor of an individual's rights is losing their job, while there is no corresponding downside of ruling the other way, there's basically no reason to ever risk granting a warrant, for example.

Drug dealers then went to their lawyers and asked if certain formulations fell under the Analog Act. Their lawyer said no and wrote out how they were legal and didn't fall under the analog act. They sold the drugs and went to prison even though they thought they were in the clear (so good faith should apply, right?).

This is a real case that I have experience with so not sure why I'm being called out as acting in bad faith or making up a ridiculous scenario. This is a real scenario with the people sitting in prison still (for another 5 years).

Right now there is currently zero accountability. At best, when a judge violates people's constitutional rights some small number of those people will be able to get an unjust ruling overturned at which point they might be released from prison or might get some monetary payout at the expense of taxpayers, but the judge is still free to do whatever they want without consequence knowing that at least a few people will be unable to assert their rights.

Considering that unaccountable judges are where we're starting from, I think having a means to make judges accountable can only improve things. Given the choice between judges being able to violate people's rights without any accountability or a system where judges have some level of accountability for the most egregious violations of our rights, even while that system requires us to make sure that it isn't being clearly abused, I think we're better off with the option to get some accountability where it's needed.

It doesn't need to be a perfect system to be a better one, and it feels like we could put some guardrails in place to keep the amount of obvious abuse down. It's difficult to believe that judges willfully violating people's rights without consequence is an unsolvable problem, let alone one that couldn't possibly be improved somehow.

If there is no such license you can apply for, I'm not sure there exists a system by which you can be indemnified from criminal prosecution for doing such sales (or possession or whatever the case may be)

The question reminded me of a 2019 case where two parties went to the judge to get a ruling on something, without there being damages or claims. (Here, a potential buyer and seller could ask to decide whether a certain substance would be legal to sell before the sale happens, steering clear of prosecution until there is a ruling.) Reading that case back, the legal provision that made this possible only applies to situations where the parties are free to do whatever (such as with a contract dispute); it does not work for creating jurisprudence on criminal law. Asking ChatGPT as a quick last attempt, it proposes to ask a lawyer (you've shared how well that worked) or to sue the government over the law that makes the sale illegal which would be void if the judge goes "this substance doesn't fall under that law anyway" and then you've got jurisprudence to work with. The latter sounds a bit strange, not sure if that's actually possible, but it'd be worth exploring for such edge cases where it may or may not be criminal to do a certain thing

Of course, I totally see how this is a double standard: you've done your homework and to the best of everyone's knowledge it's legal, and then when it turns out you're wrong, whether you get sent to prison depends on whether it was the government who sanctioned it. Everyone can make an honest mistake, government or no

I don't know the intentions of the drugs dealers you have experience with. If there are legit purposes for the specific analog they were selling (that is, purposes falling outside of the spirit of the law that makes fentanyl (analogs) illegal) then it seems strange that a judge would send them to prison for years. Was a long prison sentence perhaps compulsory due to some minimum sentence requirement as part of this war on drugs thing? Wondering this since our government is implementing more and more minimum punishments despite research showing this does not deter the behavior and also increases recidivism due to the longer time you spend outside society, losing any position that you had in it. It's great

Please do not ascribe judgements to me that I am not making. I was simply asking questions to clarify a typical process that may be hypothetically followed. Thank you.

The drug dealers were ex-marines that received debilitating injuries fighting in Afghanistan, became addicted to pain pills when they came home, and because of their injuries were unable to work. So they were selling drugs. Then the analog act came around, which made a large amount of closely related drugs illegal. They were drug dealers, and should be in prison. Someone died from these weird compounds they were bringing in from China to try and skirt the Analog Act. But these guys in their head justified it because they were using the same compounds, and they felt they needed to subdue their pain. But these guys also didn't hide it. They had a lawyer that they ran things by. They bought cars from dealerships with their money, not trying to hide it in any way.

I don't think 'good faith' should apply to them. But also don't think 'good faith' should supersede the United States Constitution. If it applies to the prosecution side, it should apply to the defense. A judge shouldn't be able to waive away our Constitution just because it's inconvenient in a prosecution. In the US, even if something is determined unconstitutional and that determination means people should be released from prison, every single person impacted has to go to court and prove it applies to them. We should release people imprisoned unConstitutionally, but we don't, because again it's inconvenient to the legal system. There is even a time limit on those people to go to court, and if they don't in time (say because they don't know, because they aren't notified) then they are bared from bringing it up in a motion to the court.

Drugs are a hard one. I blew up my life over addiction. Many around me were to. Some were using drugs, some alcohol, some gambling, some risky sex. One interesting feature of American society is we used to give people a second chance. For old guys like me, many of the characters in westerns were criminals turned better as law men one town over. These guys would have been completely different if they were receiving adequate pain care and some sort of job opportunities when they came back from war. I think society needs that. But it also can't enable bad behavior. Interesting/complex times.

Sorry for my wall of text.

> They were allowed to gather the evidence - they had a warrant from a judge. The judge erred, not the police.

And that statement makes it very clear that, if the judge gives the ok to do something, then the judge is at fault; and _not_ the person that actually does the thing. I disagree with this. The person who does the thing is responsible for their own actions. The judge may _also_ be at fault, but that doesn't absolve the officer who took the action.

Your response (in the context of what I said)

>> if a judge tells a police officer they can do something

> Who commands the police officer to do things? Is it his/her superior, or the judge directly?

Seems to indicate you think I said the judge is the one who ordered the officer to do the thing. I didn't. I said the judge gave permission for it.

To be very clear, in a situation where

1. Tier 1 officer orders Tier 2 officer to have a thing done

2. Tier 2 officer orders Tier 3 officer to do the thing

3. Judge authorizes Tier 3 officer to do the thing

4. Tier 3 officer does the thing

If "the thing" is clearly illegal (to a reasonable person), then ALL of those individuals are at fault. And Tier 3 officer clearly broke the law when doing the thing.

I believe that