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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23887 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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What if the cops or prosecution violated some rules to obtain the evidence they present, or did not utter a magical incantation while arresting a defendant? They should suffer the legal consequences for violations, but as long as the information obtained is good and has provenance that it is good, it should be allowed in.

They will almost never suffer any consequences. That's true, empirically, even when the information is excluded. When the information is not excluded, the incentives are VERY strong for them to violate every rule in order to get convictions. Complaining about the exclusionary rule and suggesting punishments for cops/prosecutors who violate defendant's rights to get a conviction is equivalent to saying defendant's rights don't matter.

You are asserting many things in a short comment, and perhaps all your claims are true in the Anglo / US context. But, you know, I read your message thrice and didn't find any empiracal backing that there is a causal relationship that is not just path dependent happenstance. In Scandinavian system I am familiar with, it appears that cops and prosecutors are far too soft despite that the courts generally are allowed to consider all relevant information, whether it was lawfully or unlawfully obtained.

Despite all the procedural chicanery that you claim is necessary to protect defendants' rights, the US and to lesser extent other English-speaking countries are only ones I have heard about with a problem with parallel construction and asset forfeiture. Perhaps you have an issue of not policing the police and prosecutors sufficiently, and opting for weird procedural hamstringing that gets in the way of getting guilty people to jail is not helping as much as it should.

We have parallel construction BECAUSE we have the exclusionary rule. If you don't have the exclusionary rule you can simply introduce the unlawfully-obtained evidence, the defendant is convicted, then nothing else happens. Asset forfeiture (itself a civil procedure) has nothing to do with any of this.

We have parallel construction BECAUSE we have the exclusionary rule.

Yes, exactly so. [insert chad meme].

Now please stop for a moment and think about it. The exclusionary rule does not protect your rights. It results in the police who are intent on violating your rights, violating them and hiding it, presenting fabricated chain of evidence in the courts.

Meanwhile, the cops who accidentally or due to well-meaning incompetence did something that a capable defense team can present running a foul of some procedural ritual magic will find a defendant walking free because the evidence that he definitely violated constitutional rights of other citizens is ritually impure.

Asset forfeiture is another example that you have dirty cops, which follows from inadequately policed cops. Indirect incentive hacking does not work very well. Direct incentives would work better.

It results in the police who are intent on violating your rights, violating them and hiding it, presenting fabricated chain of evidence in the courts.

It makes the police who are intent on violating your rights work at it. And it makes the cops who are not wholly evil, merely overzealous, have an incentive to reign it in. And it means only wholly evil departments can engage in the routine practices of beating confessions out of people, denying them legal representation until they confess, etc.

Asset forfeiture is another example that you have dirty cops, which follows from inadequately policed cops.

There is no good answer to 'who polices the police'. They will always be inadequately policed, which is why "let the evidence taken unlawfully be used and then punish the cops" really means "your rights don't exist".

I think "let the evidence taken unlawfully be used and then punish the cops" could in theory be a successful policy, but nobody has the guts to punish the cops enough to make that work. If someone says "illegal search" or "warrantless search" I hear "breaking and entering, corruption of a public official" but there's zero desire to trade the exclusionary rule for that, and if someone did offer the trade I wouldn't take it because those charges would ~never be filed.

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