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Stealing this from @ToaKraka in the FF thread:
Our own BJ Campbell wrote that this is one of the important differences between the US and Western Europe. A German or British police officer would have the power to detain all juvenile males wearing a single article of black clothing within a one-mile radius of the robbery and physical evidence wouldn't be suppressed even if obtained without following the proper trail of investigation.
Is the USA shooting itself in the foot there? What will it lose if it changes its legal norms to lower the bar on probable cause and evidence suppression?
That makes it sound like he was not linked to the robbery at all, if they could make the robbery stick then "various delinquencies" would be a weird way to phrase it.
My take (which is not the position of US law, or German law) is the following: if they had found their robber, they should keep the evidence -- stopping people within a mile of a crime scene does not seem so disproportional that we want to squash the evidence to limit the invasion of privacy. If instead they had DNA tested everyone within the state, that would be different.
On the other hand, I do not want cops to go on a fishing trip any time some crime is committed somewhere. So if they got him for drug possession instead, I would be fine with suppressing the evidence. The justice system should not depend on police getting lucky and catching delinquents while having probable cause for some totally unrelated crime, it just gives cops bad incentives ("please keep your description of the suspect as vague as possible so we can stop and frisk the maximum amount of people").
My understanding is that the standard in the US is different than what I propose, either the cops had PC, in which case any evidence is admissible even if totally unrelated to the PC, or they had not, in which case the evidence is inadmissible even if it is just what they were searching for.
I think the strong evidence rules are a brilliant tool to align law enforcement to the law.
The natural incentives of cops is catching criminals. Nobody will celebrate a PD for not conducting illegal searches. Good luck trying to have a cop get punished through disciplinary or judicial measures for an illegal invasion like making you open the trunk of your car. Even getting fired would not be enough to deter cops from illegal behavior in sufficiently high profile cases, anyone who caught a serial killer through an illegal search and got fired for their trouble would be celebrated as a martyr and land a cushy private sector job. And securing any criminal conviction against cops typically involves them being filmed from multiple angles killing someone and subsequent race riots.
So instead, you hit them where it hurts, and let criminals go free if their procedural rights were violated. Suddenly the cop who cut procedural corners to catch a criminal is no longer the hero who worked creatively around a broken system, but the fuckwit whose inability to follow SOP ruined an investigation.
Sure, you lose a few criminal convictions, but if you want to maximize catching criminals, you do not want civil liberties in the first place.
I think you've misunderstood the motivation for the doctrine -- it's not "invasion of privacy" but here the court found (debatably, sure) that the officer violated the suspect's physical person. The key part being that the suspect was (in the eyes of the court) physically seized at the moment he was (arguably) not free to leave.
You're free to say that doesn't change your opinion on the ultimate resolution. Maybe it shouldn't, I really don't know.
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Rights versus safety is despite the Ben Franklin quote, not necessarily opposed. There are two ways that I can take your freedom. The first one is the government arresting people arbitrarily and framing them for crimes. The other is allowing crime to go on and get bad enough that ordinary citizens are unable to go about their lives. The second becomes even worse if the government also limits how a citizen can protect himself from crime. When that happens, the citizens are deprived of their rights just as surely as if the government had taken them.
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I don't think maximizing catching criminals is the goal, it's minimizing the crime rate. Ideally, policies should be structured in a way that deters people from committing crimes in the first place. If the cop that cut procedural corners to catch a criminal is automatically fired, then you can both eat your cake (the crime is solved) and have it, too (other cops are deterred from doing the same, unless they think solving this specific crime is worth it).
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Correct. The opinion says that he was charged only with "firearm violations and related offenses"—presumably something like carrying without a license, carrying while underage, etc.
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