Exclusionary Rule Targeted

Bush may be gone, but his court lives: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts recently wrote the majority opinion challenging the exclusionary rule, a bedrock of earlier liberal courts that forbids the use of unlawfully obtained evidence in court. "To trigger the exclusionary rule," Roberts wrote, "police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system." That price, in Roberts' words, "is, of course, letting guilty and possibly dangerous defendants go free."