US Supreme Court Herring v. US 07-513

Decision here.

   Herring went to the impound lot to pick up his car.  He apparently had had a number of run-ins with the police before, when a deputy saw him he contacted the county clerk to find out if there were any local warrants for his arrest.  There weren't, so he had the clerk contact a neighboring county to see if there were any warrants for Herring's arrest there.  The clerks of the neighboring county checked their records and found that there was a warrant.  The deputy pulled Herring over and arrested him, in the process finding meth and a gun (Herring was a convicted felon).

   The deputies requested a hard copy of the warrant be faxed to their station, but the clerks couldn't find a hard copy so they called the court.  It turned out that the warrant had been canceled five months ago, the court had informed law enforcement of this fact, and someone had forgotten to take it out of the law enforcement database.  The error took about ten minutes to discover, but by then it was too late; the meth and gun had already been found.  The court found that the arresting officers were entirely innocent of any wrongdoing or negligence, but assumed that whoever had dropped the ball was also a law enforcement official and had acted negligently. Even so, the court admitted the evidence because the clerical error was merely negligent and not deliberate, it was attenuated from the arrest, and the preventative benefit (if any) of suppressing the evidence was outweighed by the cost.  Herring appealed.

   The Supreme Court agreed with the trial court, and ruled that the evidence was properly admitted.  The court noted that exclusion would have been justified if the police had been reckless in their maintenance of the warrant database or if they had intentionally made false entries to justify future arrests, but that wasn't the case here.  It was just an isolated error, and suppressing evidence wouldn't make it any less likely to recur, so there was no reason to apply the exclusionary rule.