[5778] in Central_America
Re: New quotes for Tue Feb 7
sethf@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (sethf@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sat Feb 11 01:38:51 1995
And even in the sections you omitted from McCollum's comments:
It is not that there is anything wrong with the Constitution or
any of the language that the gentleman is offering. It is that
what it does in the process is just strike after the word `States`
everything there that talks about a reasonable and objective
standard for making an exception to the exclusionary rule that will
let us get more evidence in and get more convictions.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
...
These technicalities are killing a lot of our police officers`
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efforts and the prosecutors` efforts to get convictions.
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As the proposer put it later:
Mr. WATT of North Carolina. Mr. Chairman, it seems to me the only
way one could conclude that this guts the bill is to say that the
rest of the bill is somehow inconsistent with the fourth
amendment. I am wondering whether that is what the gentleman from
Florida is saying, because that is the only way I could see the
actual language of the fourth amendment being inconsistent and
gutting the rest of the bill, if the rest of the bill is somehow
inconsistent with the fourth amendment.
.... later:
Mr. McCOLLUM. He is substituting the fourth amendment for the
language in the bill. Thereby he eliminates efforts we are making
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to modify the evidentiary rule that the Supreme Court has carved
out for search and seizure cases under the fourth amendment.
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> I don't think that responses like this show that Republicans think
> that the Fourth Amendment should not exist...
Well, they think it should exist, but only as long as it doesn't
have any consequences - that is, it can exist in theory, but not in
practice. When it actually matters, they call it a "technicality". I
suppose it would have been clearer to say "whether the Fourth Amendment
should exist at all, *in practice*", but I thought that was understood
as the terms of the debate (something which doesn't matter in practice
being equivalent to not existing for all intents and purposes).
> the subset of cases where police officers perform a good-faith search.
The problem is that every search is a good-faith search - it
wouldn't have been made if there wasn't some reason, right? Even if the
reason was fabricated later ...
