The rule was established in the two related cases decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1984: United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984) and Massachusetts v. Sheppard, 468 U.S. 981 (1984). The exception allows the courts to consider the mental state of the police officer. The trial court found that, although the arresting officer did nothing wrong, the Tennessee Supreme Court had not yet accepted the good faith exception in Herring, which could have allowed evidence to be admitted on the basis of the good faith of the official acting on the basis of erroneous information. Consequently, the Court of First Instance granted the defendant`s claims. The Court of Criminal Appeal upheld the decision of the Court of First Instance on the same grounds. A Union City police officer arrested defendant Jerome Antonio McElrath without an arrest warrant for being present on a housing authority property because the defendant was on a list of people held by the Union City Police Department who had been „excluded” from the property, the dispatcher confirmed. During a search for arrest, the officer seized marijuana from the accused.
Nineteen days later, the same officer arrested the accused on the property in question on the basis of the same list and again seized marijuana from the defendant. Following the arrests of the accused, he was charged in both cases with two drug-related offences, a Class E crime and a Class A offence. In U.S. constitutional law, the bona fide exception (also known as the doctrine of good faith) is a legal doctrine that provides an exception to the exclusion rule. Not all states follow the bona fide exception to the exclusion rule, as New York in People v. Bigelow, 488 N.E.2d 451 (N.Y. 1985). However, in comparing Herring`s facts with the facts of these cases, the majority, joined in part by Justice Sharon G. Lee, concluded that the City of Union`s records system was so flawed that the evidence obtained should not benefit from the application of the bona fide exception. In her separate statement, which was partially consistent and partially dismissed, Lee J. objected to the possibility of an exception to the exclusion rule to excuse police negligence leading to a violation of a citizen`s constitutional right to be free from improper searches and seizures.
According to Justice Lee, the excuse for police negligence undermines public confidence in the justice system because the courts have a responsibility to protect the constitutional rights of citizens. Justice Lee agreed that the exception should not apply in the case of this accused, as his arrests were caused by long-standing errors in police records due to an inherently flawed registration system. In a divided opinion, the Tennessee Supreme Court adopted a bona fide exception similar to that established by the U.S. Supreme Court in Herring v. United States, which stated that „when the error of the police is the result of negligence … instead of systemic error or reckless disregard for constitutional requirements,” the evidence is not subject to the exclusion rule. In her separate statement, Justice Kirby accepted the objection in good faith, but disagreed with the majority`s conclusion that the arrest of the accused did not fall within the exception. She argued that the police`s error in this case, as in Herring, constituted mere negligence and argued that the majority`s analysis was inconsistent with the U.S.
Supreme Court`s analysis in Herring. For this reason, Justice Kirby disagreed with the majority`s decision to exclude evidence. The Tennessee Supreme Court allowed the state to appeal this case to determine whether Tennessee should accept a bona fide exception similar to Herring under state law and, if so, whether, among those facts, it should allow evidence based on a law enforcement officer`s reasonable reliance on false information in a database. maintained by the same police service. The exception allows evidence gathered in violation of human rights under the Fourth Amendment to be admitted to the courts if police officers acting in good faith (good faith) relied on an erroneous search warrant – that is, they had reason to believe that their actions were lawful (measured by the appropriate person test). After reviewing cases in other jurisdictions, developing the federal good faith exception to the exclusion rule, and relevant Tennessee jurisprudence, the majority, joined in part by Justice Holly Kirby, concluded that Tennessee would accept a bona fide objection and an error of police negligence in record keeping, as opposed to those that: resulting from systemic errors or reckless disregard for constitutional requirements. would not prevent the evidence obtained from being admissible in court. The defendant filed motions to suppress the evidence against him on the basis of the searches without a search order. At the hearing, evidence was presented that the defendant had been excluded from the residential property of the Housing Authority in 2007 but had applied to be removed from the list in 2010. The request was granted and should therefore have been removed from the list almost five years before the arrests in this case. The police department also kept a separate list, a „blocked deletion” list.
The name of the defendant was also on that list. Read the majority opinion in State v. McElrath, written by Justice Roger Page, and separate statements written by Justices Lee and Kirby in the TNCourts.gov. This section, which refers to the law in the United States or its constituent jurisdictions, is a heel. You can help Wikipedia by extending it. .