Herring v. United States, 555 U.S. 135 (2009), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States on January 14, 2009. The court decided that the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule applies when a police officer makes an arrest based on an outstanding warrant in another jurisdiction, but the information regarding that warrant is later found to be incorrect because of a negligent error by that agency.
Background
The evolution of the exclusionary rule
"The Fourth Amendment contains no provision expressly precluding the use of evidence obtained in violation of its commands," but in Weeks v. United States (1914) and Mapp v. Ohio (1961), the Supreme Court created the exclusionary rule, which generally operates to suppress – i.e. prevent the introduction at trial of – evidence obtained in violation of Constitutional rights. "Suppression of evidence, however, has always been [the court's] last resort, not [its] first impulse. The exclusionary rule generates substantial social costs, which sometimes include setting the guilty free and the dangerous at large." In United States v. Leon, the Supreme Court clarified that the exclusionary rule "operates as a judicially created remedy designed to safeguard Fourth Amendment rights generally through its deterrent effect, rather than a personal constitutional right of the party aggrieved." Application of the rule should be sensitive to this purpose, the court said: If suppression "does not result in appreciable deterrence," the court had said, "its use ... is unwarranted."
Thus, for example, in Leon itself, the court concluded that the fruits of a search based on a search warrant later found defective should not be excluded because the rule's deterrent purpose "will only rarely be served by applying it in such circumstances," and in Arizona v. Evans, the court concluded that the fruits of a search based on an arrest warrant that was no longer valid, but that was still listed in the police system because of an error by the issuing court's clerk, should not be excluded because such exclusion would have no deterrent effect.
The beginnings of the Herring case
Bennie Herring drove to the Coffee County, Alabama, sheriff's department to check on a pickup truck that had been impounded. Mark Anderson, an investigator with the Coffee County Sheriff's Department, asked the department's warrant clerk to check for any outstanding warrants; the warrant clerk in the neighboring Dale County Sheriff's Department was contacted, and advised that there was an outstanding warrant. Within fifteen minutes, the Dale County clerk called back to warn the Coffee County sheriff's department that there had been a clerical mistake: the warrant had been recalled five months prior. But it was too late; Anderson had already arrested Herring and searched his vehicle, discovering firearms and methamphetamine.
Herring was indicted in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama for violations of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1) (felon in possession of a firearm) and 21 U.S.C. § 844(a) (possession of a controlled substance, viz. methamphetamine) and invoked the exclusionary rule to have both the firearm and drug evidence suppressed. He claimed that the arrest was unlawful as a result of an invalid/recalled warrant ("failure to appear", issued by neighboring Dale County, Alabama), a motion denied by the trial court. He was convicted, and sentenced to 27 months in federal prison. The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed, ruling—based on Leon—that the evidence was admissible because the mistake was made by the Dale County officials, not the Coffee County police. Because the error was corrected in a very short time, there was no evidence that the Dale County Sheriff's Department had problems disposing of recalled warrants, and thus no negligence could be claimed because of the lack of a pattern of disposal problems.
The Supreme Court of the United States granted certiorari on February 19, 2008. The case was argued before the Court on October 7, 2008.