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by ALittleLight
1891 days ago
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I disagree with this. The police aren't made any better off by getting a guilty verdict. They take their salaries home either way. As it should be. Society benefits when the guilty are in prison and suffers when they go free. If a person is guilty and the police made a mistake, we should correct the mistake the police made, including by firing people responsible or pressing criminal charges if appropriate, but malpractice by the police should not exonerate a guilty person. |
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The purpose of that is to disincentivize malpractice. That's why we have the "fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine for improperly obtained evidence. There's no point in illegally breaking into someone's house to get evidence because that evidence is inadmissable.
The alternative solution is to allow the evidence and prosecute the people who gathered it illegally. The problem there is that there's a clear conflict of interest: they were gathering that evidence for the prosecutor. The same prosecutor who will try to convict them for gathering that evidence. That prosecutor is incentivized to let them walk so they can keep getting illegal evidence. The second issue is that it's not always clear whether it's actually legal to gather some evidence in a particular way. We either have to prosecute negligence the same as malice, which seems unfair, or we leave a gaping loophole where we have to prove malice. All you have to do to get away with is shrug and go "I had no idea that it was illegal for me to just walk into the house if the door was already unlocked, and no, no one can verify the door was unlocked before I got there".