[Anderkent]

Probable cause is not necessary for a search. It's necessary for evidence from the search to be admitted. If the lawyer does not require a proof of probable cause for any searches that were permitted, he's not doing his job.

[jlgreco]

> "Probable cause is not necessary for a search. It's necessary for evidence from the search to be admitted."

The purpose of parallel construction is to create an artificial heritage for evidence collected without probable cause. This is done by finding probable cause for a search that you will then claim uncovered evidence that was in fact previously discovered during the course of an illegal search.

The lawyer, doing his job, will ask where the evidence came from and what the probable cause was for that search. He will be lied to, and told that the evidence was discovered during the course of the second 'investigation' (the existence of the first investigation, the real investigation, will be kept a secret.)

For a simple example of how this would work, imagine a naive police officer acting on his own: The police officer, spurred on by prejudice, breaks into several homes in a neighborhood looking for evidence of a grow op. He finds one such operation, but since his search was illegal nothing he found can be used in court. He then gets the bright idea to leave the police station an 'anonymous' tip. That tip is then used to justify a search warrant, which is then used to reveal the presence of a grow op.

That situation is trivial and the "anonymous tip" is immediately cause for suspicion. Things get much hairier when you add more participants, and make them reasonably intelligent.

TL;DR: The entire point of parallel construction is that the defenses lawyer can do his job, but it won't matter.

[Anderkent]

If I'm reading you correctly that's not parallel construction, that's planting evidence.

Now, I haven't followed the US law or police news closely, since my interest is at most academic, but my picture of parallel construction is that you first use unreliable/inadmissible sources to construct a picture of the situation, then using that general knowledge to locate actual admissible evidence.

So the cop might use inadmissible sources to know there's an person of interest somewhere. But he still needs admissible evidence to demonstrate probable cause if he wants to enter and use results of this second search to be useful. Otherwise he's exactly in the situation of the 'naive' cop from your example, where he can only say 'anonymous tip', doesn't have a record for that, and his 'real' investigation gets dismissed.

What you seem to be describing is taking inadmissible evidence and then somehow inserting it into results of a legal search - i.e. planting evidence. That's not a new idea, I guess, but is it really so common, and how is that caused by parallel construction?

[tptacek]

You are, I believe, correct about parallel construction. It is notably easy for police to find probable cause to effect a search, which is half of what makes parallel construction disquieting. But they do have to actually find some cause to conduct the search. They can't just go with the intel they get from inadmissible evidence; if they do, the new evidence from the unwarranted search is "fruit of the poisonous tree", and can be excluded from trial.

[tptacek]

This is 4 paragraphs saying exactly the same thing I said upthread, just more emphatically.

Meanwhile, we're no closer to understanding how "parallel construction" could have been helpful in this case, which is the question the thread purports to answer.