good-faith exception
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In
United States constitutional law The constitutional law of the United States is the body of law governing the interpretation and implementation of the United States Constitution. The subject concerns the scope of power of the United States federal government compared to the indi ...
, the good-faith exception (also good-faith doctrine) is a
legal doctrine A legal doctrine is a framework, set of rules, procedural steps, or test, often established through precedent in the common law, through which judgments can be determined in a given legal case. A doctrine comes about when a judge makes a ruling ...
providing an exemption to the
exclusionary rule In the United States, the exclusionary rule is a legal rule, based on constitutional law, that prevents evidence collected or analyzed in violation of the defendant's constitutional rights from being used in a court of law. This may be consider ...
. The exemption allows evidence collected in violation of privacy rights as interpreted from the Fourth Amendment to be admitted at
trial In law, a trial is a coming together of parties to a dispute, to present information (in the form of evidence) in a tribunal, a formal setting with the authority to adjudicate claims or disputes. One form of tribunal is a court. The tribunal ...
if
police officer A police officer (also called a policeman and, less commonly, a policewoman) is a warranted law employee of a police force. In most countries, "police officer" is a generic term not specifying a particular rank. In some, the use of the ...
s acting in good faith (''bona fides'') relied upon a defective search warrant — that is, they had reason to believe their actions were legal (measured under the
reasonable person In law, a reasonable person, reasonable man, or the man on the Clapham omnibus, is a hypothetical person of legal fiction crafted by the courts and communicated through case law and jury instructions. Strictly according to the fiction, it i ...
test). The rule was established in the two
companion case The term companion cases refers to a group of two or more cases which are consolidated by an appellate court while on appeal and are decided together because they concern one or more common legal issues. Depending on the facts of each case, the ...
s decided by the
U.S. Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...
in 1984: '' United States v. Leon'', 468 U.S. 897 (1984), and '' Massachusetts v. Sheppard'', 468 U.S. 981 (1984). The exception permits the courts to consider the mental state of the police officer. Not all states follow the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule, such as New York in ''People v. Bigelow'', 488 N.E.2d 451 (N.Y. 1985).


See also

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Sugar bowl (legal maxim) In United States constitutional law and criminal procedure, the sugar bowl refers to a legal maxim relating to one of the restrictions on searches and seizures imposed by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It specifically refer ...
*
Fruit of the poisonous tree Fruit of the poisonous tree is a legal metaphor used to describe evidence that is obtained illegally. The logic of the terminology is that if the source (the "tree") of the evidence or evidence itself is tainted, then anything gained (the "fruit") ...
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Parallel construction Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to conceal how an investigation actually began. In the US, a particular form is evidence launderin ...
*'' Herring v. United States'' (2009 Supreme Court decision about the good-faith exception) *'' Davis v. United States'' (2011 Supreme Court decision about the good-faith exception) Legal doctrines and principles Searches and seizures Evidence law {{US-law-stub