Exclusionary Rule

The law, 18 U.S.C. section 3501, provides that courts should weigh a number of factors in deciding whether a statement made by a suspect in custody was voluntary. The Exclusionary Rule rights listed in the Constitution to have substance, there must be enforceable remedies imposed on the government for violations of those rights.

The U.S. supreme introduced the exclusionary rule in 1914 in the case of Weeks v. United States as a remedy for violations of the fourth amendment The Weeks Court felt that the only effective way to enforce the Fourth Amendment right to be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures was to adopt a rule that evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment could not be used by the government against a defendant at trial. The Weeks Court further stated that a court should not sanction illegal government conduct by admitting into evidence the fruits of that illegal conduct. In Silverthorne Lumber v. United States, the Supreme Court prohibited introducing evidence which items have been directly seized during an illegal government search also any evidence indirectly derived from that search.

Originally, the exclusionary rule announced in Weeks did not apply to the states because at that time the Supreme Court limited the application of the Fourth Amendment to the Federal Government. Then, in 1949, the Supreme Court decided Wolf v. Colorado where in the Court applied the Fourth Amendment to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause. The Court considered the prohibition against unreasonable searches or seizures to be a right basic to a free society and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty. The Wolf Court, however, did not view the exclusionary rule as a necessary component of due process and refused to apply the exclusionary rule to the states as a remedy for a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The purpose of the exclusionary rule is not to redress the injury to the privacy of the search victim.... Instead, the rule's prime purpose is to deter future unlawful police conduct and thereby effectuate the guarantee of the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizures: `The rule is calculated to prevent, not to repair.'...In sum, the rule is 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.