WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court pulled back on the "exclusionary rule" Wednesday and ruled that evidence from an illegal search can be used if a police officer made an innocent mistake.
The 5-4 opinion signals that the court is ready to rethink this key rule in criminal law and restrict its reach. It will also give prosecutors and judges nationwide more leeway to make use of evidence that may have been seen as questionable before.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the guilty should not "go free" just because a computer error or a misunderstanding between police officers led to a wrongful arrest or search.
He said good evidence, even if obtained in a bad search, can be used against a suspect unless the police deliberately or recklessly violated his rights.
The exclusionary rule was applied to state and local police in 1961, and its aim was to deter officers from conducting unconstitutional searches of homes, cars and pedestrians. Usually, it means that illegally seized evidence must be excluded.
But in Wednesday's opinion, Roberts said that "the benefits . . . must outweigh the costs." And there is nothing to be gained, he said, by throwing out evidence when officers make honest mistakes.
The ruling upheld the drug and gun charges against an Alabama man who was stopped by a sheriff's department officer who had been told -- erroneously -- there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest.
The officer, Mark Anderson, had called and been told by a clerk in a neighboring county that Bennie Dean Herring had failed to appear in court on a felony charge. But minutes after Anderson found methamphetamine and a pistol in Herring's car, the clerk called back to say the arrest warrant had been withdrawn. This fact had not been entered into the sheriff's department's computer.
Roberts said the mistake here was a "negligent bookkeeping error." It did not reflect an officer's deliberate decision to violate the rights of the motorist, he said.
Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the chief justice.
The dissenters said the exclusionary rule should be strictly enforced. "Electronic databases form the nervous system of contemporary criminal justice operations," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote. "The most serious impact of the court's holding will be on innocent persons wrongfully arrested based on erroneous information carelessly maintained in a computer database."
