More on Hudson and the Exclusionary Rule

Brian Doherty | June 15, 2006

Occasional Reason contributor, and indefatigible chronicler of police search abuses, Radley Balko has lots of good Hudson and exclusionary rule chatter and links going on on his site The Agitator. Balko himself is cited in Justice Breyer's dissent (see page 10) when Breyer is questioning the Court's sanguine assumptions about police behavior in raids minus the stick of the exclusionary rule.

At the heart of Balko's objections to the decision's implication that civil suits are a workable remedy to 4th amendment violations if the exclusionary rule isn't to apply:

Given that the majority is so keen on civil remedies (instead of exclusion) as a deterrent for illegal no-knock raids, does that mean we can expect to see Scalia, Alito, Roberts, and Thomas voting to grant cert to the masses of Section 1983 cases involving no-knocks that get denied at the appellate level because of immunity?

The obvious answer to that question shows the absurdity of their claim that civil actions are cabable of deterring illegal raids.