American Rules of Criminal Procedure

Author: Li Xuejun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: Excerpt [Controversial Issue] Can the Court Adopt Evidence Obtained Through Illegal Means? [Judicial Argument] Justice Clark published the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court had previously indicated in the case of Wolf v. Colorado (1949) that the opinions of state governments on the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence rule (the exclusionary rule) varied greatly. Before 1949, i.e., before the Wolf case, almost one-third of the states opposed the application of the exclusionary rule. Today, more than half of those states have fully or partially adopted the Weeks rule (the Weeks rule), established in the case of Weeks v. United States. It is worth noting that in the state courts that adopted the exclusion rule, the California Supreme Court was forced to adopt it because it believed that no other remedy could meet the requirements of the constitutional provisions. Related to California, we believe that the second reason the Court articulated in the Wolf case for not applying the exclusionary rule was that other remedies had been granted the "right to privacy." The view of California that other remedies were futile has been confirmed by the judicial practices of other states. Accordingly, the era of "important testimonial evidence" referred to in the People v. De Forest case (1926), which the Wolf case called "important testimonial evidence," has passed. In the De Forest case, Justice Cardozo (then a judge in New York) refused to adopt the exclusionary rule established in the Weeks case in New York and said, "This rule is either too strict or too lenient." However, this view was rejected by the Court in many subsequent rulings. Therefore, although the Court recognized in the Wolf case in 1949 that the right to privacy could resist state actions, because it is not fundamentally related to constitutional requirements, whatever the interpretation, the reasons supporting the non-adoption of the Weeks rule in the Wolf case do not bind this case. Today, we again examined the constitutional basis for the right to privacy from unreasonable infringement by the government, which was confirmed in the Wolf case. For many years, it has been under its guidance that we gradually rejected evidence obtained by the government through illegal means, because this is a basic right for individuals to resist illegal actions by the government.