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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   26731 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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I actually think if there's a court order preventing the government from taking the black guy's phone, and the government knowingly grabbed it anyway, then the government should return it back to him. Yes, even if it seems counter-intuitive.

This sort of argument quickly leads to absurd places. Should the government return a kidnap victim to her kidnapper, if she was only found because a racist cop didn't like the look of some black guy who they later found out was hiding stolen children in his basement? Should the government refuse to act on the knowledge that a massive terrorist attack is being planned, if that knowledge was acquired by a racist cop roughing up a shifty-looking Arab?

The rule is not that the police have to literally undo all their previous actions or not act to address an imminent threat in the event of a procedural mishap, intentional or otherwise, it's just that evidence obtained in that way is not admissible in court, increasing the chances that the kidnapper and terrorists in your examples would walk free. In the most egregious cases, I imagine you could get a jury nullification-adjacent situation where the jurors, despite "not being allowed to consider" the tainted evidence, unanimously vote to convict.

Jury nullification is one-way only. If a jury convicts and the judge thinks it's bananas, the judge can generally set it aside. But the judge can't set aside a jury acquittal because that would violate the right to trial by jury.

I don't think the incidental discovery thing is quite as important as a court specifically prohibited the action to be taken. If a court ordered a kidnap victim to not be separated with her kidnapper, then my first inclination is that this is fake news and to dig into the court documents to see what really happened. Similarly in the hypothetical that a court is prohibiting the government from stopping a massive terrorist attack for whatever reason.

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