United States v. Leon et al. (468 U.S. 897)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided July 5, 1984 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 468 U.S. 897 · 104 S. Ct. 3405
- Decided
- July 5, 1984
- Term
- October Term 1983
- Vote
- 6–3
- Majority author
- Justice White
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Reversed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice White delivered the opinion of the Court. This ease presents the question whether the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule should be modified so as not to bar the use in the prosecution’s case in chief of evidence obtained by officers acting in reasonable reliance on a search warrant issued by a detached and neutral magistrate but ultimately found to be unsupported by probable cause. To resolve this question, we must consider once again the tension between the sometimes competing goals of, on the one hand, deterring official misconduct and removing inducements to unreasonable invasions of privacy and, on the other, establishing procedures under which criminal defendants are “acquitted or convicted on the basis of all the evidence which exposes the truth.” Alderman v. United States, 394 U. S. 165, 175 (1969). I In August 1981, a confidential informant of unproven reliability informed an officer of the Burbank Police Department that two persons known to him as “Armando” and “Patsy” were selling large quantities of cocaine and methaqualone from their residence at 620 Price Drive in Burbank, Cal. The informant also indicated that he had witnessed a sale of methaqualone by “Patsy” at the residence approximately five months earlier and had observed at that time a shoebox containing a large amount of cash that belonged to “Patsy.” He further declared that “Armando” and “Patsy”…
Excerpt of a 174,985-character opinion. The full text and citation network load in the interactive viewer above.