Also known as: evidentiary fruit · fruit of the poisonous tree
Written by attorneys — see sources below.
Derivative evidence obtained through exploitation of an initial constitutional violation. The doctrine extends the exclusionary rule to bar not only the primary evidence seized unlawfully but also any later evidence causally linked to that illegality. Evidence remains admissible only when obtained by means sufficiently independent of the violation to purge the taint.
Environmental officer Dana Cruz entered ChemTech Corporation's fenced property without a warrant and installed a hidden sampling device in a locked outfall pipe. Using data from that device alone, the agency secured warrants and seized servers and lab reports. ChemTech moved to suppress the seized records. The court suppressed them because the records were obtained by exploiting the initial unlawful intrusion.
Agent Perez hacked Malik's home server without a warrant and obtained IP logs. Perez then used those logs to secure warrants for NimbusCloud emails. Malik moved to suppress the emails. The court excluded both the logs and the emails because the later evidence flowed directly from the unconstitutional hack.
Detective Leaming elicited the location of a child's body through an improper plea during transport. The state later argued the body would have been found anyway through ongoing search efforts. The court admitted the evidence because the independent search would have inevitably discovered the body regardless of the violation.
On December 24, 1968, ten-year-old Pamela Powers disappeared from a YMCA building in Des Moines, Iowa, where she had accompanied her parents to watch an athletic contest. Williams was seen leaving the YMCA carrying a large bundle wrapped in a blanket. A fourteen-year-old boy who helped open his car door reported seeing two skinny white legs inside it. Williams' car was found the next day 160 miles east in Davenport, Iowa. Items of the child's clothing along with an army blanket were recovered at a rest stop on Interstate 80 near Grinnell between Des Moines and Davenport. A warrant issued for Williams' arrest. On December 26 the Iowa Bureau of Criminal Investigation organized a search with two hundred volunteers divided into teams that began twenty-one miles east of Grinnell and moved westward through Poweshiek County into Jasper County. Searchers checked all roads, ditches, culverts, abandoned farm buildings, and other places where a small child's body could be hidden. The search area was marked off in grids on highway maps. Williams surrendered to police in Davenport and was arraigned. After his attorneys arranged for no questioning during transport, two Des Moines detectives took him into custody for the return drive. During the trip Detective Leaming spoke to Williams about predicted snow and the parents' right to a Christian burial. Williams then directed the officers to the child's shoes, the blanket, and ultimately the body itself. The body lay next to a culvert in a ditch beside a gravel road in Polk County. It was roughly two and one-half miles from where one search team had stopped when the search was suspended at 3 p.m. Williams was indicted for first-degree murder. At his first trial the evidence of the body was admitted over objection. He was convicted. The Iowa Supreme Court affirmed. The United States Supreme Court reversed in Brewer v. Williams on the ground that the statements were obtained in violation of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. At the second trial in 1977 the prosecution introduced evidence of the condition of the body, articles and photographs of clothing, and autopsy results without offering Williams' statements or showing that he had directed police to the body. The trial court found by a preponderance of the evidence that the body would have been discovered within a short time in essentially the same condition by the continuing search. The Iowa Supreme Court affirmed. On federal habeas corpus the District Court denied relief after an independent review. The Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed. The Supreme Court granted certiorari.
View caseOfficers obtained an unwarned statement from a suspect in custody. The government sought to introduce a later warned statement that repeated the same facts. The court suppressed the second statement because it remained the product of the initial constitutional violation.
Petitioner Dickerson was indicted for bank robbery, conspiracy to commit bank robbery, and using a firearm in the course of committing a crime of violence. Before trial, Dickerson moved to suppress a statement he had made at a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office on the grounds that he had not received Miranda warnings before being interrogated. The District Court granted his motion to suppress, and the Government took an interlocutory appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. That court reversed the District Court's suppression order. It agreed that petitioner had not received Miranda warnings before making his statement but held that 18 U.S.C. § 3501 governed the admissibility of the statement. The Fourth Circuit concluded that Miranda was not a constitutional holding and that Congress could therefore have the final say on admissibility. Two years after Miranda was decided, Congress enacted 18 U.S.C. § 3501, which provides that a confession shall be admissible in evidence if it is voluntarily given and directs the trial judge to consider specified factors in determining voluntariness. Because of the importance of the questions raised by the Court of Appeals' decision, the Supreme Court granted certiorari.
View caseFederal agents conducted an unlawful wiretap of a residence. Co-defendants who were not parties to the intercepted conversations sought to suppress the recordings. The court denied their motion because they lacked a sufficient privacy interest to challenge the violation.
Petitioners Alderman and Alderisio, along with Ruby Kolod (now deceased), were convicted in federal court of conspiring to transmit murderous threats in interstate commerce under 18 U.S.C. §§ 371 and 875(c). Their convictions were affirmed by the Tenth Circuit in 1967, and the Supreme Court initially denied certiorari. After denial, the petitioners alleged in a rehearing petition that Alderisio's Chicago business premises had been subjected to government electronic surveillance. The government responded by acknowledging that Alderisio's conversations had been overheard through unlawful eavesdropping. Petitioners Ivanov and Butenko were convicted in separate proceedings of conspiring to transmit national defense information to the Soviet Union under 18 U.S.C. §§ 794(a) and (c) and related charges under 18 U.S.C. § 951. The Third Circuit affirmed most convictions. Following the Alderman rehearing developments, certiorari was granted in Ivanov and Butenko on parallel questions concerning surveillance. After the convictions were affirmed and while the cases were pending, it was revealed that the United States had engaged in electronic surveillance that might have violated Fourth Amendment rights and tainted the convictions. The Supreme Court vacated the judgments and remanded each case to the District Court for adjudication of whether any government evidence supporting the convictions was the product of illegal surveillance. The government moved for modification of the remand order, proposing that surveillance records first undergo in camera inspection by the trial judge, who would disclose to petitioners and counsel only those materials found arguably relevant to the prosecution. Petitioners opposed the in camera procedure and sought full disclosure of all surveillance records to which they claimed standing. The government maintained that none of the overheard conversations were arguably relevant to the prosecutions and that disclosure of irrelevant conversations would endanger third parties or national security. The Supreme Court restored the cases for reargument specifically on the disclosure issue and the question of standing to object to the fruits of illegal surveillance.
View caseAn informant wearing a concealed transmitter recorded conversations with the defendant in the defendant's home. The recordings were later introduced at trial. The court admitted the evidence because the informant had consented to the recording and no Fourth Amendment violation occurred.
In 2008 defendant William White, leader of the American National Socialist Workers Party, operated the website Overthrow.com. On September 11, 2008, White posted an article titled "Hale Seeks To Have Sentence Overturned" with the sub-headline "Gay Jewish Anti-Racist Led Jury." The post included a photograph of Mark Hoffman, who had served as foreperson on the jury that convicted Matthew Hale in 2004, along with Hoffman's date of birth, address at 6915 Hamilton #A Chicago IL 60645, cell phone number, home phone number, and office number, and described Hoffman as living with his "gay black lover" and cat "homeboy." The posts appeared the same day a Chicago Sun-Times article discussed Hale's post-conviction motion challenging Hoffman's jury service on grounds including Hoffman's sexual orientation and race of his partner. White posted a virtually identical version on the blog section of the site and, after Northwestern University removed Hoffman's photo, posted an update the next day noting the block and repeating the same personal information. The site at the time also displayed links to other articles including one titled "Kill Richard Warman" and a magazine cover image showing crosshairs over Barack Obama's head titled "Kill This Nigger?" Hoffman received a harassing phone call from a Virginia number on September 11, 2008, asking about his jury service, followed by text messages containing offensive content. Hoffman contacted Northwestern security and FBI Agent Sara Lopez. FBI agents later executed search warrants at properties associated with White in Roanoke, Virginia, seizing the server used to run Overthrow.com and confirming through forensic analysis that White created the Hoffman posts. The government charged White with one count of violating 18 U.S.C. § 373 by soliciting or endeavoring to persuade another person to injure Hoffman based on his jury service in the Hale case. A prior district judge dismissed the superseding indictment, the Seventh Circuit reversed and remanded for trial, and an anonymous jury returned a guilty verdict. White moved for judgment of acquittal under Fed. R. Crim. P. 29. At trial the evidence revealed that all of the information in the posts was in the public domain. Former ANSWP members Philip Anderson and Michael Burks testified about the organization's structure, conference calls, and their interactions with White, including White's post-arrest instructions to Anderson to contact other white supremacists to determine whether anyone planned to harm Hoffman. The government introduced dozens of prior Overthrow.com posts in which White had published addresses and expressed violent wishes toward other individuals.
View caseEvidence obtained under a later warrant is fruit of the poisonous tree when the warrant affidavit relies primarily or exclusively on information from the initial constitutional violation. The taint is not automatically purged by the issuance of the warrant itself. Suppression follows unless an exception such as independent source or attenuation applies.
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Courts examine the temporal proximity between the illegality and the discovery of the evidence, the presence of intervening circumstances, and the flagrancy of the official misconduct. A short time interval and deliberate misconduct weigh against attenuation. Voluntary acts by the defendant after release can sometimes break the causal chain.
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No. Evidence discovered through a source wholly independent of the constitutional violation is admissible even if other tainted information also exists. The independent source must be sufficient by itself to support the warrant or the discovery.
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Yes, when the abandonment is the direct product of an unlawful seizure. Property discarded before any seizure occurs is not suppressible on that ground because no constitutional violation has yet taken place.
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