alt Hacker News> the real story doesn’t come out in court.
I'm not saying this hasn't happened, but any competent criminal defense attorney (like a SMART criminal would have) would go to town on illegally obtained evidence. I'm not saying cops don't do warrantless searches/taps/etc., to gather unofficial clues, but if they can't get real evidence that stands up under scrutiny, the criminal walks.
I'm not sure if prosecution would move forward on such shaky ground in hard to prove cases.
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Parallel construction is when they use illegally obtained evidence to construct a separate set of ostensibly legitimate evidence. Like, an illegal wiretap might lead to someone being in the right place at the right time to witness a crime.
It is CIA. For better or worse, different rules apply.
Only if such evidence was made public
> any competent criminal defense attorney
I don't think 'going to town on illegally obtained evidence' works as often as you believe it does [0, 1].
And think back - how many people went to jail for national and/or international scale warrantless wiretapping? How did we, as a nation, respond to Snowden's revelations?
> I'm not sure if prosecution would move forward on such shaky ground in hard to prove cases.
There are people on death row in the US even after being proven innocent and ordered to go free. Dignity in Ink [2] present similar cases every day - they're never going to run out of material.
0 - A major DOJ/GAO-era federal study found that illegal search/seizure issues accounted for about 0.4% of declined federal prosecutions and roughly 0.7% of dismissed cases after prosecution began. - https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/84544NCJRS.pdf
1 - Another study across seven jurisdictions found motions to suppress succeeded in under 1% of warrant cases, and only 1.5% of defendants went free because of successful suppression motions. - https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/search-warrants-mot...
2 - https://www.instagram.com/dignityinink