Mass Suppression: Aggregation and the Fourth Amendment

The FourthAmendment's exclusionary rule requires thatcriminal courts suppress evidence obtained as a result ofan unconstitutionalsearch or seizure. The Supreme Courthas repeatedly stated that suppression is purelyregulatory, not remedial. Its only purpose is to deterfuture police misconduct, not to remedy past privacy orliberty harms suffered by the defendant. Exclusion, inother words, is for the benefit of community members whomight, sometime in the future, be subject to policemisconduct like that endured by the defendant.Exclusion's regulatory purpose would be greatly aided ifcriminal courts could identify when a suppression motioninvolved Fourth Amendment violations that wererepresentative of widespreadpatterns of police misconductin the jurisdiction.

Currently, state and local criminalcourts-where the vast majority of Fourth Amendmentsuppression motions are litigated-decide those motionswithout the benefit of any contextual informationregarding police practices within the jurisdiction.Informational bottlenecks and other design defects preventcriminal courts from systematically recording andanalyzing all of the information that is available to themregradingpatterns of police misconduct. Procedural andother reforms could correct these defects and allow stateand local courts to realize their full regulatory potential.For example, criminal courts should, under appropriatecircumstance, aggregate different defendants' FourthAmendment claims and grant group-based suppression.This will, in turn, incentivize public defenders tosystematically identify and challenge patterns ofunconstitutional police conduct.