Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and beginning April 20th, 2021 (Eastern Time) the Yahoo Answers website will be in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.
Trending News
Are search warrants not always necessary?
I was watching an episode from the first season of Criminal Minds earlier this week. In it, a girl was abducted by some pedophile. The BAU team had a strong hunch who the abductor was, and they raided his house without a search warrant, in an attempt to save the girl.
When they didn't find her in the house right away, one of the BAU members said something along the lines of "If we don't find her here, everything else we find [tapes with child pornography had already been found at this time] will be fruit of a poisoned tree, and we'll have to let him go."
Since there were no exigent circumstances other than the theory that child molesters typically kill their victims within 24 hours after the abduction (and this took place close to that 24 hour limit), wouldn't this be an illegal search even if they DID find the girl?
Eric B: I already forgot the details of the show (I have a sucky memory... :-) but I do remember thinking that the probably cause for the search was wafer thin --I wouldn't have signed the warrant if I had been the judge. (From the beginning of the show, I felt that a "most of the kids are killed by a pedophile within 24 hours of their abduction"-statistic was introduced to give it a sense of emergency. As if it was a hard and fast rule, like a bomb with a timing device.)
I've been thinking about this for the past couple of minutes: apparently, the more heinous the crime that someone is suspected of, the lower the threshold for applying the 'exigent circumstances' rule necessarily has to become. (I had a decent line of reasoning, but I'm getting tired and sleepy so I won't reproduce it here...) Does anyone know if this is true in practice?
4 Answers
- 1 decade agoFavorite Answer
Criminal Minds is a great TV show - I never miss it. BUT, it is a TV show. The only show that typically gets it right is The Unit.
Any search of the residence without a search warrant or permission of the owner (exception noted if subj was on probation or other supervised release that stipulates subj's residence may be searched at any time) would run a great risk of being illegal. There are extenuating circumstances that could allow the search - but - attorneys have years to attack the decision.
In the episode, as in real life, the saving of the victim was more important than preserving the case. You try to do both, but life trumps convicting the suspect.
- 1 decade ago
You said it yourself...
"Since there were no exigent circumstances other than the theory that child molesters typically kill their victims within 24 hours..."
That is a very valid exigent circumstance for the search. Life in danger. Im quite ceretain they had more than a hunch right? It wasn't merely a feeling of wrongdoing about this guy.
Of course, this would be argued to high-hell and back in court by the suspect's attorney.
