Tennessee General Assembly Adopts "Good Faith" Exception
Tennesseans lost a little more constitutional protection recently when the Tennessee General Assembly enacted the "Exclusionary Rule Reform Act," which essentially adopts the Good Faith Exception to the search warrant requirement that has long existed under federal law but has been absent from Tennessee's criminal law landscape. Simply put, this exception allows defective, erroneous, or otherwise unconstitutional search warrants to satisfy the search warrant requirement of the state and federal constitutions as long as the mistake was made in "good faith" by the officer executing the search. From a practical standpoint, this exception will allow evidence that would previously have been deemed unconstitutionally seized to be allowed into court to be used against defendants.
The "good faith" exception is a troublesome doctrine for criminal defendants because there is no definition set in stone of what constitutes "good faith" on the part of law enforcement officials. Settling on such a definition may prove troublesome in the State of Tennessee in the near future since the good faith exception has only recently been adopted and has yet to have been addressed by the state courts. In federal courts, it has been widely interpreted and essentially been held to apply any time the officer executing the search could reasonably have believed that he was executing a valid search pursuant to a good search warrant, regardless of the actual validity of the warrant itself.
This is another example of how the deck is becoming increasingly stacked as of late against criminal defendants in the State of Tennessee. Defendants who find themselves squaring off against this doctrine will need the assistance of an East Tennessee criminal defense attorney experienced in the realm of search and seizure law in both federal and state courts.
Source: 2011 PC 252, 36 TAM 23-49, effective 7/1/11, 3 pages.
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