Frankenstein and the exclusionary rule

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!

~ Sir Walter Scott, "Marmion," Canto vi, Stanza 17

On Wednesday the Supreme Court handed down a decision slightly expanding evidence obtained by the police that may be used against a defendant in court. With the decision in Kansas v. Ventris, the Supreme Court ruled that the government may impeach a defendant's testimony using statements obtained during an interrogation that violated his Sixth Amendment right to counsel, even though the prosecution would be barred from using such tainted evidence as part of its case in chief.

Here are the facts: After a confrontation in the home of Ernest Hicks between respondent Donnie Ray Ventris and his companion, Rhonda Theel, Hicks was shot and killed, and Ventris and Theel escaped with several hundred dollars in cash and other possessions. Ventris and Theel were arrested and charged with murder, aggravated robbery and several lesser offenses. Both defendants claimed that the other was responsible for pulling the trigger and killing Hicks. A jailhouse informant in a prison cell revealed to the police that when he asked Ventris what was "weighing in on his mind," Ventris admitted to being the shooter. When Ventris took the stand at trial and blamed the shooting on Theel, the state called the informant to testify about this prior conflicting statement.

In an opinion by Justice Scalia, the Court held that evidence obtained in violation of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel is admissible for purposes of impeachment, despite the fact it would not be admissible if presented in court as part of the prosecution's main case. Because the constitutional violation at issue involves pretrial conduct rather than a trial right, admissibility is determined by "an exclusionary-rule balancing test," which compares the benefits from deterring police misconduct against the costs of excluding potentially truthful and relevant evidence.

In a rational society, defendant's Ventris and Theel would have been tried, convicted and hanged in front of the courthouse steps as a warning to other would-be criminals. In an insane society, Ventris and Theel are treated as outsider celebrities and their unremarkable case taken all the way to the Supreme Court. This is sheer madness!

What's behind Justice Clarence Thomas' foundational beliefs and jurisprudence? Find out in "My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir"

Rather than giving a point-by-point legal analysis of Kansas v. Ventris, here I wish to look at this case as a patent example of how needlessly complicated and convoluted putting a criminal in jail has become since the advent of liberal judicial activism and legislating from the bench. In modern times, the omnipotent judge dispenses an endless litany of "new" constitutional rights for criminals at the expense of Reason, common sense and the safety of the general public, which was the primary reason why "We the People" created the Constitution, the Congress, the Executive, the Courts and the government in the first place.

To explain how far the Court has descended from Veritas (truth), allow me to use the metaphor found in the literary classic "Frankenstein" (1818), by Mary Shelley. The modern version of this narrative concerns the mad genius scientist (Dr. Victor Frankenstein) and his narcissistic obsession to create human life. With the help of his faithful assistant (Igor), bodies were stolen from the graveyard and various body parts were ghoulishly cobbled together to complete his diabolical experiment.

Frankenstein was a warning against the "overreaching" of modern man at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, implied in the novel's subtitle, "The Modern Prometheus." The moral of the story, at least in the modern conception of "Frankenstein," is that catastrophe is the inevitable end where secular man seeks to supplant his will for Natural Law or God's will.

That said, let's look at the shameful, idiotic and unconstitutional legacy of the Supreme Court in the field of criminal law and procedure surrounding the exclusionary rule. It is a veritable Dr. Frankenstein's monster of disjointed case law.

In a previous article, "Dump the exclusionary rule," I argued that the Court was violating the separation of powers doctrine by legislating from the bench and writing police criminal codes of conduct, which, after nearly 100 years since the advent of the exclusionary rule in U.S. v. Weeks (1914), the Court is clearly incompetent to do. Instead, I suggested that in all legal cases the Court simply follow Veritas (truth), forsake a slavish obsession with procedure and kill this Frankenstein monster they created called the exclusionary rule, which, as Justice Cardozo rightly divined in the 1920s, amounts to the legal catastrophe: The criminal is to go free because the constable [police] has blundered.

Why won't the Court simply abandon the exclusionary rule instead of tinkering with it like Dr. Frankenstein's monster? The answer is found in the writings of Sir Walter Scott who in his great poetical work, "Marmion," famously wrote: Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive! Yes, pride and deceit are partly to blame. Yes, reliance on illegitimate stare decisis (judicial precedent) is partly to blame. Yes, educational ignorance by politicians, lawyers, judges and the general public is partly to blame, but I give the most blame to Egalitarianism – a grotesque perversion of equality where instead of justice, activist judges follow a false "living constitution" jurisprudence that mandates an equality of outcomes; where the criminal is placed on an equal plane with Justice while Veritas becomes relative or irrelevant.

For the Court not to allow the truth into evidence (in any case) is tantamount to giving the criminal the key to his own jail cell while putting the public under the control of deviants, sociopaths and psychopaths. One of my most faithful readers (Henry Barnes of TheConservativeBeacon.net) presciently foreshadowed that under the Obama administration, societal chaos is surely by design when he wrote:

In totalitarian states criminals are given the run of prisons over the more docile political prisoners. In the general population criminals are allowed to control private individuals. The government understands that it is easier, and cheaper, to control the population by criminals.

… And Frankenstein is freed from his prison by the exclusionary rule.