nix v williams (10. 801)

On this day in 1984, the US Supreme Court issued a decision that created a carve-out to the exclusionary rule, a legal remedy and disincentive that bars police and prosecutors from entering evidence obtained from searches and seizures that contravene the right to due process under the law, protection against self-incrimination and the right to counsel (guarantees of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments, ruling that there is an exception to this inadmissible corroboration—called metaphorically the “fruit of the poisonous tree” by Justice Felix Frankfurter—in this case a coerced confession, if it could be reasonably determined that the same evidence would be inevitably by authorities in the normal course of investigations. The dissenting opinion argued that while such an exemption was common practice in many jurisdictions, the burden of proof should not be weakened from a “clear and convincing” to a “preponderance.”