The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures in criminal investigations. The Supreme Court has interpreted this to require that police obtain a warrant prior to search and that illegally seized evidence be excluded from trial. A consensus has developed in the law and economics literature that tort liability for police officers is a superior means of deterring unreasonable searches. We argue that this conclusion depends on the assumption of truth-seeking police, and develop a game-theoretic model to compare the two remedies when some police officers (the bad type) are willing to plant evidence in order to obtain convictions, even though other police (the good type) are not (where this type is private information). We characterize the perfect Bayesian equilibria of the asymmetric-information game between the police and a court that seeks to minimize error costs in deciding whether to convict or acquit suspects. In this framework, we show that the exclusionary rule with a warrant requirement leads to superior outcomes (relative to tort liability) in terms of truth-finding function of courts, because the warrant requirement can reduce the scope for bad types of police to plant evidence.
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Paper provided by University of Connecticut, Department of Economics in its series Working papers with number
2003-37.
Length: 32 pages Date of creation: Sep 2003 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:uct:uconnp:2003-37
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Jean-Pierre Benoit & Juan Dubra, 2004.
"Why Do Good Cops Defend Bad Cops?,"
International Economic Review,
Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 45(3), pages 787-809, 08.
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Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Gerd Mühlheusser & Andreas Roider, 2005.
"Black Sheep and Walls of Silence,"
Discussion Papers
56, SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems, Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich.
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