Inevitable discovery

Inevitable discovery

The inevitable discovery is a doctrine in United States law that allows evidence of a defendant's guilt that would otherwise be considered inadmissible under the exclusionary rule to be admitted into evidence in a trial.

The doctrine was adopted first by the United States Supreme Court in "Nix v. Williams" in 1984. It holds that evidence obtained through an unlawful search or seizure is admissible in court if it can be established, to a very high degree of probability, that normal police investigation would have inevitably led to the discovery of the evidence. This decision was upheld because given the fact that the exclusionary rule was created specifically to deter police and state misconduct, excluding evidence that would inevitably (hypothetically) have been discovered otherwise would not serve to deter police misconduct. In "People v. Stith", the Court stated that this doctrine may not be used to admit primary evidence but only secondary evidence, i.e. evidence found as a result of the primary evidence.


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