Also known as: evidentiary fruit · fruit of the poisonous tree
Written by attorneys · grounded in primary & secondary sources — see below
Derivative evidence obtained through exploitation of an initial constitutional violation. The doctrine extends the exclusionary rule to bar not only the primary evidence seized unlawfully but also any later evidence causally linked to that illegality. Evidence remains admissible only when obtained by means sufficiently independent of the violation to purge the taint.
Environmental officer Dana Cruz entered ChemTech Corporation's fenced property without a warrant and installed a hidden sampling device in a locked outfall pipe. Using data from that device alone, the agency secured warrants and seized servers and lab reports. ChemTech moved to suppress the seized records. The court suppressed them because the records were obtained by exploiting the initial unlawful intrusion.
Agent Perez hacked Malik's home server without a warrant and obtained IP logs. Perez then used those logs to secure warrants for NimbusCloud emails. Malik moved to suppress the emails. The court excluded both the logs and the emails because the later evidence flowed directly from the unconstitutional hack.
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Detective Leaming elicited the location of a child's body through an improper plea during transport. The state later argued the body would have been found anyway through ongoing search efforts. The court admitted the evidence because the independent search would have inevitably discovered the body regardless of the violation.
Officers obtained an unwarned statement from a suspect in custody. The government sought to introduce a later warned statement that repeated the same facts. The court suppressed the second statement because it remained the product of the initial constitutional violation.
Federal agents conducted an unlawful wiretap of a residence. Co-defendants who were not parties to the intercepted conversations sought to suppress the recordings. The court denied their motion because they lacked a sufficient privacy interest to challenge the violation.
An informant wearing a concealed transmitter recorded conversations with the defendant in the defendant's home. The recordings were later introduced at trial. The court admitted the evidence because the informant had consented to the recording and no Fourth Amendment violation occurred.
Evidence obtained under a later warrant is fruit of the poisonous tree when the warrant affidavit relies primarily or exclusively on information from the initial constitutional violation. The taint is not automatically purged by the issuance of the warrant itself. Suppression follows unless an exception such as independent source or attenuation applies.
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Courts examine the temporal proximity between the illegality and the discovery of the evidence, the presence of intervening circumstances, and the flagrancy of the official misconduct. A short time interval and deliberate misconduct weigh against attenuation. Voluntary acts by the defendant after release can sometimes break the causal chain.
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No. Evidence discovered through a source wholly independent of the constitutional violation is admissible even if other tainted information also exists. The independent source must be sufficient by itself to support the warrant or the discovery.
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Yes, when the abandonment is the direct product of an unlawful seizure. Property discarded before any seizure occurs is not suppressible on that ground because no constitutional violation has yet taken place.
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…discovery exception to the exclusionary rule. Williams contends that evidence of the body's location and condition is "fruit of the poisonous tree," i. e. , the "fruit" or product of Detective Leaming's plea to help the child's parents give her "a Christian burial," which this Court had already held equated to interrogation. He…