372
Souter, J., dissenting
In Janis, for example, we performed incremental benefit analysis by focusing on the two classes of law enforcement officers affected. We reasoned that when the offending official was a state police officer, his "zone of primary interest" would be state criminal prosecution, not federal civil proceedings; accordingly, we said, "common sense dictates that the deterrent effect of the exclusion of relevant evidence is highly attenuated when the 'punishment' imposed upon the offending criminal enforcement officer is the removal of that evidence from a civil suit by or against a different sovereign." 428 U. S., at 457-458. Stone v. Powell was another variant on the same theme, where we looked to the collateral nature of the habeas proceedings in which the rule might be applied: "The view that the deterrence of Fourth Amendment violations would be furthered rests on the dubious assumption that law enforcement authorities would fear that federal habeas review might reveal flaws in a search or seizure that went undetected at trial and on appeal." 428 U. S., at 493. And in United States v. Calandra we observed that excluding such evidence from grand jury proceedings "would deter only police investigation[s] consciously directed toward the discovery of evidence solely for use in a grand jury investigation," 414 U. S., at 351; an investigation so unambitious would be a rare one, we said, since prosecutors are unlikely to seek indictments in the face of dim prospects of conviction after trial, ibid.
In a formal sense, such is the reasoning of the Court's majority in deciding today that application of the exclusionary rule in parole revocation proceedings would have only an insignificant marginal deterrent value, "because application of the rule in the criminal trial context already provides significant deterrence of unconstitutional searches." Ante, at 364. In substance, however, the Court's conclusion will not jibe with the examples just cited, for it rests on erroneous views of the roles of regular police and parole officers in relation to revocation proceedings, and of the practical significance of the proceedings themselves.
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