In this case, the District Court immediately invoked the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule. The defendant’s argument that was rejected by the Court is that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Illinois v. Krull does not apply because, unlike the statute in Krull, the Stored Communications Act was obviously unconstitutional because the statute did not check the “discretion of Government officers” which is “a hallmark of an apparently valid statute.”
The Court answered by stating that the defendants “fail to establish that the officers had actual notice of the statute’s unconstitutionality.” The Court, having no binding precedent to cite within the Eighth Circuit, relied on precedent from another Circuit instead, which seems to be an expansion of the definition of good faith past current Supreme Court interpretation.
The case is United States v. Reed, 2018 U . S . Dist. LEXIS 181342 (Dist. Minn.) (October 23).