Relevance, in the common law of evidence, is the tendency of a given item of evidence to prove or disprove one of the legal elements of the case, or to have probative value to make one of the elements of the case likelier or not. Probative is a term used in law to signify “tending to prove”.

Fruit of the poisonous tree is a legal metaphor used to describe evidence that is obtained illegally. The logic of the terminology is that if the source (the “tree”) of the evidence or evidence itself is tainted, then anything gained (the “fruit”) from it is tainted as well.

Michael F. Murray v.

The evidence obtained in the search was upheld anyway, because the police performed the search in reliance on the warrant, meaning they acted in good faith. This became known as the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule.

Overview. Qualified immunity is a type of legal immunity. Specifically, qualified immunity protects a government official from lawsuits alleging that the official violated a plaintiff’s rights, only allowing suits where officials violated a “clearly established” statutory or constitutional right.

United States, 487 U.S. 533 (1988), was a United States Supreme Court decision that created the modern “independent source doctrine” exception to the exclusionary rule.

If, upon review, a court finds that an unreasonable search occurred, any evidence seized as a result of it cannot be used as direct evidence against the defendant in a criminal prosecution. This principle, established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1961, has come to be known as the exclusionary rule.

Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court ruled that it is not unconstitutional for American police to “stop and frisk” a person they reasonably suspect to be armed and involved in a crime.

The United States Supreme Court made an important ruling on the use of stop-and-frisk in the 1968 case Terry v. Ohio, hence the stops are also referred to as Terry stops….Legal background of stop-and-frisk.

1968

Character evidence is admissible in a criminal trial if offered by a defendant as circumstantial evidence—through reputation or opinion evidence—to show their own character, as long as the character evidence the defendant seeks to introduce is relevant to the crime with which the defendant is charged.

Admissible evidence, in a court of law, is any testimonial, documentary, or tangible evidence that may be introduced to a factfinder—usually a judge or jury—to establish or to bolster a point put forth by a party to the proceeding.

Circumstantial evidence is especially important in civil and criminal cases where direct evidence is lacking.