Therefore, he filed a motion to suppress due to a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights, to which the exclusionary rule is a remedy.

The trial court agreed, granting respondent's motion on the grounds that it could find no "distinction between State action, whether it happens to be the police department or not."

Although the exclusionary rule was originally implemented as a guard for privacy rights, after United States v. Leon, it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court as a tool for deterring police misconduct.

Second, there is no evidence that court employees were motivated to "subvert the Fourth Amendment or that lawlessness among these actors requires application of the extreme sanction of exclusion."

Furthermore, there was some police conduct involved in maintaining the database on which the officer relied to determine whether there was, in fact, a warrant out for Evans's arrest.

Moreover, Stevens observed that there was no civil remedy under section 1983 for Fourth Amendment violations that result from erroneous information in police databases, either against the individual officer or against the city that employs him.

"The offense to the dignity of the citizen who is arrested, handcuffed, and searched on a public street simply because some bureaucrat has failed to maintain an accurate computer data base strikes me as...

The fact that the police happened to find Evans's marijuana as a result of inaccurate information in the database had to be weighed against the interest of law-abiding citizens.

Justice Ginsburg argued that the case was not properly before the Court because it rested on an independent and adequate ground in Arizona law — its statute dealing with good-faith reliance on the validity of warrants.