Thurgood Marshall's dissent noted not only the extent to which the IRS had gone in planning the briefcase caper but that its agents had purposely been instructed to take advantage of the loophole created by the court's standing rule.

In 1965 the IRS initiated "Operation Trade Winds", a broad investigation into the use of offshore tax havens by American citizens, some of whom had links to organized crime.

Agents in the Jacksonville office, where the investigation was headquartered, began to focus on Castle Bank & Trust, in Nassau, Bahamas, when they learned a suspected drug trafficker had opened an account there.

[a] Richard Jaffe, one of the special agents involved in Trade Winds, asked Norman Casper, a private investigator he sometimes used as a source, to look into Castle.

Since Payner had said he did not have any offshore accounts on his tax return for that year, the case was referred to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio.

"This Court finds that the United States, through its agents, Richard Jaffe, and others, knowingly and willfully participated in the unlawful seizure of Michael Wolstencroft's briefcase", Manos declared.

Drawing on a line of cases starting with Rochin v. California,[17] where the Court had been so outraged by police officers' forced use of a stomach pump to retrieve two swallowed morphine capsules that they overturned the conviction, and clarified in United States v. Janis[18] when the Court declined to exclude evidence from a civil proceeding that had been seized in a good-faith belief it was permissible, he held that the jurisprudence on the issue: ... requires exclusion of reliable evidence only in those cases in which government officials obtain the challenged materials in a grossly improper fashion, i.e., by engaging in illegal conduct which exhibits their knowing and purposeful bad faith hostility to any person's fundamental constitutional rights ... [S]ociety's interest in deterring [d]ue [p]rocess violations outweighs society's interest in allowing the fact finder to view all relevant evidence only when an official's conduct demonstrates a bad faith hostility to the strictures imposed on him by the Constitution ...

The Court finds that the illegal conduct of the government officials involved in this case compels the conclusion that they knowingly and purposefully obtained the briefcase materials with bad faith hostility toward the strictures imposed on their activities by the Constitution.

Lewis F. Powell, Jr., reaffirmed earlier holdings that only the aggrieved party could challenge the constitutionality of evidence, and that even the deliberate, sustained nature of the violation in the instant case did not change that.

He also outlined reasons why the Court did not think it wise to extend the exclusionary rule in that direction, since its supervisory power was properly limited to actions of the judicial branch, and Congressional hearings had already exposed the excesses of Operation Trade Winds and led the IRS to shut it down.

He felt that the deliberate and calculated plans of Jaffe and Casper, as well as the former's admission to Congress that he had been made aware of the standing provision during training and encouraged to take advantage of it, required that the Court act.

[24] After reviewing the facts of the case, Powell found no reason to doubt or add to Manos's conclusion that Payner lacked Fourth Amendment standing.

"We certainly can understand the District Court's commendable desire to deter deliberate intrusions into the privacy of persons who are unlikely to become defendants in a criminal prosecution," he wrote.

"Our cases have consistently recognized that unbending application of the exclusionary sanction to enforce ideals of governmental rectitude would impede unacceptably the truthfinding functions of judge and jury.

"[30] In a footnote, he also pointed out that five years earlier, in 1975, the House Government Operations Committee had held hearings on Trade Winds and other related IRS investigations which had revealed the briefcase caper and other abusive investigatory practices.

He emphasized his agreement with the majority, but noted that its opinion "should not be read as condoning the conduct of the IRS 'private investigators' disclosed by this record, or as approval of their evidence-gathering methods.

[33] He reviewed the facts of the case as Manos had outlined them, believing fuller detail was necessary to appreciate the extent to which the IRS agents had been involved in planning and executing the briefcase caper.

"If the federal court permits such evidence, the intended product of deliberately illegal Government action, to be used to obtain a conviction, it places its imprimatur upon such lawlessness, and thereby taints its own integrity.

"[36] Since the purpose of the supervisory power was to allow the courts to protect their own integrity, Marshall continued, he was all the more puzzled by the majority's focus on the Fourth Amendment's standing provisions.

[38]Lastly, to respond to charges that this was potentially an indiscriminate application of the exclusionary rule, he quoted from one of Powell's own opinions, in Hampton v. United States[39] to the effect that at some point a case where the Court would have to take a stand against abusive investigative methods.

A few months after it was handed down, the Seventh Circuit upheld a district court's suppression of evidence during the prosecution of a Chicago gambling ring in United States v. Cortina.

An evidentiary hearing found that FBI agent William Brown had greatly exaggerated much of the information used to prepare an affidavit used to obtain the search warrant that had uncovered most of the evidence.

He noted that it was very difficult to uncover falsification in search warrant affidavits, and that it had only been the good faith and cooperation of the federal prosecutors that had made it possible to do so in the instant case.

[45]In 1984 District of Columbia Circuit judge Antonin Scalia, later elevated to the Supreme Court himself, would also rely on Payner to allow some contested evidence.

"Even where the defendants' rights are not violated," he wrote in a Boston College Law Review article, "courts should be permitted to rely on the supervisory power to exclude evidence seized by grossly improper means".

"Because the supervisory power is non-constitutional in nature," he wrote, "federal courts may utilize it to create standards that exceed minimum constitutional levels.

In Thiel v. Southern Pacific Corp.,[51] and Ballard v. United States,[52] the Court had overturned a civil verdict and criminal convictions respectively where certain categories had been unlawfully excluded from the jury pool—without requiring parties to demonstrate they were prejudiced by the exclusions, since they had done enough damage to the judicial system.

More recently, a Sixth Circuit case had excluded evidence obtained by a government informant who violated attorney–client privilege, conduct he called "more outrageous than Payner" from trials of several defendants.

[58] At the time of Mapp v. Ohio, when the exclusionary rule was applied to proceedings in state courts, its imposition was defended as much for its role in protecting judicial integrity as well as deterring unconstitutional investigative practices.

"[E]vidence collected in violation of Fourth Amendment limits", Davies recounts, "was so imbued with the potential to smear that even judicial robes normally infused with an aura of impartiality and fairness would be tarnished by it.