In his April 5 WorldNetDaily column, Ellis Washington complained that he has been “a blacklisted academic for 30 years.” He linked to his manifesto on his personal website, which is mostly a lot of whining about how he can’t get a tenure-track teaching job, followed by smearing his ideological opposites as Nazis. (As if exaggerating his resume, getting things flamboyantly wrong, and adhering to far-out-of-the-mainstream legal theories weren’t enough reason not to hire him.)
Washington demonstrated yet again why no sane law school should hire him in his April 12 column:
The Court’s most controversial decision on the Fourth Amendment was Mapp v. Ohio (1961), which established the anti-constitutional exclusionary rule where critical evidence gathered by the police can be withheld from proving defendant’s guilt if a single judge deems the evidence “tainted” or derivative of the so-called “fruit of the poisonous tree.” This is judicial tyranny writ large!
Washington conveniently omits the facts of the case, in which a person was convicted of possessing obscene materials after an admittedly illegal police search of her home for a fugitive. Washington doesn’t explain why illegally obtained evidence must be admissible.
In other words, Washington declared that it’s “anti-constitutional” to uphold the Fourth Amendment’s right against unreasonable search and seizure. And this guy wants a job as a law professor?
UPDATE: A ConWebWatch reader with a background in law points out that Washington is even more wrong than we first described. The exclusionary rule was not established in Mapp v. Ohio; that case merely ruled that it applies to the states as well as the federal government. The “fruit of the poisonous tree” rule was established for federal cases in the 1920 case Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States.