The venerable writ of habeas corpus, encoded at 28 U.S.C. §2254, serves principally to remedy state court violations of the federal Constitution. It is therefore curious that a key constitutional component—the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures—is generally unenforceable in federal collateral proceedings, except in one narrow instance: when the state fails to provide a full and fair opportunity to litigatethe issue.
The main rationale for this prudential bar, announced by the Supreme Court in Stone v. Powell,1 is that the exclusionary rule is a judicially created sanction designed to deter police misconduct, not a personal trial right of the accused.2 And since the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has constitutionally endorsed New York’s procedure for litigating Fourth Amendment claims, federal postconviction relief is functionally unavailable absent an “unconscionable breakdown” in state court access.3 As Justice John Paul Stevens has observed, such cases will be vanishingly rare.4
‘Capellan v. Riley’
