Roberts wins bonus points for intellectual dishonesty: he says that the very use of the term “probable cause” implies the possibility of error. So it does. Often a search done on valid grounds will discover nothing of interest; there was only probable cause, not certainly, behind the belief that evidence or contraband might be present. Roberts absurdly carries that over to mean that the very existence of the cause itself, rather than the inference drawn from it, need be only “probable.” That’s a pun, not an argument.
Extra extra bonus points for Roberts’s dishonesty in not mentioning the officer’s animus against the person unlawfully searched, who had accused the officer of involvement in a murder.
It’s not as if tossing a felon in possession of a handgun in prison bothers me much (and there’s no racial angle here); it’s the lawlessness of the cops that’s at issue. And even a Supreme Court Justice should be able to see that decisions like this one are an open invitation to lawlessness under the guise of carelessness.
Yes, the usual lineup: four Justices, five Injustices. Maybe if this is the quality of the Court’s work-product, the root problem is overwork, think how much faster things would go if the task of opinion-writing could be spread eleven or thirteen ways rather than nine.