If a false entry in a database leads to a unconstitutional police search that reveals illegal drugs, does the government get to hold it against you?

That's the question the Supreme Court will tackle on Tuesday in a case civil liberties groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center argue will have broad implications in a world where we are constantly being evaluated against databases and watch lists that are riddled with frustratingly persistent errors.

"In these interlinked databases, one error can spread like a disease, infecting every system it touches and condemning the individual to whom this error refers to suffer substantial delay, harassment, and improper arrest," EPIC director Marc Rotenberg argued in a friend of the court brief (.pdf).

Not surprisingly, the government disagrees.

"Police officers in the field must be allowed to rely on information they receive from others when it is reasonable to do so," the Justice Department wrote in its brief (.pdf), arguing that throwing out the evidence won't make errors less likely.

At issue is the case of Bennie Herring, an Alabama man who drove to the police station in July 2004 to try to retrieve items from an impounded pickup truck. A Coffee County cop recognized him, asked the clerk to check the database for outstanding warrant.

None was found, so the investigator asked the clerk to call the neighboring Dale county clerk to see if it had a warrant for Herring.

The Dale county clerk found a warrant for Herring in their database, so the Coffee County cops set out after Herring after asking the other county to fax the warrant over.

Herring was soon pulled over and the police found meth in his pocket and a pistol under the truck's seat.

But in the meantime, the Dale county clerk found that there was no warrant for Herring and the entry should have been removed five months previous.

In court, Herring moved to have the evidence thrown out, but instead was sentenced to 27 months for being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm.

No one – not even the government - disputes that the search was unconstitutional.

But the courts – including the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals – aren't convinced that throwing out evidence from a tainted-database-initiated search will make the system better.

"Hoping to gain a beneficial deterrent effect on Dale County personnel by excluding evidence in a case brought by Coffee County officers would be like telling a student that if he skips school one of his classmates will be punished," Judge Edward Carnes wrote in a 2007 opinion.

"The student may not exactly relish the prospect of causing another to suffer, but human nature being what it is, he is unlikely to fear that prospect as much as he would his own suffering. "

Instead Carnes suggests victims of bad government databases should find their justice by filing a civil suit against the responsible parties.

Civil liberties groups say such suits are unlikely to succeed and that the Constitution should protect people from watch lists and databases relied on more and more by the government, even as it denies responsibility for keeping them accurate.

The case is Herring vs. US 07-513.

Photo: dbking/Flickr