A statutory power for Superintendents and higher ranked officers was interpreted by the courts to be strictly limited to circumstances of urgency and that the general principle was that a warrant should be issued by an external authority.\u00a0 He must be satisfied on sworn information that there are reasonable grounds for the search.<\/p>\n
Warrants issued by members of An Garda S\u00edoch\u00e1na investigating team, who were not independent were held invalid with the consequent exclusion of evidence. Several convictions were overturned in the Court of Criminal Appeal because of the use of such warrants.<\/p>\n
The Criminal Justice (Search Warrants) Act 2012 Act allows for a member of An Garda S\u00edoch\u00e1na not below the rank of Superintendent to issue a warrant provided he is independent of the investigation.\u00a0 He must be satisfied the warrant is necessary for the proper investigation of the offence and that circumstances of urgency render it impracticable to apply to a District Judge.\u00a0 It is to be effective for 48 hours only.<\/p>\n
\n <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Unlawful v Unconstitutional Where evidence is obtained illegally but not a breach of constitutional rights, the judge has discretion as to whether to exclude it. \u00a0In some cases, the legislation may provide specifically that the evidence is admissible or inadmissible. In principle, evidence obtained unlawfully but not in breach of constitutional right may be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1470"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1470"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1524,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1470\/revisions\/1524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}