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Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document307 Filed 06/25/21 Page13 of 21
or another substantive constitutional provision supplies a standard for the suppression of
evidence, courts must follow that standard, not invent their own. See Payner, 447 US. at 735.
Maxwell has not established a violation of due process or justified the exercise of the
Court’s inherent supervisory authority. Not every misstep by the Government during a criminal
investigation justifies suppressing relevant evidence. The Supreme Court has repeatedly
explained that the exclusionary rule weighs the interest in deterring investigatory misconduct
against the truth-seeking function of the judicial process. That balance “do[es] not change
because a court has elected to analyze the question under the supervisory power instead of” some
other constitutional provision. /d. at 736. Due process provides an independent basis to suppress
evidence only when the Government engages in conduct that is “fundamentally unfair or
shocking to our traditional sense of justice” or is “so outrageous that common notions of fairness
and decency would be offended were judicial processes invoked to obtain a conviction against
the accused.” United States v. Schmidt, 105 F.3d 82, 91 (2d Cir. 1997) (internal quotation marks
omitted). “Ordinarily such official misconduct must involve either coercion or violation of the
defendant’s person.” /d. (citations omitted). This case involves neither. Omitting information
about communications with BSF years earlier falls well short of the sort of extreme misconduct
supporting suppression as a matter of due process.
To the extent Maxwell asks the Court to engage in a freewheeling exercise of its inherent
supervisory power instead, the Court declines to do so. To begin with, suppression under a
court’s supervisory authority is only appropriate, if at all, when the Government has engaged in
“willful disobedience of law.” Payner, 447 U.S. at 735 n.7 (emphasis added). Maxwell all but
concedes that the present record does not show willful misconduct, contending instead that it
“doesn’t matter” whether the prosecutor knew his statements to Judge McMahon were
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| Filename | DOJ-OGR-00004797.jpg |
| File Size | 742.5 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 94.7% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 2,184 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-03 16:53:02.443595 |