法律翻译 | 《哈佛法律评论》第130卷第8期目录+摘要

译者｜沈玚 上海交通大学法律硕士

审稿｜汪晨涵 复旦大学法律硕士

         Ellen Chen  Cornell LL.M. 

编辑｜杨蒙恩 烟台大学本科

责编｜陈远航 美国西北大学LL.M.

The Judicial Presumption of Police Expertise

警方专业意见的司法推定

By Anna Lvovsky

作者：Anna Lvovsky

This Article examines the unrecognized origins and scope of the judicial presumption of police expertise: the notion that trained, experienced officers develop insight into crime sufficiently rarefied and reliable to justify deference from courts. That presumption has been widely criticized in Fourth Amendment analysis. Yet the Fourth Amendment is in fact part of a much broader constellation of deference, one that begins outside criminal procedure and continues past it. Drawing on judicial opinions, appellate records, trial transcripts, police periodicals, and other archival materials, this Article argues that courts in the mid-twentieth century invoked police expertise to expand police authority in multiple areas of the law. They certified policemen as expert witnesses on criminal habits; they deferred to police insights in evaluating arrests and authorizing investigatory stops; and they even credited police knowledge in upholding criminal laws challenged for vagueness, offering the officer’s trained judgment as a check against the risk of arbitrary enforcement.

本文探讨了警方专业意见的司法推定所不为人知的起源和范围：该种推定认为，训练有素又经验丰富的警官对犯罪具有足够罕见且可靠的洞察力，足以获得法院的司法遵从（deference）。该种推定受到第四修正案相关分析的广泛质疑。然而，第四修正案本质属于一种更为广义上的司法遵从体系中的一环。该等体系最初诞生于刑事司法程序之外，延续到刑事诉讼程序之后。根据司法意见、上诉记录、庭审记录、警方刊物和其他档案材料，本文认为，二十世纪中叶时期的法院通过援引警方的专业意见，扩大了警方在多个法律领域内的权力。法院将警察视为犯罪行为习惯方面的专家证人。在批准逮捕及授权调查拦截（investigatory stops）时，法院会遵从警方的意见。甚至在维持因模糊性（vagueness）而受到质疑的刑事法律时，法院也会听取警方的专业知识，将警官的专业判断视作应对任意执法风险的保证。

Complicating traditional accounts of judicial deference as a largely instrumental phenomenon, this Article argues that courts in the midcentury in fact came to reappraise police work as producing rare and reliable “expert” knowledge. And it identifies at least one explanation for that shift in the folds and interconnections between the courts’ many diverse encounters with the police in these years. From trials to suppression hearings to professional activities outside the courtroom, judges experienced multiple sites of unique exposure to the rhetoric and evidence of the police’s expert claims. These encounters primed judges to embrace police expertise not only through their deliberative content, but also their many structural biases toward police knowledge. This development poses important and troubling consequences for the criminal justice system, deepening critiques of police judgment in criminal procedure and raising novel concerns about the limits of judicial reasoning about police practices.

不同于将司法遵从描述为“很大程度上的效用性现象（largely instrumental phenomenon）”的传统说法，本文认为，本世纪中叶时期的法院实际上已经开始重新评价警方的工作，认为其提供了罕见且可靠的 “专家”知识。针对法院与警方在这些年里的恩怨情仇中，关系发生由远及近的转变，本文提供了至少一种解释。从审判到压制性措施听证会（suppression hearings），再到法庭外的专业活动，法官们辗转历经多种独特场合，接触警方专家证言所主张的言辞和证据。这些接触使法官不仅通过他们的审议内容，而且还通过他们对警方专业知识的许多结构性偏见来接纳警方的专业意见。这一发展为刑事司法系统带来了严重且令人烦恼的后果，加深了对警察在刑事司法程序中判断的批评，同时引发了人们有关警方执法的司法推理局限性的新兴关注。