Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

Fruit of the poisonous tree is a doctrine of United States criminal procedure under which evidence derived from an unconstitutional search, seizure, interrogation or other illegal act is generally inadmissible against a defendant, on the reasoning that if the source of the evidence, the tree, is tainted, then anything gained from it, the fruit, is tainted as well. First articulated in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States (1920) and named in Justice Felix Frankfurter's opinion in Nardone v. United States (1939), the doctrine extends the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule to secondary evidence, subject to established exceptions such as independent source, inevitable discovery and attenuation. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/