Poisoned Fruit
First year, first sem.
Judge Pasal teaching Criminal Procedure.
He stops mid-lecture and says
that the whole phrase
"Fruit of a poisonous tree."
is wrong.
No. The tree isn't poisonous.
It's poisoned.
Someone came along and poisoned it.
An illegal search.
A bad warrant.
Police doing what police do.
So: "Fruit of a poisoned tree."
Fine. I wrote it down. Moved on.
Second sem now.
Legal Research and Writing.
They're teaching us to cut the fat.
Strip the legalese.
Say what you mean.
Don't hide behind five-dollar words
when fifty-cent words do the job.
And I'm looking at this phrase again.
"Fruit of a poisoned tree."
Why do we need the tree?
The fruit is poisoned.
That's it.
That's the whole thing.
Cop does an illegal search, finds a gun.
The gun's poisoned.
Gun leads to a witness.
Witness is poisoned.
Everything downstream is poison.
You don't need the tree, the roots, the branches,
the whole botanical metaphor to explain it.
Justice Holmes wrote it in 1920.
Justice Frankfurter expanded it in the '30s and '40s.
Maybe it needed the flourish back then.
Courts were still figuring out how to explain
why bad evidence stays bad
even three or four steps removed
from the original violation.
The tree image did work.
I get that.
But it's 2025.
We're a century past the metaphor's sell-by date.
"Poisoned fruit" says everything.
It says taint. It says derivation.
It says you can't use this in court.
It does all that without making you track
the evidence backward through
branches to trunk
to soil like you're
doing forensic gardening.
The poison is what matters.
Whether it came from
a tree or a well or
a cop with no warrant,
the fruit's no good.
Judge Pasal fixed the grammar.
But maybe the real problem
isn't poisonous versus poisoned.
Maybe it's that
we're still dragging
a whole tree around
when all we needed was the fruit.
A poem by Mychal Sajulga.
If you liked what you read, buy me coffee.