I disagree. Like everything else that comes with the ever expanding police state, they use tiny tears in the fabric to eventually rend the entire garment. The evidence should have been thrown out, for the same reason mentioned above. We are constantly told "ignorance of the law is no excuse". We don't have to have any criminal intent anymore. Yet, the state is allowed to make any excuse it deems necessary.
And I disagree. You can’t expect your everyday cop to be 100% versant with the entire legal code, especially as large and complex as it is (another issue altogether).
The busted tail light wasn’t a crime, and the defendants are well within their rights to get that charge dismissed, but that doesn’t make the stop itself “not legal”. Frankly, a cop can pull you over for any number of reasons, from as simple as “acting suspiciously” - there’s no need for him to make up a violation just to get a pretext to search a particular car.
To argue that the whole stop was illegal would be to argue that the only reason he pulled the car over was to search it, but he wouldn’t have wanted to do that without some kind of suspicion in the first place. Was there any evidence that this particular car was targeted for a random search?