The law, despite being unconstitutional, allowed this, so you can't go back and arrest people who weren't breaking the law at the time.
What you can do is track back every arrest that resulted from one of these searches, and ask for all charges and convictions to be vacated/overturned because the evidence was collected in an unconstitutional way.
I'm more interested in damage control than revenge on this one.
There is an asymmetry in your reasoning that I don't doubt is in many court decisions due to sovereign immunity, but need not be universal. If the law is declared unconstitutional, then that law was unconstitutional the whole time. Therefore there was no legal basis for the people-who-happened-to-be-employed-by-the-government to do what they did. And I'm pretty sure the laws against false imprisonment and extortion weren't passed yesterday.
Sorry, but that's insane. You can't legitmizime criminalizing and imprisoning someone for the the crime of not having a time machine. You can legitimize the government making amends for its mistakes.
You do not need a time machine to look at the law as it stands, judge that the legality of an action is unclear, and then prudently choose to not do it. As I said, this is the dynamic everyone who is not a government employee has to deal with, and it encourages a dynamic of staying well away from the edge of the law.
Err, what? The constitution is itself part of the law. If a legislative law is ruled unconstitutional, then that legislative law is invalid, and always was. Ergo there was no authority to perform the searches they did.
You seem to be implying a different model under which unconstitutional legislative laws would remain in effect, but the people who passed them would be personally responsible for having gone against the constitution.
The point is to make government agents afraid from testing the borders of the law. Regular citizens don't get any breaks either if their scheme was later ruled unlawful by a court.
I don't know, it depends on their mood I guess? I'm unaware of the U.S. legal system specifically, but the Court of Justice of the European Union invalidated laws retroactively in the past. This isn't exclusive to EU laws either. My home country did the same thing with national laws. So I don't know, maybe the US can do that as well, but people just assume the US can't because it feels intuitive for it to be that way?
The states might apply this differently, I'm out of touch, but under fed law, I think you can only apply new SCOTUS rulings to criminal cases that are still not "final." (e.g. haven't gone to trial, or haven't completed their course through all 11 or 13 stages of appellate review.. however many there are these days inc state + fed + habeas)
There are ... some exceptions. Pardons can be granted (presidential or gubernatorial) for those convicted of specific violations, or under procedures later discredited. This doesn't of itself provide the ability to prosecute bad cops / bad prosecutors, but does at least undo some of the damage.
E.g., President Biden has given broad pardons for marijuana possession under US and D.C. (administered by the Federal government) law:
This doesn't include state convictions for drugs possession (the vast majority of such convictions) but does signal to states which direction the Federal government is leaning.
Is there a law that explicitly allows these unconstitutional searches? If so then perhaps what is needed is consequences for the politicians that enact unconstitutional laws. Just letting the government fuck over people and then go "oops no hard feelings?" when found to be acting against the rules they are bound to is not a good solution.
The law, despite being unconstitutional, allowed this, so you can't go back and arrest people who weren't breaking the law at the time.
What you can do is track back every arrest that resulted from one of these searches, and ask for all charges and convictions to be vacated/overturned because the evidence was collected in an unconstitutional way.
I'm more interested in damage control than revenge on this one.