Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-05-03065/USCOURTS-caDC-05-03065-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Vince A. Southerland
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued September 15, 2006 Decided October 31, 2006

No. 05-3065

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

APPELLEE

v.

VINCE A. SOUTHERLAND,

APPELLANT

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 04cr00233-01)

Neil H. Jaffee, Assistant Federal Public Defender, argued

the cause for appellant. With him on the briefs was A. J.

Kramer, Federal Public Defender.

Nicholas P. Coleman, Assistant U.S. Attorney, argued the

cause for appellee. With him on the briefs were Kenneth L.

Wainstein, U.S. Attorney at the time the brief was filed, and Roy

W. McLeese, III, and Thomas J. Tourish, Jr., Assistant U.S.

Attorneys.

Before: RANDOLPH and GRIFFITH, Circuit Judges, and

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge.

USCA Case #05-3065 Document #1001513 Filed: 10/31/2006 Page 1 of 6
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Opinion for the court filed by Circuit Judge RANDOLPH.

RANDOLPH, Circuit Judge: Vince A. Southerland’s

appeal from a criminal conviction for possessing illegal drugs

with the intent to distribute them originally raised the question

whether the police violated the Fourth Amendment when, in

executing a search warrant, they knocked on the door of a

residence where he was staying, announced their identity and

purpose, waited ten seconds and then broke the door open with

a battering ram. After briefing, in which Southerland argued

that the district court erred in not suppressing the drugs, cash

and a scale found on the premises, the Supreme Court decided

Hudson v. Michigan, 126 S. Ct. 2159 (2006). In light of

Hudson’s holding that the exclusionary rule did not apply to

Fourth Amendment knock-and-announce violations, we called

for supplemental briefing. Southerland has now understandably

abandoned his Fourth Amendment argument, but he insists that

the evidence should be suppressed under 18 U.S.C. § 3109, a

claim he raised in the district court. 

Only officers of the Metropolitan Police Department

were involved in the search. Technically, § 3109 – which

governs the conduct of federal officers – therefore does not

apply. We do not make anything of this distinction because a

statute of the District of Columbia incorporates § 3109 as the

standard applicable to local law enforcement officers. D.C.

CODE § 23-524(a) (2001); see Artis v. United States, 802 A.2d

959, 968 n.8 (D.C. 2002). Both the local statute and § 3109 are

restricted to the execution of search warrants and both are silent

about remedies for violations. Section 3109 states as follows:

The officer may break open any outer or inner door or

window of a house, or any part of a house, or anything

therein, to execute a search warrant, if, after notice of his

authority and purpose, he is refused admittance or when

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necessary to liberate himself or a person aiding him in

the execution of the warrant.

The Supreme Court, having decided that the Fourth

Amendment incorporated the English common law knock-andannounce requirement, see Wilson v. Arkansas, 514 U.S. 927,

934 (1995); Richards v. Wisconsin, 520 U.S. 385, 387 (1997),

held that “§ 3109 codifies the common law in this area, and the

common law in turn informs the Fourth Amendment,” United

States v. Ramirez, 523 U.S. 65, 73 (1998). It thus comes as no

surprise that each of the reasons Hudson gave for not applying

the exclusionary rule to knock-and-announce violations of the

Fourth Amendment applies equally to violations of § 3109.

Among those reasons are that the knock-and-announce

requirement does not protect an individual’s interest in shielding

“potential evidence from the government’s eyes,” Hudson, 126

S. Ct. at 2165; that “imposing th[e] massive remedy” of

suppression “for a knock-and-announce violation would

generate a constant flood of alleged failures to observe the rule,”

id. at 2165-66; that questions about whether the police waited

long enough before entering would be “difficult for the trial

court to determine and even more difficult for an appellate court

to review,” id. at 2166; that any deterrent value from

suppressing evidence in these cases would not be “worth a lot,”

id.; that civil damage actions would still provide some

deterrence, id. at 2166-68; and that “[a]nother development over

the past half-century that deters civil-rights violations is the

increasing professionalism of police forces, including a new

emphasis on internal police discipline,” id. at 2168. 

Because the costs of suppressing evidence in knock-andannounce cases are so high and the benefits so slim, and because

a federal officer violating § 3109 also violates the Fourth

Amendment, Hudson compels us to reject the exclusionary rule

as a remedy for violations of § 3109, unless Supreme Court

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 Before Hudson this court had ruled that the remedy for a

violation of § 3109 was suppression of the evidence found in the

search. See, e.g., Woods v. United States, 240 F.2d 37, 39 (D.C. Cir.

1956). Because our conclusion – that a suppression remedy is no

longer available under § 3109 – conflicts with this precedent, this

opinion has been circulated to and approved by the full court. See

Irons v. Diamond, 670 F.2d 265, 268 n.11 (D.C. Cir. 1981). 

precedent stands in the way.1 Rodriguez de Quijas v.

Shearson/American Express, Inc., 490 U.S. 477, 484 (1989),

holds that “[i]f a precedent of this Court has direct application

in a case, yet appears to rest on reasons rejected in some other

line of decisions, the Court of Appeals should follow the case

which directly controls, leaving to this Court the prerogative of

overruling its own decisions.” Southerland claims that Miller v.

United States, 357 U.S. 301 (1958), and Sabbath v. United

States, 391 U.S. 585 (1968), are such “direct” precedents. We

think not.

Miller held that because the defendant “did not receive

notice before the officers broke the door to invade his home, the

arrest was unlawful, and the evidence seized should have been

suppressed.” 357 U.S. at 313-14. The policeman and the

federal narcotics officer who entered the home in Miller did so

in order to make a warrantless arrest. Id. at 305. Section 3109

therefore did not apply: then, as now, the statute governed only

entries for the purpose of executing search warrants. The Miller

Court stated that a “local” knock-and-announce rule this court

had fashioned bore such a “close relationship” to § 3109 that

“the validity of the entry to execute the arrest without a warrant

must be tested by criteria identical to those embodied in” the

statute. Id. at 306. Miller identified Accarino v. United States,

179 F.2d 456, 465 (D.C. Cir. 1949), as the source of the “local”

rule. Miller, 357 U.S. at 306. Accarino contains a lengthy

discussion of English common law, as well as several Supreme

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Court Fourth Amendment cases, but does not mention § 3109.

If, in ordering the suppression of evidence, Accarino rested on

the Fourth Amendment, as this court later said it did, see, e.g.,

McKnight v. United States, 183 F.2d 977, 978 (D.C. Cir. 1950),

it is of course directly contrary to Hudson. In any event, the

Supreme Court’s Miller decision, which applied Accarino’s

“local” rule, cannot be considered a “direct” precedent that

violations of § 3109 require the suppression of evidence. Nor

can the other case Southerland cites. Like Miller, Sabbath

invoked § 3109 by analogy to hold that an entry for the purpose

of making an arrest was illegal. It too is not a direct holding

under § 3109.

We also believe that if we were to view Miller and Sabbath

as directly mandating a suppression remedy for violations of

§ 3109, those decisions would conflict with Hudson. Before

Hudson the Supreme Court began treating § 3109 and the

knock-and-announce rule of the Fourth Amendment as identical,

see Ramirez, 523 U.S. at 73, which is why “the result should be

the same under the Fourth Amendment and § 3109,” United

States v. Banks, 540 U.S. 31, 42 (2003). Southerland points out

that in Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon, 126 S. Ct. 2669, 2679 (2006),

the Court said that although “Miller is not clear about its

authority for requiring suppression,” the authority seems to rest

on the supervisory power. This, according to Southerland,

distinguishes Hudson because the supervisory power of the

federal courts serves the dual purposes of “deterring illegality

and protecting judicial integrity,” United States v. Payner, 447

U.S. 727, 736 n.8 (1980), whereas the primary purpose of the

Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule is “to deter future

unlawful police conduct,” United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S.

338, 347 (1974). The argument is odd, involving as it does the

proposition that it is more important to ensure compliance with

a federal statute governing entries into the home than with a

constitutional provision that does exactly the same. More than

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that, the Supreme Court has rejected Southerland’s premise. In

the same footnote from Payner that Southerland quotes, the

Court stated that “the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule

serves precisely the same [twofold] purposes” as the supervisory

power. Payner, 447 U.S. at 736 n.8; accord United States v.

Mount, 757 F.2d 1315, 1321 (D.C. Cir. 1985) (Bork, J.,

concurring). 

The short of the matter is that § 3109 and the Fourth

Amendment have merged both in the standards governing

entries into the home and in the remedy for violations of those

standards. There is now one uniform knock-and-announce rule.

We are thus faced with a conflict between Supreme Court

decisions, a circumstance outside the Rodriguez decision

requiring lower courts to follow a Supreme Court precedent

directly on point even if later decisions have undercut its

rationale. See Mozee v. Am. Commercial Marine Serv. Co., 963

F.2d 929, 935 (7th Cir. 1992). As to which line should be

followed, we think it plain that Hudson, not Miller and Sabbath,

now must control. Not only is Hudson the Court’s most recent

pronouncement about whether evidence should be excluded as

a remedy for knock-and-announce violations, but it is also the

Supreme Court’s only thorough analysis of the issue. From all

that appears, Miller and Sabbath merely assumed that

suppression followed a violation. See also Wong Sun v. United

States, 371 U.S. 471, 482-83 (1963). We therefore hold that

even if the entry here violated § 3109, a question we do not

decide, Southerland was not entitled to suppression of the

evidence seized during the search. 

Affirmed. 

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