Opinion ID: 2588357
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Incentive to Conduct Warrantless Searches

Text: Tyrell J. reasoned: Because [the officer] did not know whether the minor was subject to a search condition, the officer took the chance that the search would be deemed improper. If it had turned out that the minor was not subject to a search condition, any contraband found in the search of the minor would have been inadmissible in court. Thus, under our interpretation, law enforcement officers still have a sufficient incentive to try to avoid improperly invading a person's privacy. ( Tyrell J., supra, 8 Cal.4th at p. 89, 32 Cal.Rptr.2d 33, 876 P.2d 519.) On this score, the majority finds persuasive a substantial body of scholarly commentary criticizing Tyrell J. for erod[ing] the Fourth Amendment protections for juveniles by giving police an incentive to conduct a warrantless search, unsupported by reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, in the bare hope that a search condition may exist. (Maj. opn., ante, 51 Cal.Rptr.3d at p. 435, 146 P.3d at p. 969.) These criticisms are off the mark. The United States Supreme Court has now made it quite clear that the constitutional reasonableness of a search must be determined in view of the totality of the circumstances. I believe the high court most likely would reject a blanket rule of unreasonableness in the context of probationer and parolee searches, for it has repeatedly emphasized that these convicted lawbreakers possess significantly reduced expectations of privacy due to legally imposed search and seizure conditions that provide for suspicionless detentions and searches. Moreover, the United States Supreme Court continues to caution that the exclusionary rule generates `substantial social costs,' including setting the guilty free and the dangerous at large. ( Hudson v. Michigan (2006) ___ U.S. ___, 126 S.Ct. 2159, 2163.) Because the exclusionary rule exacts a `costly toll upon truth-seeking and law enforcement objectives,' courts must avoid its `indiscriminate application' and impose the rule only `where its deterrence benefits outweigh its substantial social costs.' ( Ibid. ) To the extent no search and seizure condition exists to reduce an individual's legitimate privacy expectations, and the totality of the circumstances do not otherwise support the reasonableness of a search, imposition of the exclusionary rule provides ample incentive to deter police misconduct in proper measure to the attendant social costs. But applying the rule expansively beyond those situations in which a search actually intrudes on a person's reasonable privacy expectations, under the fiction that the search condition did not even exist, as the majority does here, amounts to an indiscriminate application violating the cardinal principle that suppression of evidence should always be our last result, not our first impulse. ( Ibid. ) Finally, I note the majority's categorical rule is sure to result in absurd applications in those situations where an officer is able to verify a juvenile's probationer status only after making a detention. For instance, imagine that an officer in a future case pulls a juvenile's car over for a perceived traffic violation, and thereafter recognizes (or otherwise ascertains) that the juvenile is a probationer subject to a probation search and seizure condition. The officer then conducts an on-the-scene search of the juvenile and his car, and finds contraband. Alternatively, imagine the officer in the instant case discovered the juvenile was subject to a probation search and seizure condition after the car was detained and impounded but before it was searched. Under the majority's rule, the contraband in both situations must be suppressed if the juvenile court determines the initial traffic stop was illegal because it was supported neither by reasonable suspicion of criminal activity nor by advance knowledge of an applicable search and seizure condition.