Opinion ID: 2973671
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: United States v. Conner

Text: At least one district court in the Eighth Circuit has applied the totality of the Eighth Circuit’s jurisprudence in this area to a factual situation quite similar to McClain. In United States v. Connor, 948 F. Supp. 821 (N.D. Iowa 1996), the court addressed a situation where the police officers unlawfully accessed and entered the defendant’s motel room (which, like a warrantless search of a home, is presumptively unconstitutional), and later used the evidence seized during the warrantless search in a search warrant application. Id. at 853. The court noted that White, Kiser, and Fletcher all involved “Terry-like investigative stops at airports and bus terminals conducted without reasonable suspicion.” Id. at 851. Thus, the court concluded that the “factual situation confronting the court is quite dissimilar from the circumstances presented in the Fletcher-White line of cases.” Id. at 852. It was “significant” to the district court that the “Fletcher-White line of authority has never been extended beyond the factual scenario presented in each of those cases: Terry-type investigative stops conducted without reasonable suspicion.” Id. at 853. In Connor, however, the court was confronted with a presumptively unconstitutional search of the defendant’s hotel room “and the resulting inclusion in the search warrant application of information tainted by the unconstitutional entry.” Id. Nevertheless, the court found that even if the Fletcher-White line of cases could apply in all Fourth Amendment contexts (as opposed to being limited to the reasonable suspicion line of cases), the facts of Connor were not anywhere close to the line of validity as to warrant the application of the good-faith exception. Id. The Supreme Court’s decision in Payton and hundreds of years of history prevent an officer from believing that a warrantless search of a dwelling is almost constitutional. Id. Thus, in applying O’Neal, the court found that the warrantless search of the motel room was “clearly illegal police behavior” and the good-faith exception did not apply. Id. No. 04-5887 United States v. McClain, et al. Page 15 D. Problems with the Eighth Circuit’s and the Panel’s Approach The great weight of authority, with which I agree, reaches the opposite conclusion from the Eighth Circuit. In my opinion, the Eighth Circuit’s approach, which the panel apparently adopted — but erroneously applied — fails to properly apply the exclusionary rule and the good-faith exception. Whether to admit or exclude — the very core of Leon’s holding — comes down to whether suppressing the evidence will “alter the behavior of individual law enforcement officers or the policies of their departments.” Leon, 468 U.S. at 918. When a reviewing court later determines that a magistrate erred, suppressing the evidence will serve no purpose because there is no unlawful police conduct to deter. Id. at 921 (“Penalizing the officer for the magistrate’s error, rather than his own, cannot logically contribute to the deterrence of Fourth Amendment violations.”). But, when the misconduct is the police officer’s own, the purpose of the exclusionary rule is served by suppression, and Leon does not apply. Id. at 918. The Eighth Circuit’s cases very clearly involved police misconduct and suppression of the evidence would deter officers from committing the same Fourth Amendment violations again.9 The Fletcher-White line of cases do nothing to deter officers from conducting weakly supported Terry stops. In fact, the decisions have the opposite effect of encouraging officers to take chances to the detriment of Fourth Amendment privacy interests. The Eighth Circuit’s decisions in this area also effectively lower the reasonable suspicion standard and have the effect of admitting evidence seized upon little more than an officer’s good faith hunch. On the other hand, had the Eighth Circuit suppressed the evidence in line with the other courts discussed above, the effect would be to deter officers from conducting Terry stops unless the officers could “point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant” the stops. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 21 (1968). Furthermore, even the White-Fletcher line of cases involves a violation of an individual’s Fourth Amendment rights by police officers. Regardless of whether the officers had any bad faith, “[t]he deterrent purpose of the exclusionary rule necessarily assumes that the police have engaged in willful, or at the very least negligent, conduct which has deprived the defendant of some right. By refusing to admit evidence gained as a result of such conduct, the courts hope to instill in those particular investigating officers, or in their future counterparts, a greater degree of care toward the rights of an accused.” Peltier, 422 U.S. at 539. The officers in the White-Fletcher line of cases, as well as in McClain, were, at the very least negligent, and suppressing the evidence serves the purposes of the exclusionary rule and does no harm to the good-faith exception. For these reasons, I would not adopt the Eighth Circuit’s precedent.