Opinion ID: 498394
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: facts

Text: 2 An anonymous tipster identified appellant Causey as the robber of a Baton Rouge bank, but the city police believed that they lacked probable cause to arrest and interrogate him about that crime. 3 Casting about for means to apprehend and question him, they discovered an outstanding warrant for Causey's arrest, issued some years earlier when he had failed to appear in court to answer a petty theft charge. After verifying the warrant's continued validity with the issuing judge, the city officers arrested Causey, gave him Miranda warnings, interrogated him about the bank robbery, and called in the FBI. Some time and several Miranda warnings later, Causey made a voluntary confession of robbing the bank. 3 At a hearing on Causey's motion to suppress the confession, one of the city officers testified that their only reason for arresting Causey on the warrant was to take him downtown and continue [the] investigation of the bank robbery.... Convicted by a jury, Causey appealed and our panel reversed for the reason given earlier: that the exclusive motive to question him about the robbery with which the misdemeanor warrant was executed rendered the arrest pretextual and tainted his confession despite the Miranda warnings that had preceded it and despite its voluntary character. On both reason and authority, we disagree. Reason 4 Any consideration of the facts in this appeal must commence with a recognition that the police who arrested Causey were empowered to do so by a valid warrant and that they took no action that they were not legally authorized to take. Nor is it suggested that anything improper occurs when police officers question a suspect who is under arrest for one crime about others of which he may be guilty or have knowledge. 4 Thus, on the reasoning of the panel opinion, had the arresting police done exactly the same things with Causey from start to finish as they did in fact, but had they in addition entertained a subjective intention at the time of his arrest to question him about the lesser offense for which the arrest warrant issued as well as about the bank robbery, his confession to the robbery would have been properly admitted at his trial. But since one of the arresting officers testified that their only purpose in arresting Causey was to investigate the robbery, the panel declares that his confession is just as tainted as if it had been coerced by torture. For several reasons, we decline to countenance such a rule. 5 In the first place, the panel's rule turns on an irrelevant intent: that of the police. It is the prosecutor 's intent that determines whether one who has been arrested on a warrant is prosecuted for that offense, not that of the police; and the panel's holding is made ironic by the fact Causey was prosecuted, convicted, and punished for the non-appearance offense on which the warrant was issued and for which he was pretextually arrested. It is difficult to see why a lack of police interest in seeing him prosecuted on the non-appearance warrant--an indifference that had neither force, basis nor consequence--should be held to be of such an overmastering effect. Especially is this so when the actions taken by the police were entirely consistent with the results in both prosecutions: Causey was convicted of both non-appearance (in state court) and of bank robbery (in federal court) and punished for each offense. The only supposed defect in the entire process was a defective intent on the part of the police regarding a decision that was not theirs to make, a lack of interest by them in the prosecution of Causey on the offense for which the warrant issued--yet a lack that was, as things fell out, irrelevant and devoid of consequence. 6 In the second, it is hard to see what police misconduct it is that is sought to be deterred by such a ruling: Is it acting to execute a valid warrant? to investigate a bank robbery by all means at hand not unlawful? or perhaps to question a suspect without coercion or force after giving proper Miranda warnings? In fact, the only conduct likely to be deterred by such a rule as that confected by the panel would be a prosecutor's act of leniency in omitting to prosecute the less serious offense on which the warrant had issued, a matter of small consequence to the police or prosecutor and of further detriment to the arrestee. 5 7 And finally, one may well question the motivational requirement which the panel undertakes to add to the qualifications laid down by the Supreme Court in Miranda for admissibility of a confession: voluntariness and administration of the warnings required by that decision. To inject a new constitutional issue of subjective police intent into every case in which a suspect is arrested for one offense and later confesses to another (or others) seems to us unwarranted and to rest on no apparent constitutional basis or foundation. A consideration of that supposed basis and of the cases discussed by the panel opinion appears in the following section. Authority 8 The panel opinion maintains, in reliance on what it describes as a continuing line of Fifth Circuit authority, that unless an arrest is made with the appropriate subjective intent, it is invalid and whatever results from it is tainted. The line which it offers, however, consists of three cases, the most recent of which is over nine years old and the earliest of which was handed down in 1968. 6 Since the most recent of these was handed down in 1978, however, the Supreme Court--in three cases of its own--has made plain that it is irrelevant what subjective intent moves an officer in taking such an action as this; what signifies is the officer's actions, objectively viewed in light of the circumstances confronting him. In the face of these clear pronouncements, we are not authorized to persist in our former rule, if such it was, to the contrary. 9 The first of the Court's relevant triad is Scott v. United States, 436 U.S. 128, 98 S.Ct. 1717, 56 L.Ed.2d 168 (1978). 7 There a central complaint on appeal by convicted narcotics dealers was that police had deliberately disregarded the minimization requirements of wiretap law, intercepting virtually all calls on the tapped line when only 40 percent of them were drug-related. The district court ordered suppression of the intercepted calls and all derivative evidence because it was offended by the policemen's state of mind, relying largely on the fact that they knew of the minimization requirement but made no attempt to comply with it, an attitude which the court stigmatized as  'unreasonable ... even if every intercepted call were narcotic related.'  436 U.S. at 134, 98 S.Ct. at 1721 (quoting the district court opinion; emphasis added). A more categorical statement can scarcely be imagined of resolution on the part of the court to punish the public for naughty intent on the part of the police--whether or not that mere intent produced any discernible consequence--by freeing the criminal. 10 In the course of upholding a reversal of the district court, the Supreme Court emphatically rejected, albeit in dicta as regards the Fourth Amendment, such a subjective view. Instead, in passing upon such matters, it espoused an objective assessment of the officer's actions for legality and a rejection of attaching consequences to his mere subjective states of mind: 11 [A]lmost without exception in evaluating alleged violations of the Fourth Amendment the Court has first undertaken an objective assessment of an officer's actions in light of the facts and circumstances then known to him. The language of the Amendment itself proscribes only unreasonable searches and seizures. In Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 21-22, 20 L.Ed.2d 889, 88 S.Ct. 1868 [1879-80], 44 Ohio Ops.2d 383 (1968), the Court emphasized the objective aspect of the term reasonable. 12 .... 13 We have since held that the fact that the officer does not have the state of mind which is hypothecated by the reasons which provide the legal justification for the officer's action does not invalidate the action taken as long as the circumstances, viewed objectively, justify that action. In United States v. Robinson, 414 U.S. 218, 38 L.Ed.2d 427, 94 S.Ct. 467, 66 Ohio Ops.2d 202 (1973), a suspect was searched incident to a lawful arrest. He challenged the search on the ground that the motivation for the search did not coincide with the legal justification for the search-incident-to-arrest exception. We rejected this argument: Since it is the fact of custodial arrest which gives rise to the authority to search, it is of no moment that [the officer] did not indicate any subjective fear of the respondent or that he did not himself suspect that respondent was armed. Id., at 236, 38 L.Ed.2d 427, 94 S.Ct. 467 [at 477], 66 Ohio Ops.2d 202. The Court of Appeals which have considered the matter have likewise generally followed these principles, first examining the challenged searches under a standard of objective reasonableness without regard to the underlying intent or motivation of the officers involved. 14 436 U.S. at 137-38, 98 S.Ct. at 1723 (emphasis added; footnote omitted). 8 15 Next, in United States v. Villamonte-Marquez, 462 U.S. 579, 103 S.Ct. 2573, 77 L.Ed.2d 22 (1983), the Court reversed our panel and upheld drug convictions resulting from the boarding of a 40-foot sailboat by customs officers to inspect ship's documents, as authorized by 19 U.S.C. Sec. 1581(a), against a contention that in fact the customs officers, accompanied by a local policeman, were following an informant's tip that drugs were aboard and hence could not rely on the statute because their hearts were not pure, being defiled by an intent to apprehend drug smugglers. The Court dismissed the claim in a footnote, reciting that [t]his line of reasoning was rejected in a similar situation in Scott ..., and we again reject it. 462 U.S. at 584 n. 3, 103 S.Ct. at 2577 n. 3. 16 Finally, in the recent decision of Maryland v. Macon, 472 U.S. 463, 105 S.Ct. 2778, 86 L.Ed.2d 370 (1985), where officers purchased allegedly obscene materials from so-called adult bookstores with marked money, the contention was made that [w]hen the officer subjectively intends to retrieve the money while retaining the magazines, ... the purchase is tantamount to a warrantless seizure. 472 U.S. at 470, 105 S.Ct. at 2783. (emphasis added). Again, the argument received short shrift: 17 This argument cannot withstand scrutiny. Whether a Fourth Amendment violation has occurred turns on an objective assessment of the officer's actions in light of the facts and circumstances confronting him at the time, Scott v. United States, 436 U.S. 128, 136, 56 L.Ed.2d 168, 98 S.Ct. 1717 [1723] (1978), and not on the officer's actual state of mind at the time the challenged action was taken. Id., at 138 and 139, n. 13, 56 L.Ed.2d 168, 98 S.Ct. 1717 [at 1723 and 1724, n. 13]. Objectively viewed, the transaction was a sale in the ordinary course of business. The sale is not retrospectively transformed into a warrantless seizure by virtue of the officer's subjective intent to retrieve the purchase money to use as evidence. 18 472 U.S. at 470-71, 105 S.Ct. at 2783. 19 Given these Supreme Court decisions in cases indistinguishable in principle from today's case, our circuit simply cannot maintain, even were it so inclined, a rule so directly contrary to the Supreme Court's. Again and again, in precisely the present context, the Court has told us that where police officers are objectively doing what they are legally authorized to do--as in arresting Causey pursuant to the valid warrant outstanding against him and interrogating him without coercion after reading him repeated Miranda warnings--the results of their investigations are not to be called in question on the basis of any subjective intent with which they acted.