Opinion ID: 774630
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Lopez-Mendoza

Text: 10 In Lopez-Mendoza, the Supreme Court reviewed two civil cases, both involving deportation proceedings that took place following unlawful arrests. Adan Lopez-Mendoza challenged an immigration court's jurisdiction over his person following his unlawful arrest, but did not object to the admission of evidence offered against him in the proceeding. 468 U.S. at 1040. In contrast, Elias Sandoval-Sanchez didn't object to the immigration court's jurisdiction over him, but rather to the evidence offered against him in the proceeding. Id. 11 In the jurisdictional case (Lopez-Mendoza), the Court said that the body or identity of a defendant or respondent in a criminal or civil proceeding is never itself suppressible as a fruit of an unlawful arrest. Id. at 1039. But the Court addressed the evidentiary case (Sandoval-Sanchez) from a different tack. There the Court acknowledged the general rule in a criminal proceeding [] that statements and other evidence obtained as a result of an unlawful, warrantless arrest are suppressible if the link between the evidence and the unlawful conduct is not too attenuated. Id. at 1040-41 (emphasis added). 3 Thus, the Court's reference to the suppression of identity appears to be tied only to a jurisdictional issue, not to an evidentiary issue. 12 Notwithstanding the Supreme Court's different approaches to the jurisdictional and evidentiary challenges brought in Lopez-Mendoza, two circuits have applied the Supreme Court's suppression-of-identity reference to evidentiary challenges in criminal proceedings. See United States v. Roque-Villanueva, 175 F.3d at 346 (holding that neither a person's identity nor his INS file are suppressible in a § 1326 criminal proceeding even if the defendant was illegally stopped); Guzman-Bruno, 27 F.3d at 421-22 (indicating that a defendant's statement of identity need not be suppressed in a § 1326 criminal proceeding merely because it was obtained as the result of an illegal arrest). 13 One court has concluded, however, that Lopez-Mendoza has no bearing upon the suppression of unlawfully obtained identity-related evidence in a criminal proceeding: 14 [T]he Supreme Court language only addresses the jurisdictional concern that the body of the defendant is never suppressible, not whether statements by a defendant regarding his identity may be suppressed. This interpretation is supported by an examination of the authorities cited by the Supreme Court: Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U.S. 103, 95 S.Ct. 854, 43 L.Ed.2d 54 (1975) and Frisbie v. Collins, 342 U.S. 519, 72 S.Ct. 509, 96 L.Ed. 541 (1952). In Frisbie, the Court held that the power of a court to try a person for crime is not impaired by the fact that he had been brought within the court's jurisdiction against his will. 342 U.S. at 522, 72 S.Ct. at 511. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this holding in Gerstein, stating that an illegal arrest or detention does not void a subsequent conviction. 420 U.S. at 119, 95 S.Ct. at 865. These cases deal with jurisdiction over the person, not evidence of the defendant's identity illegally obtained. The language in Lopez-Mendoza should only be interpreted to mean that a defendant may be brought before a court on a civil or criminal matter even if the arrest was unlawful. 15 United States v. Mendoza-Carrillo, 107 F. Supp. 2d 1098, 1106 (D.S.D. 2000). 16 The district court found the reasoning in Mendoza-Carillo more persuasive than the broad interpretation given Lopez-Mendoza by the Fifth and Ninth Circuits. So do we. We find it significant that the Supreme Court didn't distinguish between identity-related evidence and other types of evidence when discussing Sandoval-Sanchez's evidentiary challenge. The Court simply referred to the general rule in a criminal proceeding. 468 U.S. at 1040. If the Supreme Court meant to exempt identity-related evidence in a criminal proceeding from the general rule, we believe the Court would have said so while discussing the evidentiary challenge, not the jurisdictional challenge. Our belief is strengthened by the fact that the evidence that Sandoval-Sanchez challenged, INS Form I-213, see Lopez-Mendoza v. INS, 705 F.2d 1059, 1062 (9th Cir. 1983), probably contained identity-related evidence. See INS Form I-213 (Rev. 4/1/97) (including spaces for name, aliases, birthdate, and checkboxes to indicate whether an alien has been photographed or fingerprinted). 17 Furthermore, the identity-related evidence that the district court suppressed was fingerprint evidence. Prior to Lopez-Mendoza, the Supreme Court twice applied the exclusionary rule to fingerprint evidence obtained as the result of unlawful arrests and detentions. See Davis, 394 U.S. at 727; Hayes, 470 U.S. at 815. Because Lopez-Mendoza doesn't indicate that Davis and Hayes are overruled, we are bound to apply those earlier cases. See Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S. 203, 237 (1997) (warning that the circuit courts shouldn't conclude that more recent Supreme Court cases have, by implication, overruled earlier precedents); State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3, 20 (1997) ([I]t is this Court's prerogative alone to overrule one of its precedents.). 18 We conclude that Lopez-Mendoza's statement about the suppression of identity only refers to jurisdictional challenges, not to fingerprint evidence challenged in a criminal proceeding. Therefore, we must determine whether the general rule in a criminal proceeding applies, and if so, whether it requires exclusion of the fingerprint evidence under the circumstances present in this case. 19