Opinion ID: 781330
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Purpose and Flagrancy of the Official Misconduct

Text: 64 The district court made a similar error in its analysis of the third, particularly important, prong. George, 883 F.2d at 1416. In holding that the third factor weighed in favor of attenuation, the district court credited the agents' testimony that they did not use any implied promises in their interrogation. As above, however, this type of analysis betrays a lingering confusion between `voluntariness' for purposes of the Fifth Amendment and the `causal connection' test established in Brown. Satisfying the Fifth Amendment is only the `threshold' condition of the Fourth Amendment analysis required by Brown.  Dunaway, 442 U.S. at 219, 99 S.Ct. 2248. 65 Instead, under a proper analysis, this prong suggests suppression if the law enforcement officials conducted the illegal search with the purpose of extracting the evidence in question, or if they flagrantly broke the law in conducting the search. In reciting the Brown factors, courts usually choose a conjunctive phrasing (purpose and flagrancy), but the same courts then find in favor of taint if there is evidence of either improper purpose or flagrant illegality. See, e.g., Taylor, 457 U.S. at 693, 102 S.Ct. 2664 (only purpose); Dunaway, 442 U.S. at 218-19, 99 S.Ct. 2248 (only purpose); United States v. Jenkins, 938 F.2d 934, 941 (9th Cir.1991) (only flagrancy); George, 883 F.2d at 1416 (only flagrancy). We also find the disjunctive analysis more persuasive, and explicitly clarify that either improper purpose or flagrant illegality will support a determination that the third prong of the test weighs against attenuation. Although either element alone would suffice, we find both present here. 66 Bowdich testified extensively that the search was executed in order to induce Crawford to talk. In other words, the evidence that was ultimately obtained was not the mere byproduct of the search, but its primary objective. Moreover, by conducting the search solely to pressure Crawford into talking, Bowdich and his accompanying officers blatantly ignored then-existing Ninth Circuit law prohibiting law enforcement/investigatory parole searches. 34 See supra note 10. The search and detention was not questionably illegal; it was flagrantly so. 35 This combination calls for hornbook application of the exclusionary rule, which is designed to deter government officials from conducting illegal searches by suppressing the evidence that provoked the search. See, e.g., Brown, 422 U.S. at 605, 95 S.Ct. 2254 (refusing to purge taint where [t]he arrest, both in design and in execution, was investigatory. The detectives embarked upon this expedition for evidence in the hope that something might turn up.); Perez-Esparza, 609 F.2d at 1289 (When police purposely effect an illegal arrest or detention in the hope that custodial interrogation will yield incriminating statements, the deterrence rationale for application of the exclusionary rule is especially compelling.). In fact, we have found this factor decisive most often in those cases where [sic] police officers ... took a suspect into custody hoping that an interrogation would yield incriminating statements. George, 883 F.2d at 1416. We find that the third prong of the attenuation analysis therefore weighs heavily in favor of suppression.