Opinion ID: 1521791
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: the fourth amendment violation

Text: In my view, even if there had been no Fifth Amendment violation in this case, Ruffin's conviction must still be reversed. The Fourth Amendment provides that [t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, ... against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated... but upon probable cause.... In addition to the involuntary, inadmissible, written statement, the government relied upon the admission into evidence of an oral statement and blood-stained clothing. The Fourth Amendment requires that Ruffin's written and oral statements to the police, together with the pants and shoes seized from him, be suppressed as the fruits of his unlawful custody. Ruffin was seized by the police and taken to police headquarters without probable cause. The government did not show that Ruffin waived his Fourth Amendment right to be free of unlawful seizures or that he had consented to accompany the police to the stationhouse. The government unquestionably has the burden to show a waiver of fundamental rights and its failure to do so here required that all evidence obtained by virtue of the unlawful seizure be suppressed. The issue of whether the statements and physical evidence should have been suppressed as the fruit of Ruffin's unlawful seizure is entirely distinct from the question of whether Ruffin's written statement to Detective Muse was obtained in violation of the Fifth Amendment, and the two questions must be analyzed separately. Lanier v. South Carolina, 474 U.S. 25, 106 S.Ct. 297, 298, 88 L.Ed.2d 23 (1986) (per curiam) (summarily remanding decision which held that voluntariness of confession obtained following illegal seizure purged the taint of that seizure, reemphasizing separate nature of Fourth and Fifth Amendment analyses); Taylor v. Alabama, 457 U.S. 687, 690, 102 S.Ct. 2664, 2667, 73 L.Ed.2d 314 (1982) (similar). It is undisputed that Ruffin was picked up at his sister's home by two police officers and transported in the back of a squad car to police headquarters. It is also undisputed that when the police officers picked him up, they did so without probable cause to arrest or seize. It is fundamental that this type of activity by the police is an illegal seizure unless the target has agreed to waive his Fourth Amendment right and has consented voluntarily to accompany the police. Dunaway v. New York, supra, 442 U.S. at 207, 99 S.Ct. at 2253. The government has the burden of establishing a valid waiver, Michigan v. Jackson, supra, 106 S.Ct. at 1409 (citation omitted). Our function as a reviewing court is to indulge every reasonable presumption against waiver of fundamental constitutional rights. Id. (quoting Johnson v. Zerbst, 304 U.S. 458, 464, 58 S.Ct. 1019, 1023, 82 L.Ed. 1461 (1938)). Doubts must be resolved in favor of protecting the constitutional claim. Id. Rather than protect the constitutional claim, the majority chooses to indulge every presumption, reasonable and unreasonable, in favor of the government. The prosecution never made any case that Ruffin had waived his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizures. The majority relies on the testimony of Detective Hosea Dyson. At the suppression hearing, Dyson testified as follows: I called [Ruffin's] home address and asked him to come down to the office in reference to our investigation. The prosecutor then asked, And did he do so voluntarily?. Dyson responded, Yes, sir. Dyson, however, did not pick Ruffin up  that was done by Officers Terra Alexander Williams and James Brown  and Dyson therefore had no knowledge of whether Ruffin had agreed to accompany Williams and Brown voluntarily or not. Ruffin later testified that he had never spoken on the phone to Dyson and at the trial Dyson started to testify, until cut off by a hearsay objection, that it was a Lieutenant Alexander who had made the call. That it was Alexander who had made the call was also confirmed by Brown, who said that Lieutenant Alexander had told him where to pick up Ruffin. Dyson's legal conclusion (given in response to the prosecution's rather leading question  And did he do so voluntarily?  Yes, sir) is therefore entitled to no weight at all. Precious little other testimony was introduced on the issue of voluntariness. Officer Williams testified that she had asked [Ruffin] if he would go down with us because they wanted to talk to him down at the Homicide Branch. Ruffin's response is not recorded. Officer Brown testified that he was ordered to pick up Ruffin, and stated that [a]pparently someone at the Homicide Branch had in fact talked to Mr. Ruffin and apparently he was voluntarily coming down. Although Officer Brown testified that if Ruffin had asked, Brown would have let him out of the car, Brown's thoughts in this regard were never communicated to Ruffin; neither Brown nor Williams in any way indicated to Ruffin that he was free to refuse to accompany them. In contrast, Ruffin testified that the police had spoken to Sebert Harvey, Ruffin's sister, not to Ruffin, and that they had informed her that if Ruffin did not agree to come down to headquarters a bench warrant would be issued for his arrest. The prosecution never rebutted this statement. See majority opinion, ante at 698 (despite Ruffin's `bench warrant' testimony  and despite the officers' own knowledge of what Ruffin had said to them and of what the police had, or had not, said to Ruffin's sister  all the officers left out a vital testimonial link between the police requests and Ruffin's willingness to accompany them). The Supreme Court evaluated a nearly identical set of facts in Dunaway, supra, 442 U.S. 200, 99 S.Ct. 2248. There, without probable cause, a police supervisor ordered detectives to pick up petitioner Dunaway and bring him in. Like Ruffin, Dunaway was not told that he was under arrest. He was driven to police headquarters in a police car and placed in an interrogation room and, initially like Ruffin, was given Miranda warnings. Dunaway subsequently made statements and drew pictures that incriminated him. Id. at 203, 99 S.Ct. at 2251. As in this case, the government there contended that Dunaway accompanied the police voluntarily and therefore was not `seized.' Id. at 207 n. 6, 99 S.Ct. at 2253 n. 6. The Supreme Court rejected this claim, based, in part, on the trial court's determination that the seizure was not voluntary since this case does not involve a situation where the defendant voluntarily appeared [of his own accord] at police headquarters in response to a request of the police. Id. at 205, 99 S.Ct. at 2252 (quoting People v. Dunaway (Monroe County Ct., N.Y., Mar. 11, 1977), App. 116, 117). The Supreme Court also relied upon the ALI'S MODEL CODE OF PRE-ARRAIGNMENT PROCEDURE § 2.01(3) and commentary, p. 91 (Tent. Draft No. 1, 1966), which states that a reasonable person faced with a request by police officers to come to police headquarters may feel compelled to do so unless the request is clearly stated to be voluntary. Quoted in Dunaway, supra, 442 U.S. at 207 n. 6, 99 S.Ct. at 2253 n. 6. The police did not tell Dunaway that he was free not to accompany them, just as they failed in this case to so inform Ruffin. The Supreme Court concluded that the detention of petitioner was in important respects indistinguishable from a traditional arrest. Petitioner was not questioned briefly where he was found. Instead, he was taken from a neighbor's home to a police car, transported to a police station, and placed in an interrogation room. He was never informed that he was free to go.... Id. at 212, 99 S.Ct. at 2256. The Court continued: The application of the Fourth Amendment's requirement of probable cause does not depend on whether an intrusion of this magnitude is termed an arrest under state law. The mere facts that petitioner was not told he was under arrest, was not booked, and would not have had an arrest record if the interrogation had proved fruitless ... obviously do not make petitioner's seizure even roughly analogous to the narrowly defined intrusions involved in Terry [ v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968),] and its progeny. Indeed, any exception that could cover a seizure as intrusive as that in this case would threaten to swallow the general rule that Fourth Amendment seizures are reasonable only if based on probable cause. Id. at 212-13, 99 S.Ct. at 2256-57. Finally, the Court held [t]he central importance of the probable-cause requirement to the protection of a citizen's privacy afforded by the Fourth Amendment's guarantees cannot be compromised in this fashion. ... [D]etention for custodial interrogation  regardless of its label  intrudes so severely on interests protected by the Fourth Amendment as necessarily to trigger the traditional safeguards against illegal arrest. Id. at 213, 216, 99 S.Ct. at 2257, 2258. The only factor differentiating this case from Dunaway is that there the parties stipulated that had Dunaway attempted to leave police custody he would have been restrained. Here, the police testified that if Ruffin had attempted to leave he would have been free to do so. This is a distinction without a difference, for it is not the subjective intent of the police that determines when a seizure has taken place, but the extent to which that subjective intent has been communicated to the suspect. [T]he subjective intention of the [law enforcement] agent in this case to detain the respondent, had she attempted to leave, is irrelevant except insofar as that may have been conveyed to the respondent. United States v. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. 544, 554 n. 6, 100 S.Ct. 1870, 1877 n. 6, 64 L.Ed.2d 497 (1980) (Stewart, J., joined by Rehnquist, J.); see also id. at 560 n. 1, 100 S.Ct. at 1880 n. 1 (Powell, J., joined by Burger, C.J., and Blackmun, J., concurring); id. at 575 & nn. 12, 13, 100 S.Ct. at 1888 nn. 12, 13 (White, J., joined by Brennan, Marshall, and Stevens, JJ., dissenting); New York v. Quarles, 467 U.S. 649, 656 n. 6, 104 S.Ct. 2626, 2631 n. 6, 81 L.Ed.2d 550 (1984) (citing United States v. Mendenhall, supra 446 U.S. at 554 & n. 6, 100 S.Ct. at 1877 & n. 6). In both Dunaway and this case, the government failed to show that law enforcement officials had in any way communicated to their suspects that they were free to refuse to accompany the police to the station-house. The result in Dunaway accordingly governs here: Ruffin was illegally seized and, since there were no intervening circumstances that could attenuate the taint of the illegal seizure, Dunaway, supra, 442 U.S. at 218, 99 S.Ct. at 2259, its fruits  two statements and Ruffin's clothing  should have been suppressed. My colleagues make the unique argument that because Ruffin chose to testify at the suppression hearing, and the trial court did not find Ruffin's testimony at that hearing to be credible, the trial court's lack-of-credibility finding relieved the government of its normal burden to demonstrate a waiver of Fourth Amendment rights. Majority opinion, ante at 690-698. Since there is no logical connection between Ruffin's credibility and the government's initial heavy burden to show consent or waiver, merely to state this argument is to refute it. The fact that the trial court found Ruffin's testimony incredible could in no way diminish the burden upon the government to show a waiver of Fourth Amendment rights. The truth or falsity of the statements which the trial court found not credible  that Ruffin was handcuffed and that he had been intimidated by unidentified police officers  is neither determinative nor even relevant. The majority begins with the observation that one is struck ... by how elusive is the answer to the question whether Ruffin did or did not go voluntarily to the police station. Majority opinion, ante at 690. Given the fact that every doubt must be resolved in favor of protecting Ruffin's constitutional claim, this concession should be enough to end the inquiry. Instead, the majority tortuously resolves its initial doubt against Ruffin. Behind the circular twenty-page (on-again, off-again, burden-shifting) analysis engaged in by the majority is the singular conclusion that by choosing to testify at the suppression hearing Ruffin took his chance that if he had the misfortune to be disbelieved by the trial court he would thereby relieve the government of its heavy burden to demonstrate a waiver of a constitutional right. See, e.g., majority opinion, ante at 694 & n. 10, 690-697. [7] Given the questionable logic of this analysis, the level of solemnity with which it is trotted out would be humorous if its results were not so unfortunate. [8] The majority's reliance on Mendenhall, supra, 446 U.S. 544, 100 S.Ct. 1870, is misplaced. There, the issue was whether heroin seized upon the search of the defendant at an airport was admissible into evidence. The defendant was stopped by drug enforcement agents and asked to accompany them to an office a few yards away. In holding that the search that uncovered the heroin was lawful, the Supreme Court stated: it is especially significant that the respondent was twice expressly told that she was free to decline to consent to the search, and only thereafter explicitly consented to it.... [S]uch knowledge was highly relevant to the determination that there had been consent. And, perhaps more important for our purposes, the fact that the officers themselves informed the respondent that she was free to withhold her consent substantially lessened the probability that their conduct could reasonably have appeared to her to be coercive. Id. at 558-59, 100 S.Ct. at 1879. The factors relied upon by the Court in Mendenhall  the explicit statement to the defendant that she was free to refuse consent coupled with her explicit consent thereafter  are the very factors that are absent in this case and were absent in Dunaway. The majority's preoccupation with Mendenhall and its failure to distinguish Dunaway are inexplicable. In summary, I think the reversal of Ruffin's conviction, on both Fifth and Fourth Amendment grounds, is constitutionally required. Antone Ruffin is entitled to a new  and this time fair  trial. I respectfully dissent.