Court Opinion

ID: 9491966
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:28:55.35909+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:02.317124
License: Public Domain

*721TERENCE T. EVANS, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
This is a very close case, and that’s a testimonial both to Judge Easterbrook’s powerful dissent and the steady erosion of the Fourth Amendment occasioned by the government’s war on drugs. Ultimately, I come down on Judge Wood’s side of the case. I write separately to note why I think her position is correct.
The dissent says “Milwaukee’s ‘knock and talk’ process is a distraction.” That statement is true, however, only if the focus of this case is solely on the exact moment the officer stopped Johnson and started to frisk him. But there is a broader context, and it is there that Judge Wood is right. The police had no warrant when they went to apartment 7. They were taking a shortcut in the hope that something good (from a drug-busting perspective) would turn up. A little more work would have given the police the probable cause they needed to secure a warrant, but they didn’t want to take the time to do something more. They wanted to go directly to apartment 7 and see what, if anything, was up.
When a shortcut is taken and a dangerous situation arises, police will (and should) always search first and let the lawyers worry about the legalities later. They will (and should) always do what is necessary to protect themselves. But to understand precautions — here, the desire to frisk Johnson — is not to say the precautions are consistent with the Fourth Amendment. If the police use a shortcut and a need to protect themselves arises, they run the risk of not being able to use, in court, evidence they stumble on. No one would suggest that once an emergency is created the police should stand still and risk being shot. But our case today really presents a question about where the proper analysis of this search begins, and in my view it doesn’t start just as the door to apartment 7 was opened.
As I see it, the seeds of this bad search were sown when the police decided to use the “knock and talk” technique. And that process — which sounds more like a friendly visit to sell tickets to a police picnic than a perilous visit to a suspected drug hive — is fraught with danger, not to mention constitutional problems. And I think a fair reading of this record compels the conclusion that the police knew they were on thin legal ice when they decided to go to the door to apartment 7 for their “knock and talk.” That’s why, I suspect, they tried to gussy up their case (i.e., inject it with probable eáuse) through Officer Reilly’s claim that as soon as the door opened he saw a woman in the apartment toss a crack pipe to the floor. The experienced district judge, after hearing this claim and conducting a courtroom reenactment, found the claim to be “incredible.” In less sugarcoated terms, the judge found that the officer lied. The seizure and search of Johnson, as Judge Wood persuasively shows, was not consistent with what little is left of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.