Court Opinion

ID: 9497758
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:59:22.781671+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:24.074437
License: Public Domain

KENNEDY, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in Judge Hood’s opinion but write separately to explain why the “consent once removed doctrine” adopted by our Court in United States v. Pollard, 215 F.3d 643 (6th Cir.2000), to apply to undercover police officers (and in dicta to informants) is equally applicable to informants in light of the doctrine’s conceptual foundation.
The Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court declared, draws a firm line at the entry to one’s house such that a police officer may not, in the absence of exigent circumstances or consent, enter a house to arrest or search without first obtaining a warrant. See Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 585-589, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980) (holding that since the physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed, absent exigent circumstances or consent, officers may not enter a home without a warrant). Neither the exigent circumstances nor the traditional consent exception to the warrant requirement supports the application of the “consent once removed” doctrine. This doctrine appears to have arisen out of cases where the government was unable to rely upon exigent circumstances to justify the warrantless entry into a suspect’s home by officers who entered the suspect’s home after the government informant or undercover agent had established probable *809cause to arrest the suspect. United States v. Paul, 808 F.2d 645, 647 (7th Cir.1986) (noting that the officers entry into the suspects home was not “within the emergency exception” to Payton); United States v. Akinsanya, 53 F.3d 852, 856 & n. 1 (7th Cir.1995) (noting that “[t]he government wisely chose not to pursue its exigent circumstances argument ... [since] [e]xi-gent circumstances did not exist” in this case).1
Recognizing that exigent circumstances did not support the warrantless entry of police officers into a suspect’s home after the agent or informant inside the home established probable cause to arrest the suspect, the courts instead relied upon the other exception to the warrant requirement, consent. See Paul, 808 F.2d at 647-48 (“Although we do not think the search was within the emergency exception to Payton, there is an alternative ground on which its lawfulness must be sustained: consent”). Although it is certainly true that an undercover agent or a government informant receives consent when he is invited into a suspect’s home, it is a fiction to claim that the subsequent officers who enter the suspect’s home also receive the suspect’s consent to enter. One court, however, appears to have espoused such a reliance upon consent, as it noted: When a suspect gives his consent to a government informant to enter his house, the suspect effectively gives consent to the agents with whom the government informant is working. Akinsanya, 53 F.3d at 856. Since the suspect controls who may enter his home absent a warrant or exigent circumstances, it cannot be claimed that a suspect, because he consented to the entry into his home by a government informant, also consents to the forced or surreptitious entry of the officers with whom the informant is working, since, in fact, no consent has been given to them. Moreover, simply because the government informant received consent to enter the suspect’s home does not mean that the government informant himself thereby has authority to consent to the entry of the agents with whom he is working.
The doctrine, therefore, is not based upon either the exigent circumstances or the traditional consent exception to the warrant requirement.2 Rather, it is based upon the theory that, because an undercover agent or informant who establishes probable cause to arrest the suspect may in fact arrest him then and there, he should be entitled to call in the agents with whom he is working to assist in the arrest 3 because, once the suspect invites the agent or informant into his house and dis*810plays his illegal activity to him, the suspect’s Fourth Amendment expectation of privacy has been “fatally compromised.” Paul, 808 F.2d at 648 (“The interest that the Payton decision protects is the interest in the privacy of the home, and [that interest] has been fatally compromised when the owner admits a confidential informant and proudly displays contraband to him. It makes no difference that the owner does not know he is dealing with an informant”). See United States v. Bramble, 103 F.3d 1475, 1478 (9th Cir.1996) (“Once consent has been obtained from one with authority to give it, any expectation of privacy has been lost. We seriously doubt that the entry of additional officers would further diminish the consenter’s expectation of privacy ... ”); United States v. Janik, 723 F.2d 537, 548 (7th Cir.1983) (concluding that since the suspect had already invited an officer into his home, the warrantless entry of additional officers into the suspect’s home constituted a trivial invasion of the suspect’s privacy).
Thus, the doctrine is not made conceptually possible by law enforcement powers, as the dissent contends, such as the ability to seize incriminating evidence in plain view or the theory of collective knowledge.4 Rather, the back-up officers entry into the suspect’s home does not offend the Constitution because the suspect’s expectation of privacy has been previously compromised. The only power that is traditionally viewed as a police power that is potentially necessary to support this doctrine is the arrest power, since, as the doctrine goes, once the invitee establishes probable cause to arrest, he may call for additional officers to assist him in effectuating the arrest. See Pollard, 215 F.3d at 648 (noting that once the undercover agent established probable cause to arrest the suspects, he could have arrested them if he had chosen to do so, but was entitled to rely upon back-up officers to assist him); Paul, 808 F.2d at 648 (noting that when one invites an undercover agent into his house, the agent can summon other agents to assist in the arrest). The arrest power, however, does not lie in the sole province of the police, but rather it has been granted to the citizens of many states. See 5 Am.Jur.2d Arrest § 56; 133 A.L.R. 608. As is relevant in this case, Tennessee is one of those states that has granted the arrest power to its citizens.5 Tenn.Code. Ann. § 40-7-109(a)(3) (2004) (“A private person may arrest another ... [w]hen a felony has been committed, and the arresting person has reasonable cause to believe that the person arrested committed it”). Since a citizen, just as an officer, may receive a suspect’s consent to enter his home, determine if probable cause exists to arrest the suspect, and arrest him, then a citizen should be entitled to summon assistance in order to effectuate the arrest because the suspect’s expectation of privacy is just as fatally compromised when he invites an informant into his house and displays his illegal activity to him as it is when he invites a government agent. *811Paul, 808 F.2d at 648 (noting that an owner’s interest in the privacy of his home is fatally compromised when he “admits a confidential informant and proudly displays contraband to him” and that “[i]t makes no difference that the owner does not know he is dealing with an informant”).
Having adopted the “consent-once-removed” doctrine with respect to an undercover agent calling upon police back-up to effect an arrest based upon probable cause disclosed to him in his undercover capacity, there is no justifiable distinction between the undercover officer’s and an informant’s ability to call upon the police to aid in the arrest. The consent in each instance is given without knowledge of the undercover status of the visitor.

. In fact, in Pollard, Judge Nathaniel Jones dissented from this Court’s adoption of the "consent once removed” doctrine on the ground that it constituted an "unjustified extension of our traditional exigent circumstances jurisprudence.” 215 F.3d 643, 649 (6th Cir.2000).

. Although the doctrine is not based upon either the exigent circumstances or the traditional consent exception, one could characterize the conceptual foundation of the doctrine as based upon a combination of a sort of "quasi exigent circumstances and consent.” For instance, in Bramble, the court concluded that the warrantless entry of the additional officers into the suspect’s home did not violate the Fourth Amendment since the suspect had a diminished expectation of privacy as he had already invited an undercover agent into his home (consent), and, in any event, the court continued, "any remaining expectation of privacy was outweighed by the legitimate concern for the safety of the officers inside” (exigent circumstances). 103 F.3d at 1478.

.Although police officers cannot create exigent circumstances to justify their entry into a suspects home, see Williams, 354 F.3d 497, 504 (6th Cir.2003), if an undercover agent or informant in a suspect’s home were to find herself to be in danger due to circumstances that she neither created nor which she could have readily averted, then the subsequent entry of officers to aid her would be supported by exigent circumstances.

. The ability of officers to seize evidence in plain view does not justify the entry of backup officers into the suspect's home. Neither does the theory of collective knowledge justify it. The fact that we can impute the knowledge of the officer inside the suspect's home to the back-up officers does not entitle the back-up officers to enter. If these powers were the pillars upon which the doctrine rested, then Pollard, would have been decided incorrectly.

. The dissents chastisement that we are “deputizing the lawless” evidences a misunderstanding as to the basis of the doctrine. Since the doctrine is not based on police powers, as explained in footnote 4, supra, no police powers are "entrusted” to the informants. If any police power were necessary to support this doctrine, it would be the arrest power, a power which has been granted to the citizens of Tennessee, including to those without a spotless past.