Court Opinion

ID: 9429968
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:28:27.566826+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:20:07.830158
License: Public Domain

Justice Brennan,
with whom Justice Marshall joins,
concurring in the judgment.
A young man is picked up by the police. He is taken to the police station, where he is held while his fingerprints are taken. The police have neither probable cause to arrest nor have they obtained a warrant.
These were the facts of Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U. S. 721 (1969). They are also the facts of the instant case. We held in Davis that the detention was an unreasonable seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The facts of Davis did not raise the question whether warrantless on-site fingerprinting would constitute a reasonable search or seizure for Fourth Amendment purposes. Thus, although we noted that “the general requirement that the authorization of a judicial officer be obtained in advance of detention would seem not to admit of any exception in the fingerprinting context,” we sensibly left open the question “whether the requirements of the Fourth Amendment could be met by narrowly circumscribed procedures for obtaining, during the course of a criminal investigation, the fingerprints of individuals for whom there is no probable cause to arrest.” Id., at 728.
The Court’s opinion today recognizes that the instant case is indistinguishable from Davis and goes on to draw the unsurprising conclusion that the seizure here, like that in Davis, violated the Fourth Amendment. In reaffirming Davis, the Court holds that a suspect may not be apprehended, detained, and forced to accompany the police to another location to *819be fingerprinted without a warrant or probable cause. Ante, at 815-816. The intrusion on the suspect’s freedom of action in such a case is simply too great to be “reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment. I fully agree.
Unlike the Court in Davis, however, the Court today— after tidily disposing of the case before it — returns to its regrettable assault on the Fourth Amendment by reaching beyond any issue properly before us virtually to hold that on-site fingerprinting without probable cause or a warrant is constitutionally reasonable. See ante, at 817 (“There is thus support in our cases for the view that the Fourth Amendment would permit seizures for the purpose of fingerprinting, if there is reasonable suspicion that the suspect has committed a criminal act, if there is a reasonable basis for believing that fingerprinting will establish or negate the suspect’s connection with that crime, and if the procedure is carried out with dispatch”). The validity of on-site fingerprinting is no more implicated by the facts of this case than it was by Davis. Consequently I disagree with the Court’s strained effort to reach the question today.
If the police wanted to detain an individual for on-site fingerprinting, the intrusion would have to be measured by the standards of Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1 (1968), and our other Fourth Amendment cases. Yet the record here contains no information useful in applying Terry to this hypothetical police practice. It would seem that on-site fingerprinting (apparently undertaken in full view of any passerby) would involve a singular intrusion on the suspect’s privacy, an intrusion that would not be justifiable (as was the patdown in Terry) as necessary for the officer’s protection. How much time would elapse before the individual would be free to go? Could the police hold the individual until the fingerprints could be compared with others? The parties did not brief or argue these questions, the record contains nothing that is useful in their resolution, and (naturally enough) the courts below did not address them.
*820Ordinarily — outside the Fourth Amendment context, at any rate — we wait for a case to arise before addressing the application of a legal standard to a set of facts. I disagree with the Court’s apparent attempt to render an advisory opinion concerning the Fourth Amendment implications of a police practice that, as far as we know, has never been attempted by the police in this or any other case.