Court Opinion

ID: 9427322
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:20:24.118729+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:06.189077
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rehnquist,
with whom The Chief Justice joins, dissenting.
The Court’s opinion in this case carefully identifies the factors which militate against the result which it reaches, and emphasizes their weight in attempting to limit the cir*181cumstances under which an affidavit supporting a search warrant may be impeached. I am not ultimately persuaded, however, that the Court is correct as a matter of constitutional law that the impeachment of such an affidavit must be permitted under the circumstances described by the Court, and I am thoroughly persuaded that the barriers which the Court believes that it is erecting against misuse of the impeachment process are frail indeed.
I
The Court’s reliance on Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S. 10 (1948), for the proposition that a determination by a neutral magistrate is a prerequisite to the sufficiency of an application for a warrant is obviously correct. In that case the Court said:
“The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime.” Id., at 13-14.
The notion that there may be incorrect or even deliberately falsified information presented to a magistrate in the course of an effort to obtain a search warrant does not render the proceeding before a magistrate any different from any other factfinding procedure known to the law. The Court here says that “it would be an unthinkable imposition upon [the magistrate’s] authority if a warrant affidavit, revealed after the fact to contain a deliberately or recklessly false statement, were to stand beyond impeachment.” Ante, at 165. I do not believe that this flat statement survives careful analysis.
If the function of the warrant requirement is to obtain the determination of a neutral magistrate as to whether sufficient *182grounds have been urged to support the issuance of a warrant, that function is fulfilled at the time the magistrate concludes that the requirement has- been met. Like any other determination of a magistrate, of a court, or of countless other fact-finding tribunals, the decision may be incorrect as a matter of law. Even if correct, some inaccurate or falsified information may have gone into the making of the determination. But unless we are to exalt as the ne plus ultra of our system of criminal justice the absolute correctness of every factual determination made along the tortuous route from the filing of the complaint or the issuance of an indictment to the final determination that a judgment of conviction was properly obtained, we shall lose perspective as to the purposes of the system as well as of the warrant requirement of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. Much of what Mr. Justice Harlan said in his separate opinion in Mackey v. United States, 401 U. S. 667 (1971), with respect to collateral relief from a criminal conviction is likewise applicable to collateral impeachment of a search warrant:
“At some point, the criminal process, if it is to function at all, must turn its attention from whether a man ought properly to be incarcerated to how he is to be treated once convicted. If law, criminal or otherwise, is worth having and enforcing, it must at some time provide a definitive answer to the questions litigants present or else it never provides an answer at all. Surely it is an unpleasant task to strip a man of his freedom and subject him to institutional restraints. But this does not mean that in so doing, we should always be halting or tentative. No one, not criminal defendants, not the judicial system, not society as a whole is benefited by a judgment providing a man shall tentatively go to jail today, but tomorrow and every day thereafter his continued incarceration shall be subject to fresh litigation on issues already resolved.
*183“A rule of law that fails to take account of these finality-interests would do more than subvert the criminal process itself. It would also seriously distort the very limited resources society has allocated to the criminal process. While men languish in jail, not uncommonly for over a year, awaiting a first trial on their guilt or innocence, it is not easy to justify expending substantial quantities of the time and energies of judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers litigating the validity under present law of criminal convictions that were perfectly free from error when made final. [Citation omitted.] This drain on society’s resources is compounded by the fact that issuance of the habeas writ compels a State that wishes to continue enforcing its laws against the successful petitioner to relitigate facts buried in the remote past through presentation of witnesses whose memories of the relevant events often have dimmed. This very act of trying stale 'facts may well, ironically, produce a second trial no more reliable as a matter of getting at the truth than the first.” Id., at 6Q0-691.
I am quite confident that if our system of justice were not administered by judges who were once lawyers, it might well be less satisfactory than it now is. But I am equally confident that one improvement which would manifest itself as a result of such a change would be a willingness, reflected in almost all callings in our society except lawyers, to refrain from constant relitigation, whether in the form of collateral attack, appeal, retrial, or whatever, of issues that have originally been decided by a competent authority.
It would be extraordinarily troubling in any system of criminal justice if a verdict or finding of guilt, later conclusively shown to be based on false testimony, were to result in the incarceration of the accused notwithstanding this fact. But the Court’s reference to the “unthinkable imposition” of not allowing the impeachment of an affiant’s testimony in support *184of a search warrant is a horse of quite another color. Particularly in view of the many hurdles which the prosecution must surmount to ultimately obtain and retain a finding of guilt in the light of the many constitutional safeguards which surround a criminal accused, it is essential to understand the role of a search warrant in the process which may lead to the conviction of such an accused. The warrant issued on impeachable testimony has, by hypothesis, turned up incriminating and admissible evidence to be considered by the jury at the trial. The fact that it was obtained by reason of an impeachable warrant bears not at all on the innocence or guilt of the accused. The only conceivable harm done by such evidence is to the accused’s rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, which have nothing to do with his guilt or innocence of the crime with which he is charged.
Given the definitive exposition of the warrant requirement quoted above from Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S., at 13-14, it seems to me it would be quite reasonable for this Court, consistently with the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, to adopt any one of three positions with respect to the impeachability of a search warrant which had been in fact issued by a neutral magistrate who satisfied the requirements of Shadwick v. Tampa, 407 U. S. 345 (1972).
First, it could decide that the warrant requirement was satisfied when such a magistrate had been persuaded, and allow no further collateral attack on the warrant. In Aguilar v. Texas, 378 U. S. 108 (1964), the Court in reliance on Giordenello v. United States, 357 U. S. 480 (1958), a case con-cededly decided pursuant to Fed. Rule Crim. Proc. 4, nonetheless held that the determination by a magistrate that the affidavit submitted to him made out “probable cause” for purposes of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments was subject to later judicial review as to the sufficiency of the affidavit. This rule was later reaffirmed in Spinelli v. United States, 393 U. S. 410 (1969). The Court has thus for more than a decade *185rejected the first possible stopping place in judicial re-examination of affidavits in support of warrants, and held that the legal determination as to probable cause was subject to collateral attack. While this conclusion does not seem to me to flow inexorably from the Fourth Amendment, I think that it makes a good deal of sense in light of the fact that a magistrate need not be a trained lawyer, see Shadwick, supra, and therefore may not be versed in the latest nuances of what is or what is not “probable cause” for purposes of the Fourth Amendment.
But to allow collateral examination of an affidavit in support of a warrant on a legal ground such as that is quite different from the rejection of the second possible stopping place as the Court does today. Magistrates need not be lawyers, but lawyers have no monopoly on determining whether or not an affiant who appears before them is or is not telling the truth. Indeed, a magistrate whose time may be principally spent in conducting preliminary hearings and trying petty offenses may have every bit as good a feel for the veracity of a particular witness as a judge of a court of general jurisdiction.
True, a warrant is issued ex parte, without an opportunity for the person whose effects are to be seized to impeach the testimony of the affiant. The proceeding leading to the issuance of a warrant is, therefore, obviously less reliable and less likely to be a searching inquiry into the truth of the affiant’s statements than is a full-dress adversary proceeding. But it is at this point that I part company with the Court in its underlying assumption that somehow a full-dress adversary proceeding will virtually guarantee a truthful answer to the question of whether or not the affiant seeking the warrant falsified his testimony. A full-dress adversary proceeding is undoubtedly a better vehicle than an ex parte proceeding for arriving at the truth of any particular inquiry, but it is scarcely a guarantee of truth. Mr. Justice Jackson in his *186opinion concurring in the result in Brown v. Allen, 344 U. S. 443 (1953), observed with respect to purely legal issues decided by this Court:
“However, reversal by a higher court is not proof that justice is thereby better done. There is no doubt that if there were a super-Supreme Court, a substantial proportion of our reversals of state courts would also be reversed. We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.” Id., at 540.
The same is surely true of a judge’s review of the factual determinations of a magistrate; a larger percentage of the judge’s findings as to the truth of an affiant’s statement may be objectively correct than the percentage of the magistrate’s determinations which are, but neither one is going to be 100 percent. Since once the warrant is issued and the search is made, the privacy interest protected by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments is breached, a subsequent determination that it was wrongfully breached cannot possibly restore the privacy interest. See United States v. Calandra, 414 U. S. 338 (1974). Since the evidence obtained pursuant to the warrant is by hypothesis relevant and admissible on the issue of guilt, the only purpose served by suppression of such evidence is deterrence of falsified testimony on the part of affiant in the future. Without attempting to summarize the many cases in which this Court has discussed the balance to be struck in such situations, see United States v. Peltier, 422 U. S. 531 (1975), I simply do not think the game is worth the candle in this situation.
As the Court’s opinion points out, the other jurisdictions which have considered this question are divided, although a majority of them favor the result reached by the Court today. The signed articles and student law review notes which the Court refers to in its opinion are not there, I trust, to be considered en bloc or by some process of counting without weighing. Presumably, to the extent that their reasoning *187commends itself to the courts which are committed to decide these questions, that reasoning will find its way into the opinions of those courts; to the extent that the reasoning does not so commend itself, the piece containing the reasoning does not weigh in the scales of decision simply because it appeared in a periodical devoted to the discussion of legal questions.
II
The Court has commendably, in my opinion, surrounded the right to impeach the affidavit relied upon to support the issuance of a warrant with numerous limitations. My fear, and I do not think it an unjustified one, is that these limitations will quickly be subverted in actual practice. The Court states:
“Nor, if a sensible threshold showing is required and sensible substantive requirements for suppression are maintained, need there be any new large-scale commitment of judicial resources; many claims will wash out at an early stage, and the more substantial ones in any event would require judicial resources for vindication if the suggested alternative sanctions were truly to be effective. The requirement of a substantial preliminary showing should suffice to prevent the misuse of a veracity hearing for purposes of discovery or obstruction.” Ante, at 170.
I greatly fear that this generalized language will afford insufficient protection against the natural tendency of ingenious lawyers charged with representing their client’s cause to ceaselessly undermine the limitations which the Court has placed on impeachment of the affidavit offered in support of a search warrant. I am sure that the Court is sincere in its expressed hope that the doctrine which it adopts will not lead to “any new large-scale commitment of judicial resources,” but in the end I am led once more to echo the *188observation, contained in another opinion of Mr. Justice Jackson:
“The case which irresistibly comes to mind as the most fitting precedent is that of Julia who, according to Byron’s reports, 'whispering “I will ne’er consent,” — consented.’ ” Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S. 1, 19 (1947) (dissenting opinion).
Since I would not “consent” even to the extent that the Court does in its opinion, I dissent from that opinion and would affirm the judgment of the Supreme Court of Delaware.