Court Opinion

ID: 9451943
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:27:36.224086+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:59.256403
License: Public Domain

ALDRICH, Chief Judge
(dissenting)-
The court’s recitation of the facts, otherwise quite acceptable, might have-been clearer if, after stating that the circumstances under which appellees were picked up were sufficiently suspicious to justify detention under the New Hampshire statute, the court had immediately made its important concession that during the subsequent hours of appellees’ detention “the police had no valid reason for holding them.” This was true not *256merely because the statutory four hours for investigation had long expired, but because the grounds on which the suspicion, and hence the detention, had been predicated, had been dispelled even within those four hours. The necessary driver’s license had been forthcoming; the possibility that the car had been stolen had been disproved. I cannot believe that the mere fact that a nonresident was on a city street after midnight made him a suspicious person obliged to account for his conduct to the satisfaction of the police or be incarcerated.1 The court’s assertion that New Hampshire could have enacted a statute comparable to some other state’s, with a period longer than four hours, seems to me highly questionable, but, in any event, entirely beside the mark. No matter what a statute could provide as a reasonable period for investigation, it could hardly be proper to permit the detention to exceed the existence of the grounds of suspicion. After the police had resolved the question of the car they were detaining appellees without any semblance of grounds, in mere Micawber-like optimism that something would turn up.
I will assume that a stop and frisk statute would be constitutional. See generally, Police Power to Stop, Frisk, and Question Suspicious Persons, 65 Colum. L.Rev. 848 (1965). I could even assume, for present purposes, that a very brief period of detention while the investigation was proceeding, would also not be unconstitutional. This was assumed, without discussion, in Commonwealth v. Lehan, 1964, 347 Mass. 197, 196 N.E.2d 840. But it is fundamentally contrary to all principles of probable cause to say that, by statute or otherwise, a state can convert what is, concededly, not probable cause into something “just as good.” However my brethren may state it, they are performing an act of self-levitation. In seeking support from the cases finding no unconstitutional impropriety in delayed arraignments, they are overlooking the fact that prior to and underlying the custody in those cases there was probable cause. This is a basic difference. Probable cause is the constitutionally erected pale that fences in those in whose lives the police may interfere, and protects the rest. It is one thing to say there is no strict constitutional timetable once a defendant is in full, lawful custody It is another to parlay what was, at best, an ephemeral right to temporary detention, any claim to which had long disappeared, into the equivalent of lawful custody. I would go further. Even if the original grounds for suspicion remained, suspicion is not probable cause, and no more than the briefest detention on mere suspicion can be constitutionally justifiable.
If the twelve-hour detention was not constitutionally permissible, then I believe the seizure of appellees’ clothes cannot be supported. By any analysis this evidence would seem the direct fruit of the poisonous tree. The clothes were brought within the ambit of police custody by the original detention, and were retained by the unlawful holding of the petitioners. Concededly, not everything that bears any causal relation, however remote, to unlawful police action is attributable thereto. Cf. United States v. Close, 4 Cir., 1965, 349 F.2d 841, cert. den. 382 U.S. 992, 86 S.Ct. 573, 15 L.Ed. 2d 479; Commonwealth v. Palladino, 1964, 346 Mass. 720, 195 N.E.2d 769. The purpose of the “fruits” doctrine is to remove the incentive for police violations of constitutional rights, and if the evidence discovered is so incidental as to preclude even a suspicion that the reason for the detention was the hope of obtaining some such evidence, there may be no reason to exclude it. See generally Developments in the Law— Confessions, 79 Harv.L.Rev. 935, 1024-26 (1966). However, this was not the case here. I cannot go along with the implication in the court’s opinion that because the fruit was in a certain sense a *257windfall, it was not forbidden. The police, doubtless, did not realize that they had obtained custody over bloody clothes. On the other hand, clearly they were not detaining petitioners until noontime simply to thwart some as yet unperpetrated offense. They must have felt that evidence of a crime already committed might be forthcoming, and must, in turn, have intended, by detaining the petitioners, to prevent suchever activities as petitioners would otherwise have engaged in to hamper discovery. This should not be condonable by saying that the police did not know what these activities might be, or precisely what evidence might be involved.
Nor can the court whitewash police misconduct by condemning petitioners as asserting “a constitutional right * * * to destroy evidence.” The petitioners’ claim might be reduced to this if the court could cite a case holding that police violation of fundamental liberties can be vindicated by the later discovery that cause in fact existed. This it cannot do. Wong Sun v. United States, 1963, 371 U.S. 471, 484, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441; cf. Rogers v. Richmond, 1961, 365 U.S. 534, 542, 81 S.Ct. 735, 5 L.Ed.2d 760. I am frankly shocked by the court’s holding at this date that a detention without pretence of right can be used to produce usable evidence.
The present decision is, of course, a desirable result with respect to convicting these petitioners, for whom, possibly, little can be said. This, however, is not the point. The constitution exists for the unjust as well as the just.
The question whether Nelson’s oral statement, made to Nugent after the discovery of probable cause, should also have been excluded is less clear. I might agree with my brethren that the unlawful detention was probably not aimed at eliciting statements after probable cause should appear. Although it may be assumed that but for this detention Nelson would not have been apprehended, and in custody, at this particular time and place, it does not follow that he would never have been arrested, nor that if he had been, he would not have given the same answer to the same question. Nevertheless, the statement was in some sense a product of the unlawful detention. For example, because of the prior twelve-hour incommunicado detention in an out-of-state jail, Nelson may have said something that he would not have said had he been arrested later. These are imponderables, not like the easy situation in Wong Sun v. United States, supra, where, some days after release from an unlawful arrest, a defendant came himself to the station, or the perhaps relatively simple case of Commonwealth v. Palladino, supra, where the defendant was first briefly held by officers of the wrong municipality. I need not, however, resolve this question. If my brethren do not accept what seems to me the obvious case, little purpose is to be served by an academic discussion of the more difficult one. If the petitioners were to be given new trials because of the improper use of the clothing evidence, I assume this oral statement would then be interdicted by Escobedo.

. The statutory and, I believe, common, definition of a suspicious person, is a “person abroad whom [the officer] * * has reason to suspect is committing, has committed or is about to commit a crime * *