Court Opinion

ID: 9756272
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 21:19:49.70161+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:17.376939
License: Public Domain

*270Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Manderino:
The majority’s holding would permit the seizure of innocent citizens by government officials without the constitutional safeguards guaranteed by Article 1, Section 8, of the Pennsylvania Constitution and the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U.S. 721, 22 L. Ed. 2d 676, 89 S. Ct. 1394 (1969), fingerprints taken from a suspect after an illegal arrest were suppressed. The protections of the Fourth Amendment were specifically applied to evidence obtained using the suspect’s fingers after an illegal seizure.
By definition an illegal seizure is the seizure of an innocent person. Such seizures are sometimes called investigatory. They are prohibited because as was stated in Davis, “. . . investigatory seizures would subject unlimited numbers of innocent persons to the harassment and ignominy incident to involuntary detention. Nothing is more clear than that the Fourth Amendment was meant to prevent wholesale intrusions upon the personal security of our citizenry, whether these intrusions be termed ‘arrests’ or ‘investigatory detentions’.
In this case after the illegal seizure of the defendant, evidence was obtained by using the suspect’s face. The prohibition outlined in Davis is equally applicable. The identification evidence by Mrs. Ferro, the owner of the beauty shop, was a result of, and incident to, an illegal arrest. Under these circumstances, the identification evidence was the fruit of an illegal seizure and should have been suppressed prior to trial.
The majority opinion acknowledges that the record in the present case leads to the inescapable conclusion that the arrest of Benjamin Garvin, Jr., the appellant, was without probable cause and, therefore, illegal. Having acknowledged the seizure of the appellant was il*271legal, the majority reasons that the identification evidence should not be suppressed because, “The illegal arrest in this instance merely provided the means for the confrontation with Mrs. Ferro more promptly than would otherwise have been the case ... we cannot assume that but for the illegal arrest the appellant would have remained at large indefinitely.” (Emphasis supplied.)
Whether evidence, that is the direct result of an illegal seizure of a person, is to be suppressed, cannot be determined by the speculation of a court that the “illegally seized person” would not have remained at large indefinitely and the illegal arrest merely hastened the inevitable confrontation. The exclusion of the evidence does not depend upon assumption or speculation but depends solely upon the exclusionary rule explained in Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383 (1914), and applied to the states through Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961).
In Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471 (1963), the United States Supreme Court in further defining the kind of evidence that is to be considered inadmissible as being illegally seized stated: “Thus, verbal evidence which derives so immediately from ... an unauthorized arrest ... is no less the ‘fruit’ of official illegality than the more common tangible fruits of the unwarranted intrusion.” The majority’s interpretation that Wong Sun, supra, applies traditionally to physical, tangible material unreasonably restricts the use of the exclusionary rule and this restriction is not substantiated by the language in Wong Sun.
The logical and dangerous result of the majority’s opinion, that identification evidence following an illegal arrest does not fall within the exclusionary rule, is to grant law enforcement officers an unfettered discretion to illegally seize any person or any number of persons on mere suspicion, secure in the knowledge that if by *272chance a subsequent identification is obtained, the illegally seized individual will not have the right to suppress the tainted identification.
The conclusion the majority reaches ignores the purpose of the exclusionary constitutional rules by allowing subsequent discoveries from an illegal seizure to validate an arrest that was made without probable cause.
Accordingly, I would reverse and remand with the instruction to suppress the identification evidence as the fruit of an illegal seizure.