Court Opinion

ID: 9479711
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:26:54.347376+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:13.645651
License: Public Domain

BOYCE F. MARTIN, Jr., Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I have closely read this record and I agree with Judge Contie’s analysis as applied to the facts in this case.
I am, however, mindful of the admonition in the dissent in the recent railway employee drug testing decision of the United States Supreme Court:
The issue in this case is not whether declaring a war on illegal drugs is good public policy. The importance of ridding our society of such drugs is, by now, apparent to all. Rather, the issue here is whether the Government’s deployment in that war of a particularly draconian weapon — [here, the unwarranted and unsupported stopping and searching of apparently law-abiding citizens on the basis of mere speculation and conjecture]— comports with the Fourth Amendment. Precisely because the need for action against the drug scourge is manifest, the need for vigilance against unconstitutional excess is great. History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagent to endure. The World War II relocation-camp cases, and the Red Scare and McCarthy-Era internal subversion cases, are only the most extreme reminders that when we allow fundamental freedoms to be sacrificed in the name of real or perceived exigency, we invariably come to regret it.
Skinner v. Railway Labor Exec. Ass’n, 489 U.S. —, —, 109 S.Ct. 1402, 1422, 103 L.Ed.2d 639, 671 (1989) (citations omitted).
The Skinner majority noted that:
the Fourth Amendment does not proscribe all searches and seizures, but only those that are unreasonable. What is reasonable, of course, “depends on all *1497the circumstances surrounding the search or seizure and the nature of the search or seizure itself.” Thus the permissibility of a particular practice “is judged by balancing its intrusion on the individual’s Fourth Amendment interests against its promotion of legitimate governmental interests.”
Id., 489 U.S. at —, 109 S.Ct. at 1414, 103 L.Ed.2d at 661 (citations omitted).
The obvious necessity for police interdiction of drug couriers and traffickers does not outweigh the constitutional standards for police intrusion into the affairs of ordinary citizens — be they within their homes or deplaning a flight from Miami. The oral argument of the U.S. Attorney in this case, that the defendant must have satisfied the drug courier profile because when the defendant was searched, the officers discovered drugs, is a stark example of the need for the courts to ensure that the law enforcement agencies in this country adhere to constitutional requirements in their zeal to combat the drug problem that plagues this nation.