Court Opinion

ID: 9488725
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:54:18.279389+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:04.452480
License: Public Domain

NOONAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
This case has been pending in this court for nearly two years. The long delay in decision does not reflect inattention or negligence but the great uncertainty the court has experienced in dealing with the situation where our jurisdiction was brought about by the kidnapping of the defendant from Honduras, a kidnapping performed by United States Marshals.
What This Case Is Not. This case does not involve the kidnapping by a private citizen of a defendant residing in a foreign country and wanted for an offense against the statute of a particular state of the United States and the subsequent placing of the kidnapped person on trial in the state’s court. Ker v. Illinois, 119 U.S. 436, 7 S.Ct. 225, 30 L.Ed. 421 (1886).
This ease does not involve the kidnapping of a defendant from one state of the United States by police officers of another one of the states, and his removal for trial to the officers’ state. Frisbie v. Collins, 342 U.S. 519, 72 S.Ct. 509, 96 L.Ed. 541 (1952).
This ease does not involve the removal of the head of state of a foreign country by the military forces of the United States, acting at the direction of the President as Commander-in-Chief in an action found to be “military war,” and the subsequent federal trial of the person removed. United States v. Noriega, 746 F.Supp. 1506, 1537 (S.D.Fla.1990).
This case does not turn on the alleged violation of a treaty between the United States and the foreign country from which the defendant was removed to undergo trial in a federal court. United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655, 112 S.Ct. 2188, 119 L.Ed.2d 441 (1992).
This case does not turn on an alleged violation of international customary law. United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 971 F.2d 310 (9th Cir.1992).
This ease does not turn on a protest by the sovereign of the country from which the defendant was abducted for trial in federal court; for there was no such protest. Mattar-Ballesteros v. Henman, 896 F.2d 255, 259-260 (7th Cir.1990).
This ease does not turn on the Fourth Amendment rights of the abducted defendant. Id. at 262.
This case does not turn on the due process rights of the abducted defendant as in United States v. Toscanino, 500 F.2d 267 (2d Cir.1974), a case qualified by United States ex rel. Lujan v. Gengler, 510 F.2d 62 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 421 U.S. 1001, 95 S.Ct. 2400, 44 L.Ed.2d 668 (1975).
This case is not to be decided by stray dicta from the above cases; for what a court does not have before it a court does not authoritatively address. Emanations and intimations of the views of the opinion writer no doubt can be gathered from the dicta. They are not the holding of the court. They *773do not operate as binding decisional precedent.
What The Case Is About. This case begins with the kidnapping at dawn, April 5, 1988, of Matta from his home in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. According to the affidavit of Juan J. Donato Morales, a United States Marshal, he and three other members of the United States Marshals Service were near Matta’s residence. At about 6:00 a.m., six or seven Honduran officers grabbed Matta, wrestled him to the ground, and brought him to the car driven by Marshal Morales. The Honduran officers handcuffed Matta, put a hood over his head, and thrust him on the floor of the rear part of the car. Matta at this point was still struggling to escape. In the back seat were one Honduran officer and one United States Marshal; in front were another Honduran officer and Marshal Morales. Morales drove the ear to an air base in Honduras. From there Matta was transported by air to the Dominican Republic. According to the testimony of United States Marshal Roberto Escobar, he was alerted by the Marshals’ Service that Matta had been apprehended. He proceeded to the airport in the Dominican Republic with three other members of the Marshals’ Service, met the plane from Honduras, took Matta into custody, and thereafter flew with him to United States territory. Within twenty-four hours of his armed abduction Matta was in the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois. Matta-Ballesteros v. Henman, 896 F.2d 255, 256 (7th Cir.1990).
That this act of kidnapping occurred is not disputed by the government. There is dispute as to how Matta was treated by his kidnappers and that treatment is not considered further here. Kidnapping in itself is a violent attack upon a human person — a sudden invasion of personal security, a brutal deprivation of personal liberty. Kidnapping in itself is a cruel act, and the cruelty is magnified when the victim’s home is the place where the violent assault upon his liberty is made. Kidnapping committed in a foreign country becomes an offense against federal law when the victim is transported by the kidnappers into the United States. United States v. Garcia, 854 F.2d 340 (9th Cir.1988). The kidnapping continues as long as the victim is not released by the abductors. Id. at 343.
At the birth of our republic we submitted to the “opinions of mankind” and “a candid world” our reasons why Great Britain had become destructive of the ends for which government was necessary. Among our list of complaints was that Americans were “taken Captive on the high seas” and forcibly conscripted, and that others were transported “beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses.” Declaration of Independence in 1 The Founder’s Constitution (eds. Philip B. Kurland & Ralph Lerner) at 9-10.
If confirmation were wanted of the common view that humankind has of kidnapping it is furnished by Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which affirms that no one “shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.” G.ARes. 217A(III), 3(1), U.N. GAOR Resolutions at 71, U.N.Doc. A/810 (1948). United Nations Security Council Resolution 579 (1985) lumps “acts of abduction” with “acts of hostage-taking” as “manifestations of international terrorism” and “[cjondemns unequivocally all acts of hostage-taking and abduction.” S.C.Res. 579 (1985), U.N. SCOR, 40th Year, Resolutions and Decisions at 24, U.N.Doc. S/INF/41 (1986).
The motive of the kidnappers — here no doubt well-meaning in their offieiousness— does not qualify the violence of their conduct nor its impact on the person whom they kidnap. That the abductors were law enforcement officers of the United States, rather than some fanatic band, doubles the horror of their activity. If agents of the mightiest power on earth are unrestrained from kidnapping by legal authority — or rather, in obedience to higher authority in the Executive Department, see themselves constrained to kidnap — the freedom of individuals throughout the world is at the mercy of a decision made by an official of the United States Department of Justice.
It is true that Israel abducted Adolf Eichmann to stand trial in Israel. Even that case with its extraordinary features met with the condemnation of the Security Council of the United Nations. S.C.Res. 138 (1960), 15 *774U.N. SCOR, 15th Year, Resolutions and Decisions at 4, U.N.Doc. S/4349 (1960). Earlier precedent for governmental kidnapping is ugly. In the 1930s the Gestapo engaged in kidnapping in Switzerland. See “Kidnapping of Fugitives from Justice On Foreign Territory,” 29 AmJ.Int’l L., 502 (1935). Neither Nazi precedent nor Israeli exception suggests that the common view of humanity is wrong in its abhorrence of armed abduction to a foreign land. See Betsy Baker and Volker Róben, “To Abduct Or To Extradite. Does A Treaty Beg The Question?” 53 Zeit-schrift für auslcmdisches ojfentliches Recht and Vólkerrecht 657, 678-79 (1993).
We are then confronted with a kidnapping, and we as judges are asked to be part of the kidnapping. We are asked to participate in two ways. First, the acts of the United States Marshals were directed to bringing Matta within the jurisdiction of the courts of the United States so that he might be tried for federal crimes and in particular for the crime of which he stands convicted in the Central District of California. The acts of the Marshals were not personal acts of revenge. Their purpose was to assure Matta’s presence in the federal courts. Without the participation of the federal courts the kidnapping was purposeless. The federal courts are inextricably tied to the kidnapping because federal trial was the reason for abducting him.
If federal agents had boarded a foreign ship on the high seas and in an act of piracy removed Matta from the ship to bring him to federal trial in Los Angeles, we would not have wanted a federal judge to be a party to the piracy by conducting the trial. No more do we want federal judges to be parties to kidnapping, to be cooperators and collaborators in the cruel violence by standing ready to receive the kidnappers as they turn over their prey to their intended recipients. In the Noriega case, where the military character of Noriega’s removal made judicial review impracticable, Judge Hoeveler wisely observed that otherwise the court would not be “helpless in the face of inhumane conduct shocking to the conscience.” United States v. Noriega, 746 F.Supp. 1506, 1536 (S.D.Fla.1990). He invoked the famous words of Justice Brandéis, which, uttered in dissent, have had a power that few majority opinions have achieved. They still speak eloquently here:
Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperilled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal— would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this Court should resolutely set its face.
Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 485, 48 S.Ct. 564, 575, 72 L.Ed. 944 (1928) (dissent), overruled by Berger v. New York, 388 U.S. 41, 87 S.Ct. 1873, 18 L.Ed.2d 1040 (1967).
This court has inherent supervisory powers to dismiss prosecutions in order to deter illegal conduct. See United States v. Hasting, 461 U.S. 499, 505, 103 S.Ct. 1974, 1978, 76 L.Ed.2d 96 (1983). The “illegality” deterred by exercise of our supervisory power need not be related to a constitutional or statutory violation.
[T]he scope of our reviewing power over convictions brought here from the federal courts is not confined to ascertainment of Constitutional validity. Judicial supervision of the administration of criminal justice in the federal courts implies the duty of establishing and maintaining civilized standards of procedure and evidence. Such standards are not satisfied merely by observance of those minimal historic safeguards for securing trial by reason which are summarized as “due process of law” and below which we reach what is really trial by force.
McNabb v. United States, 318 U.S. 332, 340, 63 S.Ct. 608, 613, 87 L.Ed. 819 (1943). In *775McNabb the Supreme Court, without reaching the constitutional issues, excluded from evidence confessions obtained from suspects after lengthy, uncounseled interrogation pri- or to being brought before a magistrate. In this pr e-Miranda case, Justice Frankfurter noted that “[t]he principles governing the admissibility of evidence in federal criminal trials have not been restricted ... to those derived solely from the Constitution.” Id. at 341, 63 S.Ct. at 613. McNabb’s pr e-Miranda posture provides helpful guidance to this post-Alvarez-Machain case because it teaches us that even where the Constitution does not explicitly prohibit certain reprehensible acts, federal courts exercising their supervisory powers must establish and maintain civilized standards.
The cases on which the majority relies do not address the exercise of our supervisory powers. United States v. Valot, 625 F.2d 308 (9th Cir.1980) dealt with an alleged abduction by DEA agents and spoke in the due process terms of Toscanino. Id. at 308-309. In United States v. Fielding, 645 F.2d 719 (9th Cir.1981) there was “no showing whatsoever that the United States participated in any of that conduct [the alleged torture and kidnapping in Peru].” Id. at 724. Leiterman v. Rushen, 704 F.2d 442 (9th Cir.1983) is even further off the mark, applying Toscanino due process criteria to the conduct of local police officers. Toscanino itself did not involve the conduct of United States Marshals, but a member of the police in Montevideo, Uruguay, allegedly paid by the United States. United States v. Toscanino, 500 F.2d at 269. No precedent stands in the way of our use of our supervisory powers here.
We must, of course, exercise these powers over our business, not someone else’s. United States v. Simpson, 927 F.2d 1088, 1091 (9th Cir.1991). We must exercise it for a recognized purpose — here, to deter future illegal conduct by the marshals. Id. The United States Marshals service is “a bureau within the Department of Justice under the authority and direction of the Attorney General.” 28 U.S.C. § 561. The marshals have the authority to act as sheriffs within a state, 28 U.S.C. § 564, to execute lawful writs, 28 U.S.C. § 566(c) and to “investigate” fugitive matters, 28 U.S.C. § 566(e)(1). The marshals are given no authority to abduct wanted persons from a foreign country. The governing statute provides that it is “the primary role and mission of the United States Marshals Service to provide for the security and to obey, execute, and enforce all orders of the United States District Courts, the United States Courts of Appeals and the Court of International Trade.” 28 U.S.C. § 566(a). When an agency whose primary mission is to obey our orders, and whose functions do not include overseas abductions, undertakes to kidnap from abroad a person for production in trial in a federal court, this action becomes our business. We are called to supervise cruel conduct designed to provide us with jurisdiction. We should not accept that jurisdiction except for one fact.
A decision of another federal court has broken the confinement caused by the abduction. After he was brought involuntarily to the United States, Matta was tried, convicted, and sentenced for various drug offenses; his conviction was affirmed in 1991. United States v. Matta, 937 F.2d 567 (11th Cir.1991). Matta’s continued presence in the Central District of California is the result of that conviction.
At the time of this earlier conviction the United States was not a party to the Convention Against Torture And Other Cruel, Inhuman Or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified in 1990, 136 Cong.Ree. S17491 (Oct. 27,1990) and operative thirty days after its deposit by the President with the United Nations on October 21, 1994. Multilateral Treaties Deposited With The Secretary-General, UN Doc. No. 571 Leg/SER.E/13, IV.9 (1995). The relevance of the Treaty has not been argued in this court. The federal courts in the Eleventh Circuit were not asked to exercise their supervisory authority over the United States Marshals by dismissing the indictment; so this argument was waived. Matta was lawfully tried, convicted and imprisoned. He stands before us not as the victim of an abduction (which he once was) but as a lawfully-held prisoner. Accordingly, we need not dismiss the case.