Court Opinion

ID: 9503254
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-06 19:39:09.719071+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:03:20.998189
License: Public Domain

DURHAM, J.,
concurring.
I join the majority’s answer to the narrow issues that it decides in this case. However, I do not join much of the reasoning that the majority uses to arrive at its answer, and I write separately to explain the basis for this concurrence.
This case concerns the admissibility of two categories of evidence: (1) evidence obtained from a consent search of defendant’s person, and (2) statements that defendant made to the police after they advised defendant of his rights under Miranda v. Arizona, 384 US 436, 86 S Ct 1602, 16 L Ed 2d 694 (1966), as well as other drug-related evidence obtained from defendant’s backpack as a consequence of those statements to the police. The majority concludes that unlawful police conduct — an unconstitutional seizure of defendant — tainted the consent search of defendant’s person and that the later delivery of Miranda warnings was inadequate to sever the causal link between the unlawful seizure and the incriminating statements and drug evidence found in defendant’s backpack. Those admissibility determinations, according to the majority, each find their root in the conduct of the police officer in requesting defendant’s consent to search his person during the unlawful seizure.
Applying State v. Hall, 339 Or 7, 115 P3d 908 (2005), and its progeny, the majority decides that the trial court should have suppressed all evidence that came to light during the events that followed the seizure. The majority stresses, however, that the key issue that it decides concerning the initial consent search is a narrow one concerning causation, and *640that no issue exists here about whether Hall was correctly decided. The majority states:
“Before we begin our analysis of the legal issues presented in this case, we pause to observe how limited the state, as petitioner here, has chosen to make them. First, the state has not asked this court to reconsider Hall. Second, the state does not argue that the Court of Appeals was wrong to conclude that the state had not met its burden to show that the consent would have occurred independent of the illegality or that the connection between the unlawful stop and the consent was attenuated. Rather, as the state has presented the case to this court, the only issues are whether (1) defendant met his initial burden to show a minimal factual nexus between the unlawful police conduct and his consent to search, and whether (2) the giving of Miranda warnings was a sufficient intervening circumstance, standing alone, to mitigate the taint of the preceding unlawful police conduct on defendant’s later statements about the evidence in the backpack. We turn to those issues.”
348 Or at 628 (emphasis in original).
In response to the majority’s narrow statement of the issue here, the dissent seeks to distinguish the factual circumstances in Hall from those presented here, all in an effort to demonstrate that the causal link between the unlawful stop and defendant’s voluntary consent to a search of his person was weak or nonexistent. In arguing that point, the dissent acknowledges that this case presents only a question of the factual nexus between the police illegality and the consent search, and does not raise a challenge to the correctness of Hall:
“This case does not require us to decide whether Hall was correctly decided, and the state has not asked to reexamine that decision. Rather, the state argues, and I would hold, that any causal connection in this case between the retention of defendant’s identification and defendant’s decision to consent is so much weaker than it was in Hall that we should give effect to defendant’s voluntary consent to the patdown search.”
348 Or at 647 (Kistler, J., dissenting) (footnote omitted).
*641I dissented in Hall, arguing that the majority there had distorted the relevant legal analysis when the police, after committing an illegality, obtain incriminating evidence against a defendant. 339 Or at 37 (Durham, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). I contended that new mode of analysis adopted in Hall was not supported by any existing precedent, state or federal, and that the reasoning in Hall would lead to the needless suppression of evidence obtained by the police with the specific, voluntary consent of the owner or possessor of the evidence. More recently, I dissented from the court’s extension of the Hall paradigm to the arena of the traffic stop. State v. Rodgers / Kirkeby, 347 Or 610, 631, 227 P3d 695 (2010) (Durham, J., dissenting).
This case specifically concerns the application of the part of the Hall analysis that obliged defendant to demonstrate that a factual link exists between his unlawful detention by the police officer and, later, the officer’s request for consent to conduct a patdown search of defendant’s person. The state raises no claim that the Hall court erred in creating that requirement. Given the temporal and physical circumstances of the stop and the officer’s request, the majority has the better of the argument on that point. Therefore, I join the majority’s conclusion that defendant met his initial burden, as described in Hall.
Further, I join the majority’s second conclusion, which follows from its first, that a Miranda warning alone was not sufficient to nullify the causal link between the initial police illegality and the statements and drug-related evidence that defendant seeks to suppress. I do not join in the majority’s recital at length of the rationale in the Hall line of cases that has nothing to do with the disposition of this case.
The court, in the future, may face other arguments that question the logic of Hall and its progeny in ways that this case does not. This court has stated: '
“[W]e remain willing to reconsider a previous ruling under the Oregon Constitution whenever a party presents to us a principled argument suggesting that, in an earlier decision, this court wrongly considered or wrongly decided the issue in question. We will give particular attention to arguments that either present new information as to the meaning of *642the constitutional provision at issue or that demonstrate some failure on the part of this court at the time of the earlier decision to follow its usual paradigm for considering and construing the meaning of the provision in question.”
Stranahan v. Fred Meyer, Inc., 331 Or 38, 54, 11 P3d 228 (2000). Counsel for any party who chooses to challenge the correctness of the decision in Hall in a future case is well-advised to bear in mind the guidance that this court provided in Stranahan for that endeavor.
For the reasons stated above, I concur in the majority’s decision.