Court Opinion

ID: 9482586
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:55:10.102863+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:05.512362
License: Public Domain

WALD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting as to Part III:
I disagree with the panel ruling that a citizen’s consent to a search of his “person” on a public thoroughfare, given in response to a police request made in the absence of probable cause or even “reasonable suspicion” to believe that he has committed a crime, encompasses authority to conduct a palpation of the person’s genital area in an effort to detect drugs. Because I believe that in this case such an intimate and intrusive search exceeded the scope of any general permission to search granted, I would find the search nonconsensual and the drugs seized inadmissible.
The majority uses the test for scope of consent to search set out in Florida v. Jimeno, — U.S.-, 111 S.Ct. 1801, 1804, 114 L.Ed.2d 297 (1991), which dealt with the search of a car, i.e., “the scope of a search is generally defined by its expressed object.” It reasons therefrom that since the search here was for drugs, and drugs are frequently secreted in the crotch of carriers, a citizen’s permission to search his “person” in public automatically includes the genital area. The majority goes on to acknowledge, however, that “we doubt the Supreme Court would have us apply the [■Jimeno ] test unflinchingly in the context of body searches.” Majority opinion (“Maj. op.”) at 297. The majority realizes that, applied “unflinchingly,” the Jimeno test could encompass disrobing, and even more intimate probings than were attempted here, and that such consequences would be unacceptable, if not unthinkable, in our society. Thus they say that “at some point” a body search would become so intrusive as not to come within a generalized consent, and that point might be reached in an “everything up to and including a search of body cavities.” But, the majority concludes, “a continuous sweeping motion over Rodney’s outer garments, including ... his crotch area” fell short of that taboo. Maj. op. at 298. Such a search is no more invasive, they say, than the typical pat-down that accompanies a Terry stop- and-frisk. See Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968). And finally, the majority distinguishes the search here from the situation in United States v. Blake, 888 F.2d 795 (11th Cir.1989), where the Eleventh Circuit found a search involving a “frontal touching” of the genital area not included within a general consent to search, although leaving open the question of whether the traditional Terry frisk search would be.
I share the majority’s reticence to extend to body searches the “scope equals object” test for consent. The Supreme Court has historically recognized that privacy interests of a person in her body are far greater than in the space that surrounds her or the property in her possession or control. See Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757, 767-68, 86 S.Ct. 1826, 1833-34, 16 L.Ed.2d 908 (1966) (noting that although fourth amendment makes no distinction between its protection of “persons, houses, papers and effects ...” intrusions upon the human body are treated differently from “state *300interferences with property relationships or private papers — ‘houses, papers, and effects’ ”); Winston v. Lee, 470 U.S. 753, 761-62, 105 S.Ct. 1611, 1617-18, 84 L.Ed.2d 662 (1984) (noting that “intrusions upon the individual’s dignitary interests in personal privacy and bodily integrity” are different from intrusions into living room, eavesdropping on telephone conversations, or restricting person’s mobility); see also Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Dept. of Health, — U.S. -, 110 S.Ct. 2841, 2856, 111 L.Ed.2d 224 (1990) (O’Connor, J., concurring) (noting special treatment in fourth amendment jurisprudence of human body). As the Jimeno Court phrased it: “the standard for measuring the scope of a [defendant’s consent under the Fourth Amendment is that of ‘objective reasonableness’— what would the typical reasonable person have understood by the exchange between the officer and the [defendant]?” Jimeno, 111 S.Ct. at 1803-04. Thus while it may be “objectively reasonable” to expect that a citizen who consents to the search of his car for drugs means to include all spaces in his car where drugs might be hid, it is not “objectively reasonable” to expect that a citizen on a public street who consents to a police search anticipates that all potential hiding places for drugs in his body including the genital area, or in the case of a woman, her breasts and genital area, will be manually searched. Far more likely, I suspect, is that the cooperative citizen anticipates a pat-down of the outside surfaces of the body and an emptying of pockets. Anything more intimate than that inevitably invokes the expectation of a more private place to which the citizen would be taken, i.e., a bathroom or separate enclosure, which in turn would require an additional consent from the citizen to go there. The majority’s reliance on the fact that this kind of “body search” is less intrusive than other kinds, i.e., cavity searches and strip searches, therefore becomes largely irrelevant because those more intrusive searches would never in anyone’s wildest imagination be expected to take place on a public street.
Furthermore, it does not move our inquiry ahead to say, as the majority does, that a frisk of a person’s genitals through his clothing is not a “full search” (whatever that means), or that a “fully-clothed” body search is “not unusually intrusive ... relative to body searches generally.” Maj. op. at 298. The issue before us is whether a person against whom there is no articula-ble suspicion of wrongdoing who is asked to submit to a body search on a public street expects that search to include manual touching of the genital area.
I do not believe any such expectation exists at the time a cooperative citizen consents to an on-the-street search. Rather, that citizen anticipates only those kinds of searches that unfortunately have become a part of our urban living, searches ranging from airport security personnel passing a hand-held magnometer over a person’s body, to having a person empty his pockets, and subject himself to a patting-down of sides, shoulders, and back. Any search that includes touching genital areas or breasts, would not normally be expected to occur in public.
In all aspects of our society, different parts of the body are subject to very different levels of privacy and expectations about intrusions. We readily bare our heads, arms, legs, backs, even midriffs, in public, but, except in the most unusual circumstances, certainly not our breasts or genitals. On the streets, in elevators, and on public transportation, we often touch, inadvertently or even casually, each others’ hands, arms, shoulders, and backs, but it is a serious affront, and sometimes even a crime, to intentionally touch another’s intimate body parts without explicit permission; and while we feel free to discuss other people’s hair, facial features, weight, height, noses or ears, similar discussions about genitals or breasts are not acceptable. Thus in any consensual encounter, it is not “objectively reasonable” for a citizen desiring to cooperate with the police in a public place to expect that permission to search her body includes feeling, even “fully clothed,” the most private areas of her body. Under our social norms that requires “special permission,” given with notice of the areas to be searched.
*301The majority dismisses the search here as not intolerable, however, because similar searches occur, even in public, pursuant to Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868. First of all, Terry itself conceded that the search it authorized constituted “a serious intrusion upon the sanctity of the person, which may inflict great indignity and arouse strong resentment, and it is not to be undertaken lightly.” 392 U.S. at 17, 88 S.Ct. at 1877; accord United States v. Blake, 888 F.2d at 801 (Shoob, J., concurring) (describing search of genital area without explicit consent as “outrageous[ ] conduct” by police officers, likely to lead to “fists thrown by indignant [persons] subjected to these searches”). Second, it is well to remember why the Court found such an intrusive public search to be permissible in certain circumstances: it was to protect the officer from ambush by hidden weapons in the custody of a person reasonably suspected of a crime. As the Supreme Court put it:
The crux of this case ... is ... whether there was justification for [the officer’s] invasion of Terry’s personal security by searching him for weapons. We are now concerned with more than the governmental interest in investigating crime; ... there is the more immediate interest of the police officer in taking steps to assure himself that the person with whom he is dealing is not armed with a weapon that could unexpectedly and fatally be used against him.
Terry, 392 U.S. at 23, 88 S.Ct. at 1881. In consensual searches of citizens against whom there is no suspicion of crime, there is correlatively no comparable need for the officer to protect himself by doing a weapons pat-down. And even the kind of weapons search described in Terry must by its very nature be less intimate and intrusive than the manual search of a person’s genital area for any small bump which might turn out to be a glassine envelope or a small rock of crack. In sum, Terry does not purport to define the limits of a cooperating citizen’s right to privacy; it defines the balance between a suspect’s right to privacy and the need of the police to protect themselves from ambush. The Terry authorization cannot, therefore, provide the safe haven for the police search of the intimate body parts of an ordinary citizen against whom there is no suspicion of crime.
Nor can the mere fact that drug couriers often hide their stash in the crotch area justify the search of such area without some elementary form of notice to the citizen that such an offensive procedure is about to take place. The ordinary citizen’s expectation of privacy in intimate parts of her body is certainly well enough established to merit a particularized requést for consent to such an intimate search in public. The Eleventh Circuit so found, and I do not find my colleagues’ attempt to distinguish that case persuasive. Whether the “touching” begins in the genital area, or ends up there after an initial “sweep” along the legs hardly seems material to the intensity of the intrusion; and indeed we cannot be sure at all from the record here that this search was really the equivalent of a Terry pat-down, which the Blake court did not reach; or something more intrusive. In any case, I agree with Judge Shoob’s concurring opinion in Blake that “intimate searches may not occur as part of random stops absent explicit and voluntary consent.” 888 F.2d at 801 (Shoob, J., concurring).
Although the Supreme Court said in Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218, 230-31, 93 S.Ct. 2041, 2049-50, 36 L.Ed.2d 854 (1973), that the fourth amendment does not require a “knowing waiver” of the right to refuse as a prerequisite to a valid consent to search, that case does not purport to lay down the ground rules for noticing a knowing consent of an intimate body search.1 Minimally, in my view, fourth *302amendment protection of a nonsuspect citizen’s reasonable expectations of privacy requires that the police indicate that the search will entail a touching of private areas. See Anthony Amsterdam, Perspectives on the Fourth Amendment, 58 Minn. L.Rev. 349, 390 (1974) (advocating that “the protection of the amendment be graduated, imposing lesser or greater restraints upon searches and seizures in proportion to their intrusiveness and to the sanctity of the interests they invade”).
A general consent to a search of a citizen’s “person” in a public place, does not include consent to touch the genital or breast areas. The majority today upholds a practice that allows police under the rubric of a general consent to conduct intimate body searches, and in so doing defeats the legitimate expectations of privacy that ordinary citizens should retain during cooperative exchanges with the police on the street. I believe the search was impermissible under the fourth amendment, and the drugs seized should have been suppressed.

. For example, in tort law, a physician who touches parts of the body to which the patient has not consented, subjects himself to an action for common-law battery. The doctrine of informed consent begins with the general princi-pie that a physician must obtain the patient’s consent before touching any parts of the patient’s body. For the consent to be valid, it must be voluntary and informed, i.e., the doctor must explain the details of the procedure, and *302accurately describe those parts of the body that will be intruded upon. See Fowler Harper, Fleming James 8c Oscar Gray, The Law of Torts, § 3.10, at 301 & n. 20 (2d ed. 1986); W. Page Keeton et al., Prosser and Keeton on the Law of Torts § 32, at 189-92 (5th ed. 1984).