Court Opinion

ID: 9480379
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:46:25.776651+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:39.225083
License: Public Domain

ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
To me, this is a case of exigent circumstances manufactured by law-enforcement agents. I believe that the motion to suppress should have been granted, and I therefore respectfully dissent.
The agents, having discovered illegal drugs in the package, caused it to be delivered to Johnson’s address. They placed in the package a transmitting device. Shortly after the package was taken into Johnson’s house, transmissions from the device stopped completely. The agents believed, rightly of course, that the device might have been found and dismantled. This led them to fear that other evidence would be destroyed. I see nothing about this chain of events to distinguish it from what might well have happened if the package had been delivered to the home of a completely law-abiding citizen. Such a citizen might have opened the package. He would then have discovered, no doubt to his complete puzzlement, a stack of index cards, a can of soda, a bottle of Maalox, and a transmitting device. Curiosity might well have led him to dismantle the device. In any event, he would surely have discovered it, and the agents would have known this, because the device would have sent a more rapid signal as the package was being opened. The agents would then have stormed the house, forced entry, and discovered nothing— nothing, that is, beyond an innocent person who had just opened a package that had been delivered to him and that he could have thought was intended for him. At most, we would have a case of someone who opened a package that he should have known was addressed to some other person. We would not have a case of a drug dealer reasonably supposed to be such according to information possessed by the officers before they broke into the residence.
It is not, as the Court concludes, irrelevant that the exigent circumstances relied upon by the police were foreseeable. The exigency lies not in the transmitter’s failure but in the transmitter’s presence. The officers decided upon this investigative strategy, and they are responsible for its likely result. See United States v. Munoz-Guerra, 788 F.2d 295, 298-99 (5th Cir.1986). People generally open the packages they receive. It was reasonably foreseeable that the package’s contents would be revealed upon delivery. It was reasonably foreseeable that the investigation would thus be revealed and an immediate entry required to preserve any evidence present. The genesis of the exigency claimed lies in the decision to replace the parcel’s contents — in spite of the replacement strategy’s probable consequences. The police, though well-intentioned, should be held accountable for manufacturing the urgency now appealed to as justifying their war-rantless entry.
*450I take some comfort in the Court’s careful distinction of this case from one in which the address on the package identified a real person at an accurate address. In such a case it would have been, as the Court says, “a serious omission for the agents not to have applied for a search warrant_” Ante at 445. But here, just as in the case put, there was no sufficient justification for entering the house by force. If someone should deliver a package to my house, bearing an incorrect but identifiable variant of my address, and I should be foolish enough to open it, I should be in exactly the same position that Mr. Johnson was in, so far as agents outside the house would have any reason to believe. This behavior by law-enforcement officers, in my view, is not “reasonable,” which is the touchstone of Fourth Amendment law.
There is a war on drugs, and we want to win it. But this war should be fought in accordance with rules. Otherwise, we may achieve victory, but it will be Pyrrhic.