Court Opinion

ID: 9756360
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 21:25:37.922945+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:20.530232
License: Public Domain

NEBEKER, Associate Judge
(concurring) :
I concur in the holding of the court in this case because the case law applicable to these facts compels it. I wonder, however, whether contemporary application of the suppression doctrine does not overemphasize the question of the reasonableness of the officer’s action as it relates to an intrusion on constitutional rights vel non, and excludes consideration of other relevant factors. While no one questions that an officer of the state must, in relation to a citizen, act reasonably under the circumstances, it may also be that the suppression rule might be applied without doing violence to the Fourth Amendment with some deference to reasonableness in relation to the degree of intrusion by the officer and the extent of his good faith. Indeed, with so much judicial deliberation and time expended in evaluating split-second judgments by police, this area of constitutional interpretation could well become justifiably subject to the kind of criticism the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham leveled at eighteenth century English law. In being most critical of what he viewed as technical judge-made law of that time, he compared it to law which one makes for his dog, “. . . you wait till he does it and then beat him . . . this is the way judges make laws for you and me.” 1 The effect of the holding in this case is to “beat” the *710officer and thus the state for doing something that we now say was wrong, but which in total context was not wholly unreasonable or a gross intrusion on personal security, and certainly not rooted in bad faith.
The officer said that in “my particular district, I have been taught that that’s the normal hiding place for any type of narcotics, weapons or such, and just out of habit I reached under the front seat.” Experience in numerous cases in most courts vindicate that lesson. Because reaching under the front seat while lawfully having custody of the car cannot be justified by what we deem to be the equivalent of “specific and articulable facts”2 — that the reach was for security purposes or reasonably aimed at contraband — we hold that a constitutional right has been violated. We do not stop to consider whether this reach beneath the seat was in good faith and based on experience, as is the case here, or whether the reach was born of a callous and vindictive frame of mind. We do not stop to consider whether the intrusion is of minor or major proportions.3 Looking to this single aspect of reasonableness, we afford this appellant total immunity from prosecution.
Perhaps there will come a time when legislation or interpretative decision will apply the suppression rule under the Fourth Amendment by balancing the reasonableness of the officer’s conduct in the specific situation with the degree and nature of the intrusion and the consequences of suppression. It may be that at the same time there must be created other effective sanctions which can deal appropriately with police misconduct in proportion to the extent of and motivation for the intrusion.

. ID. Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 279 (1900).

. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 21, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968).

. Some support for measuring the degree of the intrusion can be found in Terry v. Ohio, supra note 2, where that Court characterized the “traditional responsibility” of courts as guarding against “overbearing or harassing” police conduct. Id. at 15. To be sure, that opinion also spoke of conduct which “trenches upon personal security without objective evi-dentiary justification”. But when read in context with the phrase “overbearing or harassing” it would seem that the Supreme Court may have had in mind a weighing of the degree of intrusion.