Court Opinion

ID: 9482007
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:37:43.815227+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:42.677833
License: Public Domain

FLAUM, Circuit Judge,
with whom BAUER, Chief Judge, and HARLINGTON WOOD, Jr., RIPPLE and KANNE, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting.1
In its effort to develop a rationale for denying the Soldáis’ fourth amendment claim, the majority has produced a remarkable holding. The fourth amendment, it maintains, governs should police intrude upon your privacy by searching your home. Should they instead intentionally eliminate your privacy by participating in the carting away of your residence, the fourth amendment can have no bearing. With all due respect, I dissent.
The majority acknowledges that the police denied the Soldáis the privacy of their home, but maintains that the fourth amendment is concerned only with intrusions of privacy as the right to secrecy rather than as the right to solitude. To be sure, there is a distinction between these aspects of privacy, but not one that should bar the applicability of the fourth amendment in the limited and unique circumstances of this case.2 Along with the right to secret one’s effects, or words, or actions, the right of privacy encompassed by the fourth amendment protects — in Justice Brandéis’ words, dissenting in Olmstead — “the right to be let alone,” giving the individual the right to isolate himself from unreasonable government intrusions. In my view, there are few infringements of privacy greater than denying the enjoyment of one’s home. Arrests — in which police figuratively, and often literally, remove the individual from the home, in contrast to taking the home from the individual — involve the most comparable deprivation of privacy. An arrest gives police the right to search the individual, but the applicability of the fourth amendment’s protections to police conduct during arrests does not turn on whether or not they conduct a search incident to the arrest, so the invasion of privacy must be inherent in the arrest itself. The majority acknowledges the invasion of privacy inherent in arrests, ante at 1078, but does not address how an arrest invades privacy in any sense other than as an interference with the arrestee’s right to solitude.
The analogy between an arrest and the police involvement in the seizure of the Soldáis’ trailer is easily seen when we consider what happened to Edward Soldal the next day. When Mr. Soldal returned to the trailer park to retrieve two of his children (whom he had left with a neighbor for the night after he was evicted from the trailer park), police arrested him for trespassing. That seizure gave Mr. Soldal a fourth amendment claim, even though it was merely a continuation of the previous day’s attempts to evict the Soldáis from the trailer park. We all agree that Mr. Soldal has a valid fourth amendment claim because the arrest was made without probable cause to believe that he was a trespasser; why, then, does he not raise a valid fourth amendment claim with regard to the seizure of his home when police had no more basis for assisting in the eviction? Suppose that the police had been requested to usher Mr. Soldal and his family from the trailer park before their trailer was towed away. In that case, the Soldáis would have a fourth amendment claim stemming from the forcible removal from the premises; why should they lose the claim when police first help to remove their home, giving them no choice but to leave?
I am not, of course, suggesting that the seizure of any private property is an in*1083fringement of privacy, for most property affords little privacy to persons as opposed to their effects. Indeed, the home appears sui generis in this important but limited regard. Taking a pen does not compromise the privacy of its owner’s person, nor does seizing a container in which personal effects are stored. An automobile might, at one time, have been thought to afford privacy to its occupants (as well as to their possessions), but that era is past. Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128, 99 S.Ct. 421, 58 L.Ed.2d 387 (1979). By contrast, the right to privacy a home affords its residents, whether by sheltering their possessions or their persons from government interference, has always been at the core of the fourth amendment’s protections. “[T]he Court since the enactment of the Fourth Amendment has stressed ‘the overriding respect for the sanctity of the home that has been embedded in our traditions since the origins of the Republic,’ ” for it is the home that, more than any other location, “provide[s] the setting for those intimate activities that the Amendment is intended to shelter from government interference or surveillance.”' Oliver v. United States, 466 U.S. 170, 178-79, 104 S.Ct. 1735, 1741, 80 L.Ed.2d 214 (1984) (quoting Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 601, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 1387, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980) (emphasis supplied)).
The majority’s resort to United States v. Lindsey, 877 F.2d 777 (9th Cir.1989), puzzles me, as I conclude that the case clearly illustrates my point. The majority acknowledges that when, as in Lindsey, police secure a home without searching it, they violate the residents’ fourth amendment rights. The Soldáis allege that police violated their fourth amendment rights in almost exactly the fashion described in Lindsey — in both cases police action intruded upon the personal privacy of the occupants of the homes by eliminating their ability to isolate themselves within their residences — except that in this case instead of'physically occupying the house, it is as if the police surrounded the exterior of the home and denied the residents access to it.3 It seems to me that such an intrusion is every bit as “palpable” as the intrusion described in Lindsey.
In my judgment, the analogy to arrest leads to a broader, though no less telling, indictment of the majority’s position. I respectfully suggest that the fourth amendment is not concerned exclusively with privacy. Indeed, the Court expressly rejected that view in Katz v. United States, the case the majority heralds as the confirmation that privacy alone is the fourth amendment’s province. See 389 U.S. at 350, 88 S.Ct. at 510 (“[the Fourth Amendment] protects individual privacy against certain kinds of governmental intrusion, but its protections go further, and often have nothing to do with privacy at all.”). The analogy I draw between arrests and the seizure at issue in this case underscores the point. In the face of case law that states the proposition explicitly, the majority opinion recognizes that arrests implicate the fourth amendment not only because they invade privacy but also because they restrict liberty. Ante at 1080. Indeed, the opinion further observes that property seizures that infringe the property owner’s liberty to go about his business implicate the fourth amendment as well. Id. United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696, 103 S.Ct. 2637, 77 L.Ed.2d 110 (1983), makes that point, and it is an instructive case for this and other reasons.
In Place, police detained the luggage of a suspected narcotics trafficker for three days before they obtained a search warrant. The police took custody of the bags initially while they made arrangements to have a narcotics dog sniff them; after the *1084dog arrived and alerted to one of the bags some 90 minutes later, police retained the bags over the weekend until they could obtain a warrant from a magistrate on the following Monday morning. The Supreme Court held that although no search of the bags had occurred because the invasion of privacy entailed by the dog sniff was virtually nonexistent, 462 U.S. at 707, 103 S.Ct. at 2644, the bags had been unlawfully seized because the police had intruded “on both the suspect’s possessory interest in his luggage as well as his liberty interest in proceeding with his itinerary.” Id. at 708, 103 S.Ct. at 2645.
I find the majority’s nod to Place, ante at 1079, to be misplaced in light of the reasoning employed and the result reached by the Court in that case. If the detention of luggage for even 90 minutes was an unreasonable deprivation of liberty in Place, see 462 U.S. at 709-10, 103 S.Ct. at 2645-46, I cannot concur with the majority’s view that there was no deprivation of the Soldals’ liberty interests, reasonable or otherwise, when their home was illegally towed away. Place, whom the police had some reason to suspect of criminal activity, was inconvenienced by the loss of the clothing, personal effects, and, of course, the cocaine, his bags contained. The Soldáis, whom police had no reason to suspect of any wrongdoing whatsoever, were deprived of the occupancy of their home. The members of the majority apparently believe that Place suffered a greater loss. I do not.
Perhaps even more distressing than the majority’s conclusion that the police did not restrict the Soldals’ liberty is its acknowledgement that the police did disrupt their possessory rights. The concession is disturbing, because the majority goes on to hold that the disruption is not actionable under the fourth amendment because it was not attended by any invasion of privacy. That position strikes me to be at odds with the myriad cases in which the Supreme Court has affirmed that the fourth amendment’s proscription against unreasonable seizures shields the individual’s possessory interest in the property seized— an interest altogether different than the individual’s privacy interest in the property. The majority does not address the Court’s statement in Place that the seizure violated the fourth amendment because it unreasonably infringed “the suspect’s possessory interest in his luggage.” 462 U.S. at 708, 103 S.Ct. at 2645. Nor does it heed cases like Rakas v. Illinois, in which the Court explicitly recognized that although a search of a home (and by extension, a car) does not violate any legitimate expectations of privacy of visitors in the home, those visitors could nonetheless “contest the lawfulness of the seizure of evidence ... if their own property were seized during the search.” 439 U.S. 128, 142 n. 11, 99 S.Ct. 421, 430 n. 11, 58 L.Ed.2d 387 (1978). See also United States v. Salvucci, 448 U.S. 83, 91 n. 6, 100 S.Ct. 2547, 2552 n. 6, 65 L.Ed.2d 619 (1980) (“Legal possession of the seized good may be sufficient in some circumstances to entitle a defendant to seek the return of the seized property if the seizure, as opposed to the search, was illegal.”); United States v. Jackson, 585 F.2d 653, 657 (4th Cir.1978) (defendant’s ownership of a bag containing gambling receipts found in car belonging to another gave him standing to contest seizure of the bomb though not the search of the car) (citing United States v. Lisk, 522 F.2d 228, 230-31 (7th Cir.1975) (Stevens, J.), cert. denied, 423 U.S. 1078, 96 S.Ct. 865, 47 L.Ed.2d 89 (1976)). It devotes little attention to cases like United States v. Jacobsen, 466 U.S. 109, 104 S.Ct. 1652, 80 L.Ed.2d 85 (1984), in which the Court held that by asserting control over a package that had already been opened and searched by private parties, federal agents “seized” the package for purposes of the fourth amendment even though the agents did not invade the privacy of the package’s owner when they seized it. Id. at 120-21, 104 S.Ct. at 1660. See also Autoworld Specialty Cars v. United States, 815 F.2d 385, 389 (6th Cir.1987) (seizure by customs agents of automobiles displayed in public showroom subject to fourth amendment despite lack of invasion of privacy); United States v. Bagley, 772 F.2d 482, 490 (9th Cir.1985) (towing of lawfully parked car belonging to suspect who had not been *1085apprehended “constituted a seizure within the meaning of the fourth amendment”); United States v. Roberts, 644 F.2d 683, 688 (8th Cir.1980) (en banc) (seizure by police of marijuana discovered by private party in rental storage unit actionable under fourth amendment). The majority does suggest that Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U.S. 583, 94 S.Ct. 2464, 41 L.Ed.2d 325 (1974), supports its view, but does not explain that although no search or seizure took place when police obtained paint scrapings from the car, a seizure did occur when the police towed the car away. Id. at 593, 94 S.Ct. at 2470. Another seizure occurred when police assisted in towing the Soldáis’ home away.
The Court’s most recent affirmation, in 1990, of the fourth amendment’s applicability when government officials interfere with possessory interests is, I submit, also its most plain. Consider the language of Horton v. California, — U.S. -, 110 S.Ct. 2301, 110 L.Ed.2d 112 (1990):
The right to security in person and property protected by the Fourth Amendment may be invaded in quite different ways by searches and seizures. A search compromises the individual interest in privacy; a seizure deprives the individual of dominion over his or her person or property. The “plain view” doctrine is often considered an exception to the general rule that warrantless searches are unreasonable, but this characterization overlooks the important difference between searches and seizures. If an article is already in plain view, neither its observation nor its seizure would involve any invasion of privacy. A seizure of the article, however, would obviously invade the owner’s possessory interest.
110 S.Ct. at 2306 (footnotes and citations omitted; emphasis added). For that reason, the seizure at issue in Horton was subject to fourth amendment analysis. I see no way to square the Supreme Court’s view that seizures, even in the absence of an invasion of privacy, implicate the fourth amendment, with the majority’s view that they do not.
Unlike the majority, I do not read Hudson v. Palmer to have fundamentally altered this longstanding tenet of the Supreme Court’s fourth amendment jurisprudence. In that case, prison authorities seized a ripped pillow case found in an inmate’s cell during a “shakedown” search; the Court held that the prisoner did not have a cause of action under the fourth amendment. The majority says that Palmer shows the fourth amendment does not protect property interests because if it did the prisoner would have been able to invoke the fourth amendment to challenge the seizure of the pillowcase even if he were unable to challenge the search itself. Palmer’s result, however, was premised on the Court’s conclusion that prison inmates have neither privacy nor possessory rights in property maintained in their jail cells. 468 U.S. at 527-28 & n. 8, 104 S.Ct. at 3200-01 & n. 8 (rejecting seizure claim “for the same reasons”); id. at 538, 104 S.Ct. at 3206 (O’Connor, J., concurring) (“The fact of arrest and incarceration abates all legitimate Fourth Amendment privacy and possessory interests in personal effects_”); id. at 542, 544-45, 104 S.Ct. at 3208, 3209-10 (Stevens, J., dissenting) (rejecting majority’s position that prisoner’s have no privacy or possessory interests in their property); see also W. LaFave, Search and Seizure §§ 2.4(d), 10.9(a) (2d ed. 1987). The Court’s holding, then, was limited to the prison environment, making the case particularly unsuited to carry the burden heaped upon it by the majority.
Troubled as I am by the majority’s interpretation of binding precedent, consider why, under the majority’s approach, any seizure, whether made in the course of a law enforcement investigation or a civil property dispute, should be subject to the strictures of the fourth amendment. When police seize a suspect’s personal effects after a search, the seizure does not implicate the suspect’s right to privacy. As Horton and Place explain, and the majority apparently agrees, the invasion of privacy attends the search rather than the seizure. Why, then, does the majority treat a search as a prerequisite to a seizure under the fourth amendment? If the fourth amendment protects only privacy interests, it should not be employed to bar even those *1086seizures that have been preceded by a search since the seizure itself does not infringe privacy. The majority ties these two distinct concepts together because it assumes that a seizure is the object of the invasion of privacy — “police search in order to seize.” Ante at 1079. That assumption, I believe, misconceives the investigatory process. Police search to uncover information (therein lies the invasion of privacy); they seize for other reasons, usually to gather evidence to present at trial (therein lies the disruption of possession). This case illustrates another, albeit objectionable, reason police might seize private property. In neither case are seizures a necessary incident of a successful search — police can present evidence of the results of a search or investigation by means of their own testimony. Cf. United States v. Jacobsen, 466 U.S. 109, 119, 104 S.Ct. 1652, 1659, 80 L.Ed.2d 85 (1984). The fourth amendment governs seizures, but not, as the majority asserts, because they are inextricably bound up with searches.4 The reason is simply that the plain language of the fourth amendment guarantees the right to be secure against both “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
The fourth amendment guarantees that right to the average citizen as well as to the average criminal. The outcome of this case highlights the anomaly, to which I adverted in my original dissent to the panel opinion, created by the majority’s desire to restrict the scope of fourth amendment protections to cases in which the police, or other state actors, are engaged in investigative activity. That approach would extend greater fourth amendment protection to those suspected of crimes than to those against whom the police harbor no suspicions at all. See 923 F.2d at 1253. Unlike the majority, I do not find this to be a “superficial” concern. Neither, apparently, has the Supreme Court, which has found it necessary on repeated occasions to reiterate that the applicability of the fourth amendment does not turn on whether the victim of a search or seizure was the object of police suspicion. See, e.g., O’Connor v. Ortega, 480 U.S. 709, 714-15, 107 S.Ct. 1492, 1496, 94 L.Ed.2d 714 (1987) (searches and seizures by government employers of the private property' of employees subject to fourth amendment) (plurality opinion); Wyman v. Jones, 400 U.S. 309, 317, 91 S.Ct. 381, 385-86, 27 L.Ed.2d 408 (1971) (“one’s Fourth Amendment protection subsists apart from his being suspected of criminal behavior”); Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U.S. 523, 530-31, 87 S.Ct. 1727, 1732, 18 L.Ed.2d 930 (1967) (“even the most law-abiding citizen has a very tangible interest in limiting the circumstances under which the sanctity of his home may be broken by official authority”); Go-Bart Co. v. United States, 282 U.S. 344, 357, 51 S.Ct. 153, 158, 75 L.Ed. 374 (1931) (“[the fourth amendment] protects all, those suspected or known to be offenders as well as the innocent”); Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383, 392, 34 S.Ct. 341, 344, 58 L.Ed. 652 (1914) (“This protection reaches all alike, whether accused of crime or not....”).
To fully appreciate the incongruous nature of the majority’s position, one must also consider how this case might have played out had the police acted more reasonably. Imagine that the sheriffs had been less willing to accommodate the Sol-dais’ landlord when she told them that she wanted the Soldáis out because they were behind in their rent. Suppose that instead of immediately assisting the landlord’s employees, the police had forced Mr. Soldal to show them his lease, threatening to have his trailer towed away if he did not comply with their demand. Had the police done nothing further, they would certainly have *1087disrupted the lives of the Soldáis far less than they did when they helped to seize the trailer. And yet, under the majority’s view, the Soldáis might nevertheless have a fourth amendment cause of action — relating to the coerced “search” for the lease— when they would have no fourth amendment action if the police had dispensed with any investigation and had simply taken their cue from the landlord. Such a result, I suggest, has little to recommend it.
The majority nevertheless endorses this outcome. My colleagues apparently fear that recognizing the Soldals’ fourth amendment claim will unleash in the federal courts a torrent of litigation stemming from private repossessions.5 As I do not believe that government officials routinely ignore the law and evict people from their homes solely at the whim of private creditors, I do not share that concern. Even assuming for a moment that the incidence of such conduct is significant, it would not justify denying access to the federal courts to redress a meaningful constitutional injury. The majority’s concern stems from its insistence on characterizing this case as a “garden variety” property dispute, but when police embroil themselves in such disputes, I submit that they lose their generic quality. This is not, as the majority alleges, an ordinary dispute between landlord and tenant, nor is it a case in which the police merely tried to “keep the peace.” This is a troubling case in which the claim is that a landlord and the local police illegally teamed up to dislodge a man’s home from its moorings and towed it away simply because they both found him disagreeable. I see nothing ordinary about this course of events, nor can I view it as a simple case of jumping the gun on otherwise constitutional state procedures.
The majority claims that the Soldáis had other constitutional remedies available to them; their claim, says the court, is really a procedural due process claim that must be brought in state court if adequate remedies are available there. The Soldáis’ claim is no more a procedural due process claim, however, than is any fourth amendment claim; indeed, it is less so. A warrantless search may be “reasonable,” in the sense that it is based on probable cause, and nevertheless violate the fourth amendment simply because those conducting the search failed to comply with the warrant procedures prescribed by law. Katz, 389 U.S. at 356-57, 88 S.Ct. at 514. Here, the police neither complied with the eviction procedures required by law nor (so far as we know) had any basis for believing that the eviction was warranted substantively.
As I pointed out in my original panel dissent, the Court in Zinermon v. Burch used a fourth amendment violation as the paradigmatic example of a case in which a plaintiff “may bring a § 1983 action for an unlawful search and seizure despite the fact that the search and seizure violated the State’s Constitution or statutes, and despite the fact that there are common-law remedies_” 494 U.S. 113, 110 S.Ct. 975, 982-83, 108 L.Ed.2d 100 (1990). The Court explained that procedural due process claims are those in which “the deprivation by state action ... is not in itself unconstitutional.” Id. As we have seen, unreasonable seizures are unconstitutional in and of themselves, and Zinermon should therefore set to rest any attempt to invoke the availability of state remedies as a ground for denying fourth amendment claims.6 *1088This point was apparently not lost on the Soldáis, who never attempted to characterize their claim as one for procedural due process, a fact acknowledged in the original panel opinion. See 923 F.2d at 1248.
Zinermon notwithstanding, the majority claims that Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 109 S.Ct. 1865, 104 L.Ed.2d 443 (1989), supports its approach. Once again, however, the majority and I part company over precedent. I would argue that Graham does not, as the majority claims, stand for the principle that the dominant character of the conduct challenged in a section 1983 case determines the only constitutional standard under which the case may be evaluated; that would mean that civil rights plaintiffs would be obliged to choose a single constitutional provision in which to ground their suits, even when the alleged infringement encompasses more than one constitutional provision (say, for example, the first and fourth amendments, as in cases where the authorities seize allegedly obscene materials not for evidentiary purposes but simply to destroy them; these seizures must be reviewed under both the first and the fourth amendments — see Heller v. New York, 413 U.S. 483, 491, 93 S.Ct. 2789, 2794, 37 L.Ed.2d 745 (1973)). Graham is more accurately described, as it was in Schroeder v. City of Chicago, 927 F.2d 957, 961 (7th Cir.1991) (Posner, J.), as establishing a preference for grounding section 1983 actions in specific provisions of the bill of rights where possible rather than relying on the more inchoate protections afforded by the doctrine of substantive due process. See 490 U.S. at 395, 109 S.Ct. at 1871 (“Because the Fourth Amendment provides an explicit textual source of constitutional protection against this sort of physically intrusive governmental conduct, that Amendment, not the more generalized notion of ‘substantive due process,’ must be the guide for analyzing these claims.”). In this light, the majority’s view that Graham requires the Soldáis to rely on the due process clause in any fashion when they have a cause of action under the fourth amendment seems untenable.7
In an era in which “reasonable expectations of privacy” seem to be diminishing, preserving the sanctity of the home becomes all the more critical. We take too lightly “the right to be let alone” when we conclude that the fourth amendment has no possible relevance to a claim that deputy sheriffs, in contravention of the laws they are charged to know and uphold, helped roust a family from their home and cart it away at the behest of a trailer park manager. That is exactly the type of governmental intrusion that the fourth amendment regulates, whether we label the intrusion one of privacy, property, or liberty. The majority believes that we should recognize one more “fine distinction” in fourth amendment law — one that I find nowhere evident in the language of the amendment itself or the opinions of the Supreme Court — to stem an anticipated onslaught of fourth amendment poseurs. That belief provides little justification for hastening the demise of the most significant citadel of solitude available to Americans. The majority opinion does not merely nibble at the margins of the fourth amendment’s protections; it gnaws at their very core. Some thirty years ago, dissenting from the Supreme Court’s refusal to address the merits of a challenge to a Connecticut law prohibiting the use of contraceptives by married couples in Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 81 S.Ct. 1752, 6 L.Ed.2d 989 (1961), Justice Harlan anticipated and addressed precisely the argument the majority surfaces today, and I cannot improve upon his analysis:
[I]t must be acknowledged that there is another sense in which it could be argued that this intrusion on privacy differs from what the Fourth Amendment ... [was] intended to protect: here we have not an intrusion into the home so much as on the life which characteristically has its place in the home. But to my mind *1089such a distinction is so insubstantial as to be captious: if the physical curtilage of the home is protected, it is surely as a result of solicitude to protect the priva-cies of the life within. Certainly the safeguarding of the home does not follow merely from the sanctity of property rights. The home derives its preeminence as the seat of family life.
Id. at 551, 81 S.Ct. at 1781. The majority’s opinion compromises that preeminence, and I am therefore obliged to dissent.

. My dissent is directed toward only the Soldal's fourth amendment claim regarding the seizure of their trailer. As I indicated in my dissent to the panel opinion, I concur in the remand of Mr. Soldal’s fourth amendment claims arising from the subsequent unlawful arrests.

. To the extent that the fourth amendment affords different degrees of protection to these aspects of privacy, a stronger argument can be made for extending greater protection to the right of privacy as solitude rather than as secrecy. See R. Posner, Economic Analysis of Law 639 (3d ed. 1986).

. In my view the distinction is largely irrelevant to fourth amendment analysis. Securing a home is a seizure that intrudes upon the solitude of the residents whether accomplished by an entry into the home or by surrounding its perimeter. Similarly, both methods "interfere to the same extent with the possessory interests of the owners.” Segura v. United States, 468 U.S. 796, 811, 104 S.Ct. 3380, 3389, 82 L.Ed.2d 599 (1984) (Burger, C.J., joined by O’Connor, J.). More on this in a moment. In any event, whether it constitutes an invasion of privacy as solitude, an interference with possession, or both, securing a home is actionable under the fourth amendment, and that is the point recognized by the court in Lindsey.

. To be sure, that a seizure has been preceded by a lawful invasion of privacy can be relevant to whether the seizure itself is reasonable. See Jacobsen, 466 U.S. at 120-22, 104 S.Ct. at 1660-61. But that is not to say that the applicability of the fourth amendment turns on an invasion of privacy but only that whether there has been a lawful invasion of privacy bears upon whether a subsequent seizure comports with the amendment’s requirement of reasonableness. In the same way, the length of the deprivations suffered may be relevant to the reasonableness of the police actions, but not to the question of whether the fourth amendment applies at all. Place, 462 U.S. at 708-09, 103 S.Ct. at 2645.

. Judge Easterbrook goes the majority one better, raising the specter that recognizing the Sol-dais' fourth amendment claim would open the flood gates to negligence claims clothed in the fourth amendment. Specter it is, though, because a seizure is the product of an intentional application of force, a point California v. Hodari D., — U.S.-, 111 S.Ct. 1547, 113 L.Ed.2d 690 (1991), underscores.

. Respectfully, Judge Easterbrook’s reference to Elkins v. United States, 364 U.S. 206, 80 S.Ct. 1437, 4 L.Ed.2d 1669 (1960), puts the cart before the horse. The issue here is whether there has been a seizure within the meaning of the fourth amendment, not whether the seizure was reasonable. Elkins states that compliance with state procedures is not the benchmark of fourth amendment reasonableness. It, like Zinermon, rejects the view that the fourth amendment’s scope depends on either the availability or adequacy of state procedures. As for the "reasonableness” of the seizure, I note only that the majority opinion acknowledges that the deputies did more than "keep the peace” and that we have held that in damages suits for alleged civil *1088rights violations involving the fourth amendment, the reasonableness of police action is a question of fact for the jury. Llaguno v. Mingey, 763 F.2d 1560, 1565 (7th Cir.1985) (en banc).

. This is particularly true in light of the fact that the Soldáis raised a substantive due process claim, but the original panel majority chose not to address it. See 923 F.2d at 1251.