Court Opinion

ID: 9705804
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 01:21:41.311956+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:15.717792
License: Public Domain

SANDSTROM, Justice,
concurring.
[¶ 32] I agree with the opinion of the Court. I write separately to note that the concurring and dissenting opinion here parallels the dissent in State v. Jacobson, 545 N.W.2d 152, 156 (N.D.1996) (Levine, S.J., dissenting). For reasons similar to those in my concurrence in Jacobson at 155, I disagree with the concurring and dissenting opinion.
[¶ 33] “The framers of North Dakota’s Constitution must have intended more protection under the North Dakota Constitution’s unreasonable searches and seizures clause than that of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, because otherwise the state provision is a meaningless redundancy.” So goes the argument. What the argument lacks is historical perspective.
[¶ 34] From its adoption, the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution was considered a limitation only on the federal government. It was not until 1961 that the United States Supreme Court, in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 81 S.Ct. 1684, 6 L.Ed.2d 1081 (1961), extended “the Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and to have excluded from criminal trials any evidence illegally seized” to the states. Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 148 and n. 6, 88 S.Ct. 1444, 20 L.Ed.2d 491 (1968).
[¶ 35] When the framers of North Dakota’s Constitution included an unreasonable searches and seizures clause, they were prohibiting the state from doing what the federal government was prohibited from doing. *853In view of then current federal constitutional jurisprudence, our framers were providing a real protection that would otherwise have been lacking.
[¶ 36] A review of the entire proceedings of our State Constitutional Convention offers not one word of support for the concept that the framers intended to do anything other than prohibit the state from doing what the federal government was prohibited from doing. Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the First Constitutional Convention of North Dakota (1889); Journal of the Constitutional Convention for North Dakota (1889).
[¶ 37] The concurring and dissenting opinion refers us to Mesehke and Spears, Digging for Roots: The North Dakota Constitution and the Thayer Correspondence, 65 N.D.L.Rev. 343 (1989), and Model Constitution (Peddrick Draft # ¾ 1889), 65 N.D.L.Rev. 415 (1989). The “Authorities” section of the Peddrick Draft # 2 reflects the origin of the unreasonable searches and seizures provision was “Penna., I, and Constitutions generally.” 65 N.D.L.Rev. at 481. There is nothing in our constitutional records or the jurisprudence of the time to support the concurring and dissenting opinion’s imputation of an exclusionary rule, let alone an exclusionary rule without a good faith exception, as the intent of our Constitutional Convention. Although Pennsylvania’s, in addition to constitutions generally, may have been a source secret drafters looked to, there is nothing to support the idea our Constitutional Convention knew it. If the delegates had looked to Pennsylvania law, they would have found no “exclusionary rule without any good faith exception” enunciated there. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court first “discovered” this principal over one hundred years after our North Dakota Constitution was adopted. Commonwealth v. Edmunds, 526 Pa. 374, 586 A.2d 887, 889 (Pa.1991). Certainly our drafters cannot fairly or reasonably be said to have intended an undiscovered interpretation, of one undisclosed source, used by secret drafters.
[¶ 38] Dale V. Sandstrom