Court Opinion

ID: 9487384
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:15:07.956662+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:14.195838
License: Public Domain

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
As our dissenting colleague points out, no one likes being pressured by strangers while performing bodily functions; it can be a degrading experience. But despite the strong implication in the dissent’s opening paragraph, there is no evidence that anything like that took place here. The record reflects only that Gonzalez-Rincon was left in an examination room with a single female agent, and that she was taken to the restroom four times to attempt a bowel movement. During the last of these efforts she passed blood, at which time she was seen by a doctor who helped her remove an astonishing quantity of drugs from her alimentary canal. Nothing in the record supports the notion that Gonzalez-Rincon was required to defecate in front of others, or that anyone hurried her along or cajoled her in any way. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that Gonzalez-Rincon was subjected to embarrassment significantly greater than that endured by millions of people who use public restrooms every day. To be sure, she knew the results would be examined, and to that end she was not allowed to use a flushable toilet. But is this “necessarily more degrading” than a strip search, Dissent at 870, where the suspect is taken into a small room by total strangers and required to partially disrobe so they can pat down and examine her private parts? See ER 76-83.
Which is not to deny that the monitored bowel movement is an intrusive procedure, nor to suggest that it should be lightly approved. But the reasons for allowing the procedure are compelling, and they are by no means limited to effective law enforcement. To understand what’s at stake, one must consider the vastly increased sophistication and persistence of those who use alimentary canal carriers to import illegal drugs into the United States. Gone are the days when body-packers could be detected by external signs, such as petroleum jelly smeared around the buttocks or the use of adult diapers. See United States v. Montoya de Her*867nandez, 473 U.S. 531, 534, 105 S.Ct. 3304, 3306, 87 L.Ed.2d 381 (1985) (“two pairs of elastic underpants”); United States v. Cameron, 538 F.2d 254, 256 (9th Cir.1976) (“lubricant in the rectal area”); Huguez v. United States, 406 F.2d 366, 370 (9th Cir.1969) (“greasy substance” on appellant’s buttocks). Today’s drug smuggler assiduously avoids such telltale signals; Gonzalez-Rincon herself was subjected to a close visual inspection of her anus and genital area, and then performed five knee squats, yet showed no external evidence that she was carrying drugs inside her body. RT (5/24/93) 49-50. Drugs might nevertheless be detected nonintrusively by means of x-rays, but drug lords have hit on the idea of using pregnant women who can’t safely be exposed to radiation. The choice we face in eases like this is therefore simple: Subject the suspected smuggler to a monitored bowel movement or let her go.
Selecting the latter choice, as the dissent suggests we should, see Dissent at 870 n. 1, would have profound consequences. Not only would we be capitulating to the importation of large quantities of illegal drugs by these unseemly means, but we would also create a major incentive to use only pregnant women as alimentary canal carriers. The calculus for drug dealers would be straightforward enough: If you use a man as a courier and he comes under suspicion, he will be x-rayed and you can kiss your shipment good-bye; but if you use a pregnant woman, the worst that’s likely to happen is that she will be put on the next plane back with the shipment intact. Given the staggering value of some of these shipments, see RT (6/2/93) 126-28 (street value of the cocaine Gonzalez-Rincon discharged estimated at $200,000), only the most humanitarian of drug lords would eschew pregnant women as their carriers of choice.
Even putting aside all considerations of law enforcement — though these certainly are not trivial — -it strikes me as utter folly to adopt a policy that will have the effect of luring poor pregnant women into stuffing their bodies with massive quantities of dangerous drugs. Experience has shown that the containers in which drugs are carried are not foolproof; packages have been known to rupture or leak, severely intoxicating or killing' the carrier. See Sue Leeman, Many Nigerian Women Pay with Lives in Risky British Drug Traffic, L.A. Times, Feb. 7, 1993, at A24. At least one pregnant woman has lost her life trying to smuggle drugs in this fashion, delivering a premature, cocaine-poisoned child as she died. See Cocaine Baby’s Condition Upgraded to Serious, UPI, Oct. 12, 1991, available in LEXIS, News library, UPI file. And given that mules have been known to carry as many as one hundred separate containers of drugs at a time— Gonzalez-Rincon herself had 73 balloons and two cannisters filled with cocaine — the risk that one or more of these will leach poison into the body of the carrier is far from trivial. See Pregnant Women Smuggle Cocaine in Stomachs, UPI, Feb. 27, 1990, available in LEXIS, News library, UPI file. Such mishaps are common enough to have been the subject of commentary in medical journals. See, e.g., Punit S. Ramrakha & Ian Barton, Drug Smuggler’s Delirium: Suspect Cocaine Intoxication in Travellers with High Fever and a Bizarre Mental State, 306 Brit.Med.J. 470 (1993).
It’s bad enough when adults expose themselves to these risks, but at least it is a decision they have made for themselves. A fetus, undergoing the delicate process of development — forming a nervous system, internal organs, limbs — is not only more susceptible to minute traces of drugs that might be released in the mother’s body, but it also has no say in the matter. A policy that makes it good business for drug dealers to use pregnant women as carriers will vastly increase the human suffering that results from this grotesque practice, and the brunt of that suffering will fall on desperately poor women and their unborn babies.
I fully agree with the dissent’s basic sentiment, which is that we must minimize the affront to human dignity that results from any contact search, including a monitored bowel movement. If the suspected courier were subjected to unnecessary indignities, such as those hypothesized in the opening paragraph of the dissent, that certainly would bear on the reasonableness of the search. See Cameron, 538 F.2d at 257-59 *868(body cavity search too intrusive). But where the suspect is simply kept under observation and asked to produce a fecal specimen, the intrusion is no more serious than necessary. Subjecting Gonzalez-Rineon to a monitored bowel movement was surely no minor intrusion, but doing otherwise would invite assaults on the dignity and safety of countless other pregnant women and their unborn infants.
We are forced to this sad choice by unscrupulous and exploitative drug smugglers, but we dare make it only one way.