Court Opinion

ID: 9482202
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:43:10.337566+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:49.741183
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
The prosecutor urges us to hold that the exclusionary rule may not be used in sentencing, relying on 18 U.S.C. § 3661, which provides: “No limitation shall be placed on the information concerning the background, character, and conduct of a person convicted of an offense which a court of the United States may receive and consider for the purpose of imposing an appropriate sentence.” Unless this statute is unconstitutional, or negates only the ordinary rules of evidence, the exclusionary rule is inapplicable. Is § 3661 consistent with the fourth amendment? Two recent cases hold that it is. United States v. McCrory, 930 F.2d 63 (D.C.Cir.1991); United States v. Torres, 926 F.2d 321 (3d Cir.1991). On remand the district judge must decide whether to follow these decisions, if Jackson establishes that the search invaded his interests. I offer some thoughts for his consideration.
McCrory and Torres, like a few pre-guidelines cases, mention the possibility— which they neither embrace nor reject— that these courts might exclude evidence that the police illegally seized expressly for use in sentencing. Judge Silberman’s opinion concurring in McCrory observes that such an exception is chimerical. 930 F.2d at 72. Police do not mull over the potential uses of evidence, fix on a use, and then seize the evidence for that purpose. Officers have multiple purposes — they want to close down drug operations (even if no prosecution ensues), they want to get the goods that will help turn a dope peddler against his supplier, they want to facilitate convictions, they want to maximize sentences when convictions occur. It is inconceivable that any defendant will be able to show that the police had only one of these purposes in mind when making a seizure. None has been able to make such a showing in the 23 years since Verdugo v. United States, 402 F.2d 599, 611 (9th Cir.1968), raised the possibility.
It is awfully hard to see why motive should matter on either prudential or doctrinal grounds. Is the seizure less offensive to the Constitution, or is deterrence less important, when the police drain their minds of the possibility that the seizure will contribute to a conviction? As for *239doctrine: the fourth amendment establishes an objective standard. Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 397, 109 S.Ct. 1865, 1872, 104 L.Ed.2d 443 (1989); Maryland v. Macon, 472 U.S. 463, 470-71, 105 S.Ct. 2778, 2782-83, 86 L.Ed.2d 370 (1985); Scott v. United States, 436 U.S. 128, 136-38, 98 S.Ct. 1717, 1723, 56 L.Ed.2d 168 (1978). I think it most unlikely that the Supreme Court will admit intent through the back door in deciding whether to apply the exclusionary rule. Application is categorical: the exclusionary rule applies, or it doesn’t, to one or another juncture of litigation. Evidence is excluded from the prosecution’s case-in-chief, for example, but may be used as impeachment of the defendant or to support deportation. United States v. Havens, 446 U.S. 620, 100 S.Ct. 1912, 64 L.Ed.2d 559 (1980); INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032, 104 S.Ct. 3479, 82 L.Ed.2d 778 (1984). Not one of the Supreme Court’s opinions implies that the rule may apply when the police have one motive and dissolve when the police have a different one. Even United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984), the principal non-categorical exception to the rule, employs only objective criteria. Evidence seized on the authority of a warrant is admissible unless the warrant was so weak that reliance was “objectively” unreasonable, id. at 922, 104 S.Ct. at 3420, or unless the officers procuring the warrant misrepresented or withheld material facts, id. at 923, 104 S.Ct. at 3421. Neither of these exceptions makes anything of intent. “The exclusionary rule is a prophylactic: it applies across the board in situations where the incentives for the police and the deterrence provided by the rule are such that exclusion is required and without reference to what motivated the particular search in issue.” McCrory, 930 F.2d at 72 (Silberman, J., concurring).
Why invite a subjective inquiry that is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s approach to the fourth amendment and at all events a false hope to defendants? In the end we will have a simple answer: the exclusionary rule applies to sentencing, or it does not. Today the scope of the exclusionary rule depends on instrumental considerations, as Leon shows vividly. See also, e.g., Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340, 347, 107 S.Ct. 1160, 1165-66, 94 L.Ed.2d 364 (1987). Exclusion deters wrongdoing but also deprives the court of valuable evidence. How much of one goal to sacrifice in pursuit of the other is a difficult question. Congress answered it in favor of using the evidence, but that cannot be dis-positive, else Congress could abolish the exclusionary rule without putting anything in its place. If criminal prosecutions (or even disciplines) of officers who violated the fourth amendment were routine, or if victims of illegal searches received monetary balm, abrogation of the exclusionary rule would be attractive. See Richard A. Posner, Rethinking the Fourth Amendment, 1981 Sup.Ct.Rev. 49. But police carry out unreasonable searches and seizures without fearing so much as the loss of a day’s pay, and official immunity makes it next to impossible to recover damages. Immunity “provides ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 341, 106 S.Ct. 1092, 1096, 89 L.Ed.2d 271 (1986). So the victim anticipates no compensation, the offender no deterrence. Serious inroads on the exclusionary rule mean, as a practical matter, serious inroads on the fourth amendment.
Before November 1987 using illegally seized evidence in sentencing could not have been called a serious inroad on the exclusionary rule. Judges based their sentences on the crimes the prosecutor had proved plus the character of the defendant. To get a steep sentence the prosecutor needed to obtain a conviction on one very serious charge or multiple less serious ones. Excluding the evidence from the case in chief was a grievous, often mortal, blow. Today prosecutors often present at trial only a small fraction of the defendant’s provable conduct. The rest is reserved for sentencing. Instead of a wide-ranging inquiry into the defendant’s character in which “the punishment should fit the offender and not merely the crime”, Williams v. New York, 337 U.S. 241, 246-47, 69 S.Ct. 1079, 1082-83, 93 L.Ed. 1337 *240(1949), sentencing has become a focused inquiry into the defendant’s crimes. In drug cases the guidelines require the court to take into consideration all quantities sold or under negotiation as “part of the same course of conduct or common scheme or plan as the offense of conviction”. U.S.S.G. § lB1.3(a)(2). Our case is the norm: the prosecutor charged the defendants with distributing slightly more than 5 kilograms of drugs but asked for a sentence based on more than 50 (and the court imposed a sentence based on more than 15). Where once courts sentenced the offender and not the conduct, now courts sentence for crimes that were the subject of neither charge nor conviction. In proving such additional crimes, illegally seized evidence may play a central role — the same sort of role it used to play in supporting convictions on additional counts.
Changing the importance of conviction versus sentencing would not be troubling if statutes capped the effects of using illegally-seized evidence in sentencing. But the last five years have witnessed astounding increases in the maximum sentences for drug offenses. Until a few years ago the maximum penalty for distributing cocaine, no matter how much, was 15 years in prison, and the prisoner was eligible for parole after serving a third of that time. 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(A) (1982 ed.). Higher sentences could be meted out to kingpins, repeat offenders, or those who sold to minors or close to a school, but the maximum for simple distribution set the practical limit in most cases. How times have changed! The crime of which Jewel and Jackson were convicted, selling more than 5 kilograms of a mixture containing a detectable amount of cocaine, 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(l)(A)(ii)(I), carries a minimum of 10 years and a maximum of life. Parole has been abolished. If the police seize 5 kilograms legally and another 46 illegally, this statute, coupled with § lB1.3(a)(2), allows the court to impose a sentence of life imprisonment, just as if all of the drugs had been seized in compliance with the Constitution. Someone caught with any cocaine, no matter how little, faces 20 years without parole, 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(C). One with no prior convictions cannot receive 20 years under the guidelines until offense level 37, equivalent to 150 kilograms of cocaine (or 1.5 kilograms of crack). So if the police seize a smidgen of cocaine legally, the suspect can be locked up for 20 years if the police seize another 1500 grams of rock cocaine, or 150 kilograms of powered cocaine, in violation of the fourth amendment. By any account that would be a serious inroad on the exclusionary rule.
Judge Silberman recognized that to allow the use of unconstitutionally seized evidence in sentencing is to take “a big bite out of the exclusionary rule”, McCrory, 930 F.2d at 72, but was willing to masticate that possibility because, he thought, the Supreme Court is on the verge of scuttling the rule — perhaps even of overruling Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 81 S.Ct. 1684, 6 L.Ed.2d 1081 (1961). I do not read the Court’s cases so. A jurisdiction wanting to use unconstitutionally seized evidence has to create some substitute — whether careful training and discipline of the police, see Anthony G. Amsterdam, Perspectives on the Fourth Amendment, 58 Minn.L.Rev. 349, 428-29 (1974), or an expansion of civil liability. A combination of official immunity with official indifference to employees who violate the Constitution means that the exclusionary rule still has a vital role to play. I appreciate the arguments in Torres and McCrory but cannot resist the conclusion that if we do not apply the exclusionary rule in sentencing under the guidelines, the constitutional ban on unreasonable searches and seizures will become a parchment barrier.