Court Opinion

ID: 9498244
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:11:55.654879+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:42.290480
License: Public Domain

BYE, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concede that United States v. Hernandez-Hernandez, 384 F.3d 562 (8th Cir.2004) controls the outcome of the present case, but I write separately to voice my disagreement with its holding. Initially, something must be said in regards to the court’s confusing analysis in Hemandez-Hemandez. The court began by classifying the issue as one involving an illegal detention in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Id. at 565. The court then, after acknowledging the district court’s application of factors relevant to a Fourth Amendment analysis (Ramos factors), id., proceeded to analyze the case as one controlled by the Fifth Amendment, id. at 565-67 (discussing the Fifth Amendment cases of Oregon v. Elstad, 470 U.S. 298, 105 S.Ct. 1285, 84 L.Ed.2d 222 (1985) and Missouri v. Seibert, 542 U.S. 600, 124 S.Ct. 2601, 159 L.Ed.2d 643 (2004)). The court completed its discussion by inexplicably concluding factors seemingly relevant, to the Fourth Amendment intervened between the unwarned questioning (i.e., a Fifth Amendment Miranda issue) and the subsequent postwarning statements. Id. at 567.
This confusing analysis prompted Vega-Rico to argue Hernandez-Hernandez was decided under the Fifth Amendment’s exclusionary rule rather than the Fourth Amendment’s. If Vega-Rico is correct, Hemandez-Hemandez would not be controlling or persuasive because the Fourth Amendment requires a broader application of the exclusionary rule and a more exacting standard to purge the taint of a violation. United States v. Fellers, 397 F.3d 1090, 1094-95 (8th Cir.2005). My careful *981reading of the opinion, however, does not support Vega-Rico’s position. In my view, Hernandez-Hernandez was an illegal detention case.2 Although the court in Hernandez-Hernandez did not explain clearly why or how the defendant was illegally detained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, it presumably occurred when the trooper exceeded the scope of the traffic stop. Id. at 564. The unwarned statements made to the trooper and later to the border patrol agent were fruits of this unconstitutionally prolonged traffic stop. On appeal, the government apparently conceded, and rightfully so, the inadmissa-bility of these statements, which were made contemporaneously to the initial illegal detention and without the prophylactic warnings of Miranda. The government, however, did not concede the inadmissability of postwarning statements made five days after the initial illegal detention to a different border patrol agent at his INS office.
Without this concession, the court held the five-day delay between the initial illegality and the postwarning statement, along with the change in interrogating location and personnel were sufficient intervening circumstances to purge the taint of the initial illegality. Id. at 567. This holding has served to whittle away important constitutional protections by ignoring a key constitutional fact and by expanding the definition of intervening circumstances to include unilateral acts of law enforcement.
The court’s holding first whittled away important constitutional protections by overlooking the fact that the five-day interval between the Fourth Amendment violation and the postwarning statements was spent in custody. Id. at 564. This prolonged five-day period of incarceration cuts against the. confession being of free will and constitutes a more serious violation than the initial illegal seizure. Dunaway v. New York, 442 U.S. 200, 220, 99 S.Ct. 2248, 60 L.Ed.2d 824 (1979) (Stevens, J., concurring). In fact, “where no intervening circumstances are present, a long and illegal detention may in itself impel the defendant to confess.” People v. White, 117 Ill.2d 194, 111 Ill.Dec. 288, 512 N.E.2d 677, 688 (1987). During this five-day period of isolation, Hernandez-Hernandez had little or no contact with anyone other than law enforcement. This, isolation and other jailhouse conditions are less than ideal for the rational decision-making processes required to decide voluntarily and intelligently whether to confess. Cf. Clewis v. Texas, 386 U.S. 707, 712, 87 S.Ct. 1338, 18 L.Ed.2d 423 (1967). Thus, without an intervening circumstance, a court must assume the confession was, at least in part, prompted by these less than ideal jailhouse conditions. Dunaway, 442 U.S. at 220, 99 S.Ct. 2248 (Stevens, J., concurring).
The court then further whittled away important constitutional protections by expanding the definition of intervening circumstances to include unilateral acts of law enforcement. Prior to Hernandez-Hernandez I can find no other court which *982held unilateral acts of law enforcement to be intervening circumstances. See, e.g., Taylor v. Alabama, 457 U.S. 687, 692-98, 102 S.Ct. 2664, 73 L.Ed.2d 314 (1982) (rejecting an arrest warrant obtained by law enforcement ex parte as an intervening circumstance). All other intervening circumstance cases focus on the conduct of the suspect as in Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 491, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963), or the on the actions of a neutral party such as the judiciary as in Johnson v. Louisiana, 406 U.S. 356, 365, 92 S.Ct. 1620, 32 L.Ed.2d 152 (1972). Despite the government’s contention otherwise, the INS agent’s actions in seizing Hernandez-Hernandez and transporting him to another location for additional investigatory interrogation did not purge the taint of the initial constitutional violation, but exasperated it. In other words, the perpetrators of an illegal search or seizure tagging off to an agent from a different law enforcement agency is not an intervening circumstance, not an act of free will sufficient to purge the taint of an initial Fourth Amendment violation. White, 111 Ill.Dec. 288, 512 N.E.2d at 689. This is practically black letter law. See 6 Wayne R. LaFave, Search and Seizure: A Treatise on the Fourth Amendment § 11.4(b), at 298 (4th ed.2004). Thus, even in the absence of flagrant official misconduct, the government’s failure to show an intervening act of free will on the part of Hernandez-Hernandez required suppression of his postwarning statements which were proximately caused by the Fourth Amendment violation. But, even though I disagree with its holding, I find Hernandez-Hernandez indistinguishable from the present case. I therefore reluctantly concur in the judgment of the majority.

. Admittedly, certain statements within the opinion cause me to question my view. Particularly, the court’s reference in the concluding paragraph to unwarned questioning, rather than an illegal detention, as the event which triggered the need to purge the taint. Unwarned questioning is, of course, not a violation of the Fourth Amendment, but a violation of the Miranda warnings designed to protect Fifth Amendment rights. This reference to unwarned questioning was also preceded by a discussion of Fifth Amendment case law and by a statement on how the Seibert factors were similar to the Ramos factors. Id. at 566. Thus, I think it conceivable that the court’s analysis was a Fifth Amendment voluntariness inquiry which looked similar to, but was not, a Fourth Amendment analysis under Ramos.