Court Opinion

ID: 9490990
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:00:47.793296+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:26.932352
License: Public Domain

BOGGS, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the judgment of the court, and I concur completely in the court’s analysis in Parts I and II A. The court’s holding with respect to Part II B is, based on a careful analysis of the evidence, that “there was no equal protection violation in this ease.” Supra, at 357. I agree. I write separately only to note that I believe that much of the language in Part II B goes well beyond what is necessary to reach that conclusion, and thus is dicta. Moreover, this ease is a good illustration of the desirability of a court restricting its discussion to what is necessary to decide the case at hand, especially in an area where the factual situations that might be covered by the court’s broad language are likely to be varied and subtle.
I fully agree that, as stated in Travis II, the initiation of consensual contacts based solely on race can violate the Equal Protection Clause. However, the question that would be presented here, if there were not good evidence of non-racial motivations for the officers’ actions, is a more difficult one.
On the one hand, even if a hypothetical defendant were to present compelling evidence that officers “noticed” (supra, at 346) or “targeted” (supra, at 352) or “pursued” (supra, at 355) or investigated (supra, at 353) a person solely because of his race, would suppression be the proper remedy, when the “pre-contact” activity that could be described by those words leads to evidence of crime? I am not sure of the answer to that question. Although the court hypothesizes that equal protection violations could occur at the pre-contact stage (and the court’s language is notably hypothetical—“what of a case”; “what about a situation” (ibid.); “a case could be made”; “may be found” (supra, note 5)), the court never discusses whether such violations could result in the suppression of evidence otherwise lawfully obtained.
On the other hand, the contours of the violation are difficult to discern in the abstract. In a paradigmatic ease, an officer on routine foot patrol walks east on First Street, behind two men, one black and one white. First Street dead-ends into Main, so at the comer of First and Main each man, and the officer, must turn right or left. The black man turns one way; the white man turns the other. The officer chooses to turn the comer to follow one of the men and, when questioned later, candidly admits that he had no reason for deciding to go right rather than left save the race of the man who also turned that way. However, within a block of turning the corner, the officer sees the man rob a store, and arrests the man. My intuition is that the evidence of that robbery could not be suppressed. However, that intuition is no less dicta than most of the discussion in Part II B of the court’s opinion.
I would have preferred that we wait for a case whose facts would provide context for our consideration, leaving until that day the question of the circumstances in which “pre-contact” actions, whether denominated as “pursuit,” “investigation,” or “targeting”, (or, as I think most accurate here, merely “noticing”) could possibly violate the equal protection guarantee. We know that in this case, the officers’ actions did not, and I think that is sufficient for today.