Court Opinion

ID: 9450199
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:38:04.650379+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:11.419960
License: Public Domain

ALDRICH, Circuit Judge
(concurring) .
I am sorry not to be able to join in the court’s opinion, but I cannot bring myself to believe that McDonald is controlling. At the outset, although the advantages of playing the “numbers” game are problematical, it may be noted that while six justices concurred in the result so far as the defendant Washington was concerned, only three joined in the opinion. Under these circumstances it may be questionable to say, as the court does, that McDonald “was based upon the existence of a co-defendant with standing.” The Supreme Court may itself have had later doubts as to the scope of McDonald, as evidenced by the fact that although the briefs show it was cited by the parties both in Jones v. United States, 1960, 362 U.S. 257, 80 S.Ct. 725, 4 L.Ed.2d 697, and in Wong Sun v. United States, 1963, 371 U.S. 471, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441, the court made no mention of it. And, with all respect, it seems to me that some doubts would be justifiable. To have the answer to the question whether a defendant may assert an unlawful search and seizure depend upon the existence of a co-defendant who has such a right* and has himself made a pretrial motion* seems something less than logical.
Furthermore, if this is the scope of McDonald, then it seems to me that Mc*742Donald is of no help to the present defendants. The court takes the position that since their rights were only secondary they had no opportunity to move in advance of trial for the suppression of the evidence. If their rights arose only when the evidence was offered against them, this takes care of the government’s claim of waiver by their not moving sooner. On the other hand it exposes the fact that when the evidence was offered against them Amorello, who had pleaded prior to trial, no longer had such a right and did not exist as a co-defendant. Hence there was a rather unsubstantial coattail on which they could ride.
Without reviewing the cases in exten-so, it seems to me that the real basis of the exclusionary rule is its effect as a police deterrent, and that the rule should be fashioned, to deter the accomplishment of whatever purpose the police were improperly attempting to further. I believe, accordingly, that the present defendants’ rights are not simply dependent upon Amorello’s, as Washington’s were said to depend upon McDonald, but are broader, and stem from their own status as parties against whom the search was directed. Surely, in stopping Amorello’s truck, the interests of the police were not limited to the driver, but were directed against all those, whether their identities were known or not, who might be engaged in the operation of the still. I find support for this in Jones v. United States, supra, where the court said, 362 U.S. at 261, 80 S.Ct. at 731,
“In order to qualify as a 'person aggrieved by an unlawful search and seizure’ one must have been a victim of a search or seizure, one against whom the search was directed, as distinguished from one who claims prejudice only through the use of evidence gathered as a consequence of a search or seizure directed at someone else.”
While this conclusion avoids what I believe to be the weakness of relying upon McDonald it raises a further issue, namely the fact that if the present defendants had standing in their own right they should, have moved in advance of trial unless the court, in its discretion, were to permit the matter to be raised at the trial for the first time. The • district court expressly refused to exercise that discretion. Normally, this should be an end to it. However, while I believe that this is a discretion which we should be slow to overrule, the new circumstance of the decision in Preston v. United States while these proceedings were still viable causes me to feel that fairness would dictate a review of that discretion in the light of that occurrence, and that on such a review it would be an abuse of discretion to penalize the defendants for not having moved earlier. I accordingly agree that they should be entitled to a new trial.