Court Opinion

ID: 9479100
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:08:24.218181+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:49.676988
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join the majority opinion, and write separately only to offer some thoughts about the proposition that a search warrant procured on the basis of an affidavit that contains unlawfully obtained information is nevertheless valid if the lawfully obtained information in the affidavit is sufficient by itself to establish probable cause for the search. The Supreme Court has not as yet so held, although the proposition was assumed in Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154, 156, 171-72 and n. 8, 98 S.Ct. 2674, 2676, 2684-85 and n. 8, 57 L.Ed.2d 667 (1978), and commanded the explicit support of four Justices in United States v. Giordano, 416 U.S. 505, 554-56, 94 S.Ct. 1820, 1845-46, 40 L.Ed.2d 341 (1974) (concurring and dissenting opinion). Loads of court of appeals cases so hold (including cases in this circuit) — for a very partial sample see United States v. Vasey, 834 F.2d 782, 788 (9th Cir.1987); United States v. Eschweiler, 745 F.2d 435, 439 (7th Cir.1984); United States v. Williams, 633 F.2d 742, 745 (8th Cir.1980); United States v. Marchand, 564 F.2d 983, 992-95 (2d Cir.1977) (Friendly, J.); United States v. McHale, 495 F.2d 15, 16-17 (7th Cir.1974) (per curiam); James v. United States, 418 F.2d 1150 (D.C.Cir.1969) —but few contain an extended discussion of the issue and those that do, notably Marchand and James, rely, questionably in my view, on the Supreme Court’s decision in Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963). Wong Sun holds that statements made by a criminal suspect in the wake of his unlawful arrest are not automatically inadmissible as “fruits of the poisonous tree”; if the statements have an independent, lawful source (whatever precisely this means), they are admissible. (See also Segura v. United States, 468 U.S. 796, 104 S.Ct. 3380, 82 L.Ed.2d 599 (1984), applying the “independent source” principle to physical evidence as distinct from statements.) The analogy to the search warrant based on *595both legal and illegal evidence is patent, but like many analogies misleading. Wong Sun did not involve the subversion of the magistrate’s role in the issuance of search warrants. The line of cases that culminates in our decision does. It gives law enforcement authorities an incentive to gather evidence by foul means as well as fair, and to serve up the entire gallimaufry to the magistrate in the hope that he will be persuaded and issue the warrant. For the search will be upheld against judicial challenge provided that the lawful evidence submitted to the magistrate, as appraised by a court after the completion of a successful search, established probable cause to conduct the search.
To take a concrete example — an exaggerated version of the present case — suppose the police have ample probable cause to obtain a warrant to search a suspect’s house, but, to make assurance doubly sure, before applying for the warrant they break into the house and take pictures of contraband and then submit these to the magistrate along with their lawful evidence showing probable cause and tell the magistrate that the photographs had been handed them by the suspect’s spouse. Such tactics would subvert the search-warrant process yet would be rewarded by a judicial determination that the search had been lawful because the lawful evidence submitted to the magistrate was sufficient — in the court’s hindsightful view — to establish probable cause for the search. It is as if the search had been conducted without a warrant, and the court had had to decide (as it does for example when a search is made incident to an arrest and the issue is whether the arrest was made on probable cause), without any help from a magistrate’s determination, whether there had been probable cause.
Although a powerful argument can thus be made that a search pursuant to a warrant procured on the basis of an affidavit that contains illegally obtained information should be invalidated regardless of whether there is other evidence to establish probable cause, the argument does not persuade me. Ordinarily when a decision is reversed because of tainted evidence, the remedy is further proceedings without the taint; yet even if it were possible to “remand” the determination of probable cause to the magistrate for a redetermination free of the tainted evidence, it would be entirely artificial to do so, the search having been long since conducted. Hence a rule that the presence of such evidence invalidates the warrant would be a heavy sanction indeed, undoing criminal prosecutions in many cases where the tainted evidence had done no harm because the warrant would have been issued anyway on the basis of legal evidence. The exclusionary rule is, many believe, already too heavy a sanction for illegal searches. This belief lies behind the “good faith,” “inevitable discovery,” “plain view,” and “independent source” exceptions (see, e.g., United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984); Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340, 107 S.Ct. 1160, 94 L.Ed.2d 364 (1987); Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431, 104 S.Ct. 2501, 81 L.Ed.2d 377 (1984); Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971); Murray v. United States, — U.S. -, 108 S.Ct. 2529, 101 L.Ed.2d 472 (1988)) that singly and in combination are eroding the rule. Proposals that would make the exclusionary rule a heavier sanction by refusing to recognize a harmless-error doctrine in proceedings before magistrates must be viewed with extreme caution if we are to follow the route staked out by the Supreme Court.
Lurking in the background is the fact that while the Fourth Amendment places limitations on warrants, nothing in the text or background of the amendment requires law enforcement officers to obtain warrants in the first place in order to conduct searches. The Fourth Amendment forbids unreasonable searches and forbids general warrants; the prohibition of searches without warrants is a judicial gloss, by no means inevitable, on the amendment. See Taylor, Two Studies in Constitutional Interpretation 41 (1969). And despite all the sonorous talk about the advantages of having the inference of probable cause “drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate in*596stead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime,” Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 14, 68 S.Ct. 367, 369, 92 L.Ed. 436 (1948), the ex parte character of a search-warrant proceeding makes the requirement of obtaining a warrant a formality in most cases. Perhaps the greatest practical value of the requirement is in forcing the compilation of a written record of the facts alleged to constitute probable cause before the search is conducted; and that requirement is satisfied whenever a warrant is actually obtained. The court in this case has only to determine whether the untainted materials that were before the magistrate would have persuaded the magistrate to issue the warrant. This court, rather than the police officer, is placed in the magistrate’s shoes; this distinguishes the arrest case, where there has been no previous proceeding to determine probable cause. In the vast majority, perhaps all, of the cases in which this court concludes that probable cause existed on the basis of the (untainted) evidence presented to the magistrate, the magistrate would have issued the warrant, making the error in such cases really harmless.
So there will be some erosion of the warrant requirement as a result of the course followed in this case, just as there has been some erosion of the right to jury trial as a result of the principle of harmless error. (And see United States v. Eschweiler, supra, 745 F.2d at 439, where we analyzed the issue whether the search was invalidated by the tainted evidence presented to the magistrate in explicit harmless-error terms.) But in both cases the erosion is slight and in both there are offsetting considerations which seem to me, as they have seemed to most other judges in recent years, weightier.