Court Opinion

ID: 9494144
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:30:35.977695+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:14.763807
License: Public Domain

DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
While I agree with the majority that one must analyze Fourth Amendment cases on their facts, in my view the uncontested factual record before us on this appeal requires us to affirm the district court’s decision to suppress the evidence found in Miguel Espinoza’s apartment. I therefore respectfully dissent.
The majority’s description of the facts underlying the motion to suppress accurately sets the stage for the legal issue presented to us: whether the exclusionary rule should be invoked here to suppress the drags, cash, and drag paraphernalia that the Racine County Sheriffs officers seized in the wee hours of March 27-28, 2000. And, as the majority agrees, a series of concessions has removed some potentially interesting issues from the scope of this appeal. We therefore have no occasion to question two important propositions: first, that the officers waited an unreasonably short period of time between announcing their presence and forcibly entering first the building and then Espinoza’s unit (five seconds, each time), and second, that the speed of the officers’ entry was not justified by exigent circumstances. A change in either one of those facts obviously would have made a difference to our analysis.
With that much established, the majority goes on to apply the framework established in United States v. Stefonek, 179 F.3d 1030 (7th Cir.1999), to the question whether the remedy afforded by the exclusionary rale should be applied here. In Stefonek, this court first concluded that the police did not have an adequate warrant to justify their seizure of certain business records, because the warrant itself was so vague that it amounted to an impermissible general-warrant, and it failed to incorporate a more specific affidavit by reference. Id. at 1033. The court expressed concern about the applicability of the good-faith exception to the warrant requirement that the Supreme Court created in United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984), because the defect in the warrant was so obvious. Rather than rely on Leon, the court reviewed the circumstances under which suppression is (or is not) necessary in order to farther the purposes of the Fourth Amendment rale in question. Those purposes include a concern for protecting the property and privacy of the *730individual whose premises are to be searched and property to be seized, the need to confine searches to constitutional limits, and a desire to head off avoidable breaches of the peace (of particular importance to the “knock and announce” aspect of the rule). In keeping with the spirit of the inevitable discovery exception to the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule, the court then looked to the factual record to determine whether the police officers’ actual conduct infringed upon any of these interests. No harm, no foul, said the court. The officers had established probable cause to obtain a warrant and they had limited their search to matters consistent with the probable cause affidavit. Had the magistrate judge simply incorporated the existing affidavit by reference in the warrant, exactly the same materials would have been seized. Because this safeguard was in place and the search was just as confined as it would have been if everything had gone according to plan, no harm resulted from the technical violation of the rules and no suppression was necessary. In spirit, if not in detail, this ruling followed the same line of thinking as the Supreme Court’s decisions in Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431, 104 S.Ct. 2501, 81 L.Ed.2d 377 (1984), and Leon.
My concern here is that the majority has unmoored the intermediate step of Stefonek from its logical foundation. The error in Stefonek did not warrant suppression precisely because the officers themselves never violated the interests protected by the Fourth Amendment. Given the very specific nature of the affidavit that had been prepared before the warrant was executed and the properly limited scope of the subsequent search, the court found that case to be suitable for the application of a kind of harmless error rule.
Our case is different in several respects. The problem was not with the specificity of the warrant, but instead was with the manner in which the warrant was executed. There was nothing in the record to show that ex ante everything was in order. Indeed, the evidence in the record points the other way and suggests with some force that the Racine County Sheriffs Department has a practice of unconstitutionally executing warrants. As the majority notes and rightly criticizes, the Department has a policy of waiting only five seconds before serving “knock and announce” warrants. Especially in the middle of the night, which seems to have been the Department’s preferred time for serving warrants, hardly anyone could scramble out of bed and reach the door in time to make a peaceful entry possible. Espinoza’s is a case in point. Consistent with the Department’s policy, the officers crashed through the front door of Espinoza’s duplex at midnight after waiting only five seconds. In doing so, they deprived Espinoza of the opportunity to permit the officers to execute their warrant without the use of unnecessary force and property damage. Contrary to the majority’s conclusion, and in contrast to the officers in Stefonek, the Racine County officers therefore did offend the interests protected by the Fourth Amendment “knock and announce” rule.
Relying largely on Espinoza’s efforts to keep the officers from entering the interior door to his apartment, the majority disagrees with this conclusion. Its rationale, however, amounts to a significant departure from Supreme Court precedent and from Stefonek. Normally Fourth Amendment issues are analyzed on the basis of information available to the police at the time they act: at the time they claim probable cause is present, Woods v. City of Chicago, 234 F.3d 979, 996 (7th Cir.2000), at the time they obtain a warrant, United States v. Hall, 142 F.3d 988, 995 (7th Cir.1998), or at the time they execute a warrant. This perspective reflects the fact *731that after-acquired information about the defendant’s alleged criminal activity should not influence either the scope of the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights or whether they were violated.
The majority reasons that the officers’ actions did not offend any interests protected by the Fourth Amendment because Espinoza made it clear by his actions that he had no intention of taking advantage of the opportunities afforded to him by the “knock and announce” rule. But whatever actions Espinoza took were not actions that were inevitably suspicious at the time the officers broke down the front door. The majority’s reasoning holds together only if we are willing to consider at the suppression stage evidence that cannot be considered at the violation stage. In light of the evidence that Espinoza was later found to be in possession of a substantial quantity of drugs, the majority argues that his attempt to block the interior door must as a matter of law be regarded as proof that he would not have opened the front door even if he had been given a constitutionally sufficient opportunity to do so. If, on the other hand, we disregard the after-acquired evidence, there is no reason to think Espinoza’s efforts to block the interi- or door were anything other than a natural defensive response to hearing someone crash through his front door in the middle of the night and then start to try to break down the interior door. Viewed from this perspective, Espinoza’s actions tell us little about what he would have done had he been given proper notice of the police’s desire to gain entry through the front door.
Perhaps recognizing the vulnerability of such a post hoc approach to the issue, the government has fought the suppression order in a different way. It argues flatly that the exclusionary rule should never be available to redress Fourth Amendment violations that pertain “only” to the manner of executing a warrant, not to the scope of what premises may be searched or what may be seized. As long as the officers have a valid warrant, discovery of whatever lies within will inevitably occur, no matter how flagrantly the entry tactics violate the purposes of the Fourth Amendment. The majority has wisely refused to accept this per se rule. The Supreme Court has never indicated that such a blanket rule is appropriate; to the contrary, it has always stressed the fact-specific nature of Fourth Amendment inquiries. The inevitable discovery and independent source doctrines have consistently been construed so as to preserve suppression as a remedy designed to deter police misconduct in certain circumstances. Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431, 444, 104 S.Ct. 2501, 81 L.Ed.2d 377 (1984) (explaining that where untainted ongoing search would have turned up evidence “deterrence rationale has so little basis that the evidence should be received”); Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533, 539-40, 108 S.Ct. 2529, 101 L.Ed.2d 472 (1988) (emphasizing continued deterrent effect of rule that permits officers to obtain and execute proper warrant after first conducting illegal search).
Suppression retains its deterrent effect only so long as it is consistently applied to prevent law enforcement officers from benefitting from their Fourth Amendment violations. The “no benefit” principle would be destroyed if, as the government suggests, it is always sufficient for officers to spell out after the fact a hypothetical scenario by which they could have properly obtained the evidence. In order to avoid this reductio ad absurdam, the Court has limited the use of the inevitable discovery idea to situations in which law enforcement either was engaged, or did engage, in a violation-free investigation that would have yielded or did yield the *732disputed evidence. In Nix, the Court found illegally obtained evidence admissible because the government was able to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that an independent ongoing investigation would have led law enforcement to the same evidence. 467 U.S. at 448-50, 104 S.Ct. 2501. Similarly, in Segura v. United States, 468 U.S. 796, 813-16, 104 S.Ct. 3380, 82 L.Ed.2d 599 (1984), after entering and seizing the suspect’s premises without a warrant, the police obtained a warrant without relying on any of the information obtained from the original entry and properly seized evidence pursuant to that valid warrant. In Murray, the police conducted a warrantless entry and seized evidence, but then they obtained a warrant without relying in any way on the seized evidence and re-executed the search and seizure. Emphasizing the importance of a separate, untainted source for the seized evidence, the Court explained that “[t]he ultimate question ... is whether the search pursuant to the warrant was in fact a genuinely independent source of the information and tangible evidence at issue. This would not have been the case if the agent’s decision to seek the warrant was prompted by what they had seen during the initial entry, or if information obtained during that entry was presented to the Magistrate and affected his decision to issue the warrant.” 487 U.S. at 542, 108 S.Ct. 2529. The only way to read these cases is as a rejection of the kind of wholesale “we could have conducted a proper search” approach urged by the government.
In this case, there are no facts comparable to those in Nix, Murray, and Segura that would allow us to recognize the inevitable discovery doctrine without undermining the suppression remedy’s deterrent effect. The evidence seized in Espinoza’s apartment was the product of only one illegally executed search and as such is subject to exclusion. Segura, 468 U.S. at 804, 104 S.Ct. 3380. This is in marked contrast to Segura, where subsequent to the illegal entry a proper search was conducted and “[t]he illegal entry into petitioners’ apartment did not contribute in any way to discovery of the evidence seized under the warrant.” Id. at 815, 104 S.Ct. 3380. In Espinoza’s case, there was no other investigation ongoing that would have yielded the same evidence and the police did not, after the fact, obtain and properly execute another warrant. Rejecting the government’s attempt to invoke inevitable discovery on these facts does not put the government in a worse position than it otherwise would have been in. It merely prevents the government from ben-efitting from an illegal search. Without a requirement of at least one untainted investigation apart from the unlawful one before the exclusionary rule can be avoided, the exclusionary rule itself would be severely undermined, and along with it, the salutary deterrent effect it provides.
On the broad question whether suppression is an available remedy when the manner of executing a valid warrant violates the Fourth Amendment, I thus agree with my colleagues on the Sixth and Eighth Circuits who have said that in certain cases it is. See United States v. Dice, 200 F.3d 978, 984 (6th Cir.2000) (rejecting inevitable discovery in “knock and announce” violation case where there was no evidence of a properly conducted investigation that would have led to the same evidence); United States v. Marts, 986 F.2d 1216, 1220 (8th Cir.1993) (same). I realize there are recent opinions from this court that, if read expansively, might be thought to look the other way. See, e.g., United States v. Kip Jones, 214 F.3d 836 (7th Cir.2000). But such an interpretation would be inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence requiring an actual independent source of the tainted evi*733dence. Rather than take this step, I think it better to consider the statements in Kip Jones in light of the facts there presented, which are distinguishable from the ones now before us. As Judge Coffey’s separate opinion (dissenting in part and concurring in part) in Kip Jones makes clear, there were ample facts in the Kip Jones record to support the reasonableness of the methods the police officers chose to use under the circumstances they faced there. Most importantly, there was definitely no concession from the government in Kip Jones that the entry or its methods were unreasonable. We have such a concession here, and as I stressed at the outset, it is in that light that I approach this case.
The remaining question is whether the Fourth Amendment violation in our case requires suppression of the evidence that was seized, or if Espinoza should be remitted to his other, largely illusory, remedies. I agree with that portion of the majority’s opinion that emphasizes the fact-specific and balancing approach that we must take to this question. Again, however, we are constrained by the government’s concessions, including, in particular, its concession that the Fourth Amendment violation in this case occurred when the officers waited only five seconds before crashing through Espinoza’s front door. It is plain that Espinoza was not involved in any obstructive action at that time. The officers had a constitutional obligation to give Espinoza adequate notice of, and. an opportunity to respond to, their presence. They denied him that opportunity, even though they had no indication that Espinoza would not take advantage of it. The fact that Espinoza took steps to prevent the officers from entering through the interior door after they had already violated his rights at the front door does not make the officers’ violation of Espinoza’s Fourth Amendment rights, and the interests protected by those rights, any less flagrant.
Looking at the situation at the time the officers started barging into Espinoza’s building, therefore, and taking into account the two critical factual concessions, I would affirm the district court and suppress the evidence. My conclusion that this is the legally correct outcome does not in any way reflect a view that it is unimportant to enforce the drug laws, or any other laws for that matter. On the other hand, as the recent tragic killing of the young Baptist missionary, Roni Bowers, and her infant daughter in Peru by drug enforcement officials illustrates, overzealous enforcement tactics can sometimes inflict injury on someone whose innocence or guilt is unknown until it is too late. See Irvin Molotsky, Baptists’ Plane Identified As Drug Carrier, N.Y. Times, April 22, 2001, at Al. The protections established by the Fourth Amendment, as well as the principal remedy courts have used for years to redress violations of that amendment, are designed to respect personal interests and to deter unconstitutional police behavior. In this ’case, the officers carried out their mission in an unconstitutional way, and I agree with the district court that suppression was the proper remedy.
I therefore respectfully dissent.