Court Opinion

ID: 9476942
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:09:37.508553+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:35.937118
License: Public Domain

NOONAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
No one wants the police using guns to arrest people on a hunch. No one wants the police to search very personal things without a warrant or arrest. No one wants the guilty to go free on technicalities or violation by the police of rules of etiquette. These sometimes conflicting aspirations have constitutional dimensions. The right of the people to be secure “against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, ... and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” United States Constitution, Amendment I. At the same time the President is under obligation to “faithfully execute” the laws of the United States. United States Constitution, Article II. Both the executive and the judicial branches have the obligation to recognize these constitutional commands. In the instant case, with all respect to my colleagues, I believe that the court has not properly resolved the conflict between the security of the person against the police and appropriate enforcement of the law.
The Detention of Steeprow: When the agents were approaching the house to serve the arrest warrant on Lyle Johnson, Steeprow was emerging from the house. She was about ten feet from the front door, which was held open by someone apparently following her. Donald Simms, a DEA agent, shouted at her, “Police, Freeze.” He was in the middle of a field, about thirty feet away; he pointed a gun at her. Another agent posted near the garage also directed his gun at her. She stopped. Within a minute most of the agents pushed past her, knocked in the door, and arrested Johnson and Robertson. The time elapsed, according to Steeprow herself, was “maybe three, four minutes,” or “five, seven minutes — maybe not even that long. It happened fast.” At that point the only agent still covering Steeprow ceased his coverage. At that point Steeprow was told she could leave if she left her backpack and purse. Was the three to seven minute detention of Steeprow a Terry stop?
The desire of courts to mitigate the harsh exclusionary rule that applies if a detention is an arrest has led to the invention of a term of art: the Terry stop. An arrest in normal speech is an action of stopping or seizing. A Terry stop is an arrest in normal speech, but it does not amount to an arrest within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. It is an investigatory detention.
In Steeprow’s case two of the normal criteria for a Terry stop were undeniably met. First, the detention was brief. Second, there were reasonable grounds for suspicion that someone leaving a smelly crank lab was a participant or customer. The court, however, focuses on the use of a gun — the single gun that was pointed at Steeprow for no more than three to four minutes. Why does the visibility and direction of this gun convert the Terry stop into something worse? Because, it might be answered, a drawn gun is more threatening than a gun in a holster. But wheth*787er the gun is patted as it rests in an officer’s belt or pointed at a person, the person is brought to a halt because of the authority asserted by the officers. The person is “seized” — the constitutional term — whether the gun is pointed or not.
It seems, then, that everything should not be made to turn on whether the officer has the gun at the ready. In particular, the gun should not be the dispositive factor under the circumstances of this case. The agents were seeking to serve an arrest warrant on a fugitive. Their business was to catch Johnson. They did not want his suspected accomplice to make any maneuvers to his advantage or to take advantage of their pre-occupation and run away. They could not know whether or not she was armed. They did have reason to think she was part of the criminal enterprise involving narcotics. The police did what was the sensible thing to do: for at the most seven minutes they secured Steeprow with force proportionate to the circumstances.
My view conflicts with that of the court on both the facts and the law. Steeprow was not exactly “confronted by seven to ten officers.” The law does not support the proposition that the officers would have been justified in displaying force only if their knowledge of special danger had been shown on the record. Michigan v. Summers, 452 U.S. 692, 702, 101 S.Ct. 2587, 2594, 69 L.Ed.2d 340 (1981). The law does not support the proposition that the purposes of preventing flight and violence were not appropriately served by the stop. The suggestion of the court that the failure to frisk Steeprow undercuts the officers’ original apprehensions is psychologically unfounded: when felons are at large reasonable persons will take precautions and then relax when they are captured. The court’s suggestion comes perilously near to creating a new rule of law: a Terry stop is good only if a frisking follows.
Michigan v. Summers comes close to being absolutely decisive here. It deals with the detention of a person in exactly Steeprow’s position of leaving a house that the police were about to enter. The person was detained while the police searched the house. When they found narcotics in the basement, they then searched him and found heroin in his pocket. The Michigan courts suppressed the heroin as evidence. The Supreme Court reversed. Justice Stevens wrote:
Although no special danger to the police is suggested by the evidence in this record, the execution of a warrant to search for narcotics is the kind of transaction that may give rise to sudden violence or frantic efforts to conceal or destroy evidence. The risk of harm to both the police and the occupants is minimized if the officers routinely exercise unquestioned command of the situation. Cf. 2 W. Lafave, Search and Seizure § 49, pp. 150-151 (1978).
Michigan v. Summers, 452 U.S. 692, 702-06, 101 S.Ct. 2587, 2594-96, 69 L.Ed.2d 340 (1981).
That Steeprow turned out to be a visitor not an occupant is of course not a relevant distinction; thirty feet away, Agent Simms could not know her exact status, but he had to act. The distinction can be made that in our case the warrant being served was for the arrest of a fugitive not for the search of the premises. That distinction may enable the court to escape the force of Michigan v. Summers as controlling authority. The distinction does not justify disregard of the Court’s reasoning as to the circumstances in which detention is reasonable. “Unquestioned command” was what the Court thought reasonable in circumstances identical with ours. Apparently our court disagrees.
The Fourth Amendment does not require perfect police behavior. It requires reasonable police behavior. Although the judges who now condemn the police were not on the scene, the judges’ way of handling it— apparently by a simple verbal order to Steeprow — may, perhaps, not have been unreasonable. But what the police did under the pressures of the moment was equally reasonable. They intruded to a minimum on Steeprow. A substantial space separated her from the agents. They did not make her “prone out.” They *788did not later touch her person. They took the minimal precaution that was reasonably consistent with the safety of the agents, their need to secure the premises, and their need to check Steeprow out.
Common sense cries out that any police officer who let Steeprow walk away from the house would not have been doing his duty. The court quarrels with the details of the procedure followed. Men embarked on the inherently dangerous enterprise of capturing a wanted felon should not be judged so narrowly. The seizure of Steep-row was reasonable.
The Search of the Backpack. Steep-row’s backpack and purse were properly seized after Wisenor had observed the indi-cia of a crank lab. At that point he had probable cause to believe that these containers carried contraband, and the circumstances were exigent, requiring the holding of these articles until a magistrate could be found and a search warrant secured. United States v. Licata, 761 F.2d 537, 542-43 (9th Cir.1985).
As to the later search, with a warrant, of the backpack, the court equates the backpack with a pocket on a pair of pants on a person. With the aid of this equation, the court finds decisive authority supporting its position. Ybarra v. Illinois, 444 U.S. 85, 90, 100 S.Ct. 338, 341, 62 L.Ed.2d 238 (1979). The equation is not justified, the authority is not apposite. Ybarra involved a search of a person’s clothes. Clothes not only, as the adage has it, make the man; clothes are part of a way a person presents himself or herself; they are close enough to the person to be assimilated to the person. A backpack or bookbag, whatever sentiments may attach to it and however often it is lugged around by a youthful owner, is distinguishable.
True, a shoulder bag or purse has been held to fall within a warrant for the search of a person in a case where the court refused to “narrow the scope” of the warrant and admitted all the evidence obtained. United States v. Graham, 638 F.2d 1111, 1114 (7th Cir.1981), cert. denied, 450 U.S. 1034, 101 S.Ct. 1748, 68 L.Ed.2d 231 (1981). But that, under the perspective of upholding a search, a bag is personal does not prevent it from being seen under another perspective as distinct from the person. True, in United States v. Branch, 545 F.2d 177, 182 (D.C.Cir.1976), a visitor entered an apartment after a warrant had been issued for its search and the court held that the shoulder bag he was wearing was not covered by the warrant (how could it have been?). The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia explicitly said that in some circumstances a shoulder bag could be found to be within the ambit of a premises search warrant; Branch supports non-suppression here.
The Fourth Amendment requires that a warrant describe “particularly” “the place to be searched,” and “the person or things to be seized.” The place to be searched here was the house and curtilage. The things to be seized were formulas for making methamphetamine. The backpack was on the ground. The backpack came within the warrant. LaFave on Search and Seizure (1987) 2, 321. Examining the backpack was not seizing Steeprow.
To sustain Steeprow’s objection the court does two things: it engages in legal fiction and it converts what was at worst an oversight into the invasion of an important right. First, as to the fiction, the backpack was not part of Steeprow when it was examined. To say she was being searched when her backpack was searched shows legal ingenuity of a high order; but it is the kind of fiction that often induces disgust with the law. To the ordinary person Steeprow was not searched when her person was untouched.
Second, it is evident that if the agents had been able to anticipate this court’s mind they would have specified the backpack when they asked for the warrant. They could have specified the backpack if they had thought of it. What great good, what public purpose is served by disciplining the prosecutor for the agents’ lack of clairvoyance or attention to detail? Trained drug enforcement agents, a magistrate, and a federal district judge have all thought this search was reasonable. I too think it was reasonable. Protection of a *789basic liberty of citizens does not require or justify the invention of a new legal fiction, the invention of a new legal rule, and the freeing of a guilty defendant because we think the police could have been more exact.
I would vote to affirm Steeprow’s conviction.