Court Opinion

ID: 9468326
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:12:01.147942+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:49.096586
License: Public Domain

MURNAGHAN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent. It is true that the FBI agents had probable cause to search immediately following Muhammad’s arrest; indeed, Muhammad concedes as ' much. Probable cause alone, however, is not sufficient to authorize a search, Walter v. United States, 447 U.S. 649, 657-58 n.10, 100 S.Ct. 2395, 2401-2402 n.10, 65 L.Ed.2d 410 (1980); there must also be a warrant for the search, or exceptional circumstances which excuse the failure to obtain a warrant. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 357, 88 S.Ct. 507, 514, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967); McDonald v. United States, 335 U.S. 451, 456, 69 S.Ct. 191, 193, 93 L.Ed. 153 (1948). No such circumstances existed here; consequently, the warrantless search by FBI agents of the trunk of Muhammad’s car violated the Fourth Amendment, and the evidence seized during the course of that search should have been suppressed.
“The word ‘automobile’ is not a talisman in whose presence the Fourth Amendment fades away.” Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 461-62, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 2035-2036, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971); rather, the so-called “automobile exception” to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement is a subset of the exigent circumstances exception to the Fourth Amendment. Coolidge v. New Hampshire, supra, 403 U.S. at 460-62, 91 S.Ct. at 2034-2035; Carroll v. *254United States, 267 U.S. 132, 45 S.Ct. 280, 69 L.Ed. 543 (1925). That is, the fact that the subject of the search is an automobile, which often is possessed of great mobility, is a factor to be considered in assessing whether the circumstances are exigent so as to excuse the failure to obtain a warrant, but is not dispositive; there must still be exigency.
There was no exigency here. At approximately 10:30 a. m., within a short time after the robbery of a bank, FBI agents proceeded to the residence of a person suspected of having participated in the robbery. They observed parked on a commercial parking lot across the street from the residence,1 a car matching the description of a car which had been seen in the vicinity of the victim bank at about the time the robbery was taking place. Shortly thereafter the agents learned that the car was registered to the suspect. The agents then began surveillance of the car. Approximately one hour later, defendant, accompanied by his common-law wife, approached the car, opened the trunk and shut it again quickly when he saw the agents approach. Defendant was arrested at about 11:30 a. m. and taken to FBI headquarters by several officers while at least two more remained with the car. They guarded the car at the commercial parking lot for another 4Vi hours during which time they contacted the offices of the United States Attorneys in both the District of Columbia and Baltimore preparatory to seeking a search warrant.2 However, they made no attempt to obtain a search warrant. At approximately 4:00 p. m. the agents had the car towed to FBI headquarters and at 4:30 p. m. searched the car without obtaining a warrant.3
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1976, Unabridged) defines “exigent” as
exacting or requiring immediate aid or action: pressing, critical.
Black’s Law Dictionary (Revised Fourth Ed. 1968) agrees:
Exigence, or Exigency. Demand, want, need imperativeness; emergency, something arising suddenly out of the current of events; any event or occasional combination of circumstances, calling for immediate action or remedy; a pressing necessity; a sudden and unexpected happening or an unforeseen occurrence or condition. [Citations omitted.] Something arising suddenly out of circumstances calling for , immediate action or remedy, or where something helpful needs to be done at once, yet not so pressing as an emergency. [Citation omitted.]
The exigent circumstances exception to the warrant requirement developed precisely because of situations requiring immediate action; waiting to search until a warrant could be obtained would risk the destruction or disappearance of the object of the search or its removal from the jurisdiction, or would increase the risk of harm to law enforcement officers or innocent bystanders. E. g., United States v. Turner, 650 F.2d 526 (4th Cir. 1981); United States v. Gardner, 627 F.2d 906 (9th Cir. 1980); United States v. Williams, 626 F.2d 697 (9th Cir. 1980), cert. denied, 449 U.S. 1020, 101 S.Ct. 586, 66 L.Ed.2d 481 (1980); United States v. Gray, 626 F.2d 102 (9th Cir. 1980).
Clearly, the FBI agents did not believe that immediate action was necessary here— they held the car immobilized in the parking lot and made overtures aimed at obtaining a warrant, but otherwise took no action at all. Thus there is no basis for a contention that the agents had a reasonable belief *255that delay inherent in obtaining a warrant would be detrimental to people or to evidence.4 Nor did anything occur thereafter which created a need for immediate action; the only thing that happened was the towing of the car to the FBI garage. Since the car was already immobile for all practical purposes, the relocation to the FBI garage only served to decrease any possible risk to the public from whatever might be in the trunk from possible access by the public.
There simply was no “fleeting” vehicle here. The car was not stopped while it was moving down the highway, nor was it discovered parked on a public highway; it was parked in a parking lot which defendant habitually used as he would use a driveway. The car was, of course, mobile in the sense that it had an engine and four wheels and was capable of being moved, but any possibility that it might be moved was no greater than the possibility that the car in Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971),5 or the footlocker in United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1, 97 S.Ct. 2476, 53 L.Ed.2d 538 (1977), would be moved. Agents here had arrested defendant, the owner of the car, before he even approached the driver’s seat, and the record is quite clear that the agents intended to, and did, deny access to the car to anyone but themselves. Nor is there any need to speculate on whether the number of agents was such that some could have been left to secure the car while others sought a warrant, compare United States v. Bradshaw, 490 F.2d 1097, 1102-04 (4th Cir. 1974), cert. denied, 419 U.S. 895, 95 S.Ct. 173, 42 L.Ed.2d 139 (1974); and United States v. Mitchell, 538 F.2d 1230, 1232-33 (5th Cir. 1976), cert. denied, 430 U.S. 945, 97 S.Ct. 1578, 51 L.Ed.2d 792 (1977); agents were in fact left to guard the ear in numbers which were sufficient, both prospectively — from the viewpoint of the agents making the decision — and retrospectively — as events ac*256tually occurred, to keep the car secure while other agents transported defendant to FBI headquarters, where certainly there was sufficient personnel that someone could go to a magistrate and seek a warrant. Thus it is obvious that none of the usual justifications for finding exigent circumstances where an automobile is involved existed here.6
Finally, the government tries to build a case of exigency by referring to the peculiar facts of the case and to a far-fetched assumption based on them. Those circumstances are a police officer’s expressed concern that defendant’s accomplice “might” be hiding in the trunk along with the fact that the car was parked on a commercial lot near a public sidewalk. Although the district judge found the possibility “conceivable” on the basis of a single unrelated incident which had occurred several years previously in a nearby county where somebody else’s accomplice had hidden in a trunk and engaged law enforcement officials in a gun battle upon emerging, it is indeed highly implausible. Adopting such a basis for avoiding the Fourth Amendment’s stringent warrant requirements is an open invitation to riots of imagination, at the expense of facts and of reality. Defendant’s brief compellingly points out:
If the mere fact that an armed robber had been secreted in a car trunk in an armed robbery case in Montgomery County, Maryland some several months before is sufficient to create exigent circumstances justifying entry into appellant’s trunk then in virtually every case arising in Fourth Circuit jurisdictions where a suspect is at large, sufficient exigent circumstances to search an accomplice’s car would exist.
The police must also have at least reasonable factual grounds for a suspicion that an armed person is hiding in the trunk in order to create the kind of exigency which would justify the by-passing of the Fourth Amendment dictates to permit a warrant-less search of the trunk. In the instant case, even if the agents had a reasonable suspicion that a person was hiding in the trunk, they clearly did not believe that the circumstances were exigent; they took no immediate action, either to search the trunk at once or to remove the car and hence the articulated potential hazard from the location where they now claim the public had ready access. See G. M. Leasing Corp. v. United States, 429 U.S. 338, 358-59, 97 S.Ct. 619, 631-632, 50 L.Ed.2d 530 (1977); United States v. Bradley, 571 F.2d 787, 790 (4th Cir. 1978).
It is possible, of course, that a wiser course in cases where an armed person may be hiding in a trunk is to wait rather than to enter the trunk immediately. If waiting is the wiser course, however, it is certainly possible to obtain a warrant while waiting and therefore there is no exigency pressing for search without a warrant. As has been noted above, obtaining a warrant here would not have diminished the security being maintained on the car since several agents over and beyond those guarding the car were available to accompany defendant to FBI headquarters.7 The only event oc*257curring during the afternoon was the eventual towing of the car to the FBI garage. This certainly did not create any exigency; in the FBI garage the car was more secure, more easily guarded and any danger to the public significantly less than while it was on the commercial parking lot.
Because I think that no exigent circumstances existed which would excuse the agents’ failure to obtain a warrant, I would hold that the warrantless search of defendant’s trunk violated the Fourth Amendment.

. Defendant apparently had no driveway or property of his own on which to park the car and habitually used the parking lot as a place in which to leave his car while at home.

. The District of Columbia U. S. Attorney incorrectly advised the agents that they had insufficient probable cause to obtain a search warrant. The Baltimore U. S. Attorney advised the agents, properly, I would hold, to impound the car and obtain a search warrant before searching it. Neither, therefore, advised that a warrantless search would be proper. To the contrary, each U. S. Attorney accepted that a warrantless search would be improper.

. The government expressly disavows any reliance on an inventory search rationale in this case.

. This sufficiently distinguishes the instant case from Chambers v. Maroney, 399 U.S. 42, 90 S.Ct. 1975, 26 L.Ed.2d 419 (1970), on which the majority relies. In that case, law enforcement officers stopped on a public street a moving car matching the description of a car which had been seen leaving the scene of a robbery. The occupants of the car were arrested and, to get the vehicle off the public highway, the police towed the car to the police station where it was later searched. The Court decided that there was little difference, for Fourth Amendment purposes, between an immediate search at the scene of the arrest and impounding the car while the police went to a magistrate to obtain a warrant based on probable cause.
In the instant case, however, no circumstances existed which would authorize an immediate search; consequently Chambers does not justify the later search at the FBI garage.
Nor was there in Chambers any extended delay between the stop on a public street and the removal to the police station. Here there were 4'k hours of exigency-dissipating elapsed time during which the car remained on the privately owned, commercial parking lot customarily used by the defendant to leave his car when at home.
In Texas v. White, 423 U.S. 67, 96 S.Ct. 304, 46 L.Ed.2d 209 (1976), a per curiam case decided without full briefing and oral argument, the Court, applying Chambers v. Maroney to a case where the car was immediately removed to the police station, held that a thirty to forty-five minute interval at the police station while the car owner/suspect was questioned did not opérate to vitiate the probable cause to search existing when the car was stopped, or the coexisting exigency. Similarly, in the instant case, the probable cause to search the car existed at the time of Muhammad’s arrest and continued to exist when the car was searched in the FBI garage. But the exigency did not. Probable cause alone is not, however, sufficient for a search; the Fourth Amendment mandates that there must be a warrant, absent special circumstances which excuse the failure to obtain a warrant, which did not exist here. Exigency is the only exception on which the government relies, and there was no exigency to excuse the getting of a warrant present at the time the search was made.
Texas v. White, in which a search which could have been made at the scene without a warrant, because of exigency, was deemed still to be authorized later at the station house, cannot justify the search here where no circumstances authorizing the warrantless search existed at the scene of the arrest or arose during the ensuing course of the afternoon. The same consideration serves to distinguish United States v. Chulengarian, 538 F.2d 553 (4th Cir. 1976).

. Coolidge appears to have drawn a distinction between a vehicle encountered on a public street, and a car found parked on private property. In light of what we have elsewhere stated in the Dissent, it is not necessary that we consider that possible point for holding the search to be unconstitutional.

. The other common justification for warrant-less searches in cases involving automobiles — a lowered expectation of privacy — is also inapplicable here. The search in question here was of the locked trunk of the car, a place quite commonly used by ordinary citizens as a repository for personal effects which they wish to keep hidden from public view. For example, travelers often carry their luggage and other personal belongings in the trunks of their cars so that, while stopped at a restaurant or motel, their effects will not be in public view, or a temptation to any thief who might walk by. Similarly, shoppers often put their purchases in the trunks of their cars to keep them out of the view of inquisitive and acquisitive people while the car is in a parking lot.

. Had the agents attempted to get a warrant, and had there really been a person hiding in the trunk, it is possible, of course, that something might have occurred during the course of the afternoon such that an immediate search, without waiting for the warrant to arrive, might have become necessary. However, the possibility that circumstances will become exigent in the future can justify a warrantless search only if they do in fact become exigent and a search is made in response to the exigency. Allowing a warrantless search at a time when circumstances are not exigent and never have been, *257just because they might in the future become exigent would completely vitiate the Fourth Amendment. In any situation it is possible that an unforeseen occurrence might create exigent circumstances.