Court Opinion

ID: 9427722
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:21:41.389132+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:09.329296
License: Public Domain

Mr. Chief Justice Burger,
with whom Mr. Justice Blackmun and Mr. Justice Rehnquist join, dissenting.
I join Mr. Justice Rehnquist’s dissent since I cannot subscribe to the Court’s unjustifiable narrowing of the rule of *97Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1 (1968). The Court would require a particularized and individualized suspicion that a person is armed and dangerous as a condition to a Terry search. This goes beyond the rationale of Terry and overlooks the practicalities of a situation which no doubt often confronts officers executing a valid search warrant. The Court’s holding is but another manifestation of the practical poverty of the judge-made exclusionary rule. “The suppression of truth is a grievous necessity at best, more especially when as here the inquiry concerns the public interest; it can be justified at all only when the opposed private interest is supreme.” McMann v. SEC, 87 F. 2d 377, 378 (CA2 1937) (L. Hand, J.). Here, the Court’s holding operates as but a further hindrance on the already difficult effort to police the narcotics traffic which takes such a terrible toll on human beings.
These officers had validly obtained a warrant to search a named person and a rather small, one-room tavern for narcotics. Upon arrival, they found the room occupied by 12 persons. Were they to ignore these individuals and assume that all were unarmed and uninvolved? Given the setting and the reputation of those who trade in narcotics, it does not go too far to suggest that they might pay for such an easy assumption with their lives. The law does not require that those executing a search warrant must be so foolhardy. That is precisely what Mr. Chief Justice Warren’s opinion in Terry stands for. Indeed, the Terry Court recognized that a balance must be struck between the privacy interest of individuals and the safety of police officers in performing their duty. I would hold that when police execute a search warrant for narcotics in a place of known narcotics activity they may protect themselves by conducting a Terry search. They are not required to assume that they will not be harmed by patrons of the kind of establishment shown here, something quite different from a ballroom at the Waldorf. “The officer need not be absolutely certain that the individual is armed; the issue is *98whether a reasonably prudent man in the circumstances would be warranted in the belief that his safety or that of others was in danger.” Terry v. Ohio, supra, at 27.
I do not find it controlling that the heroin was not actually retrieved from appellant until the officer returned after completing the first search. The “cigarette pack with objects in it” was noticed in the first search. In the “second search,” the officer did no more than return to the appellant and retrieve the pack he had already discovered. That there was a delay of minutes between the search and the seizure is not dispositive in this context, where the searching officer made the on-the-spot judgment that he need not seize the suspicious package immediately. He could first reasonably make sure that none of the patrons was armed before returning to appellant. Thus I would treat the second search and its fruits just as I would had the officer taken the pack immediately upon noticing it, which plainly would have been permissible.
Under this analysis, I need not reach the validity of the Illinois statute under which the Illinois court sustained the search. Parenthetically, I find the Court’s failure to pass on the Illinois statute puzzling in light of the Court’s holding that the searches were not authorized by Terry.