Court Opinion

ID: 9718849
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 07:36:17.826998+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:10:01.895700
License: Public Domain

POCHÉ, J.
I concur in the judgment.
When law enforcement officials in the case at hand monitored the beeper (this now appears to be the official terminology; see United States v. Karo (1984) 468 U.S. 705 [82 L.Ed.2d 530, 536, 104 S.Ct. 3296, 3299] as it beeped from within the residence at 3402 Kerner Street—a location not open to visual surveillance—they violated the Fourth Amendment rights of those who had a justifiable interest in the privacy of the residence. That is exactly what the Supreme Court of the United States held little more than a year ago in United States v. Karo. (Id., 468 U.S. at p. 715 [82 L.Ed.2d at pp. 541-542, 104 S.Ct. at pp. 3303-3305.) I am at a complete loss to understand why the majority opinion does not acknowledge that undeniable aspect of this case.
However, the taint of that illegality was sufficiently attenuated so that it can fairly be said that the stop of Abdos Salih’s car and his subsequent arrest were not the product of that illegality. (Wong Sun v. United States (1963) 371 U.S. 471, 488 [9 L.Ed.2d 441, 455-456, 83 S.Ct. 407].) If law enforcement officials had turned on their monitoring equipment only after Salih stepped out of the residence on his way to his car their electronic listening activities would have been constitutionally pure since those activ*1022ities of Salih occurred outside the residence and not only were open to visual surveillance but in fact were surveilled by an army of law enforcement officials. {United States v. Knotts (1983) 460 U.S. 276, 281-283 [75 L.Ed.2d 55, 61-63, 103 S.Ct. 1081].) So far as I can determine the information police obtained from listening to the beeper while it was located within the residence assisted them in the eventual arrest and search of Salih only in that through those means they were able to determine that the package remained on the premises until Salih left. But knowledge of the crucial fact that Salih was leaving with the contraband was in no way a product of the electronic monitoring of the beepings from within the building but rather was entirely the product of extra-residential beeping and monitoring. To put it another way, the police knew Salih was leaving the residence when they watched him do so with a paper bag package under his arm. But they did not know the contents of that package: that could not be determined by visual or electronic methods until his car pulled away and the beeping became fainter. Thus the relevant time of electronic surveillance was from Salih’s exiting of the house until the sounds grew fainter and under Knotts no constitutional violation occurred. {Ibid.)
That conclusion of attenuation of the taint of the constitutional violation of Salih’s privacy interests in the residence requires that I address whether the placing of the beeper in the package violated any constitutionally recognizable privacy interest of Salih in the package itself. The answer is that Salih had no privacy interest in that container of contraband once the police lawfully opened it and identified its contents as illegal. {Illinois v. Andreas (1983) 463 U.S. 765, 771 [77 L.Ed.2d 1003, 1010, 103 S.Ct. 3319].)
To sum up, I conclude: (1) that by electronically monitoring the beeper while it was in the residence the police violated Salih’s Fourth Amendment privacy rights in and to the residence; (2) that the eventual seizure of the package was not in any real sense the product of the illegal monitoring; (3) that from the moment police legally opened the container and found it contained contraband Salih had no privacy interest in that container and thus he cannot complain about the placing of the beeper in the package of contraband.
I therefore concur in the judgment of this court affirming the judgment of conviction.
A petition for a rehearing was denied November 22, 1985, and appellant’s petition for review by the Supreme Court was denied February 20, 1986.