Court Opinion

ID: 9498097
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:08:00.848013+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:37.043157
License: Public Domain

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The constitutional deficiency in this case is not, as the majority poses the issue, an overbroad search warrant. It is that the police tampered with the warrant after it was authorized by the reviewing judge. As a consequence, the warrant executed and served by the San Francisco Police Department was a legal nullity. Everything seized under this sham warrant must be suppressed.
1. What happened here is far more troubling than one would surmise from the majority’s prosaic recitation of the facts. Officer Kasper presented Judge Louie with a packet of documents that included a search warrant, a statement of probable cause and an Exhibit A listing the boundaries and objects of the proposed search. When the judge approved the search, he expressly incorporated Exhibit A into the section of the warrant listing the items to be seized. Exhibit A — the one reviewed by Judge Louie — thus was part of the warrant.
Had Officer Kasper simply passed out photocopies of the warrant to his search team, blocking out the probable cause section (to comply with the police department’s policy of not serving the probable cause statement at the time a warrant is executed), there would have been no constitutional problem. But Officer Kasper did something far more exotic. He logged into his computer and printed a document titled Exhibit A. The file Officer Kasper used to print the document was not the same one he had used to print the Exhibit A and probable cause statement he had presented to Judge Louie. Rather, he printed a different file, one that contained only an Exhibit A, hoping (in vain, as it turns out) that it would contain a description of seizable items and searchable areas identical to the one Judge Louie had approved. Officer Kasper then attached this new Exhibit A to the search warrant without providing any indication of what he had done.
The majority is “certain that there would have been no Fourth Amendment violation had the printout of Exhibit A been identical to the version approved by Judge Louie, just as [it is] certain that photocopies of warrants are acceptable, indeed indispensable, aids to searching officers.” Maj. op. at 1129. Not so fast. Making a photostatic image copy of the warrant the magistrate has actually seen and reviewed is very different from copying another document that is, in the words of the majority, “identical” to it. For example, I’m not at all prepared to say it would have been permissible for Officer Kasper to photocopy Exhibit A from a different warrant than the one approved by Judge Louie for 7 Maddux — even if Officer Kasper thought the two Exhibits A were identical. Photocopying the very document seen by the judge requires no judgment and leaves room for few mistakes. Copying another document opens up the possibility of reproducing something different from thé original; it crosses the fine line between duplication and forgery.
The risk of error or manipulation is much greater when the substitution is made using a computer rather than a photocopier. In order to duplicate a docu*1133ment by reprinting it, an officer first has to find the correct file on the computer — in the case of an institution like a police department, often choosing from among dozens of similar files. Once he has identified the right document, the officer must confirm that it was not altered by someone else and refrain from introducing changes of his own. The danger that the wrong file will be selected, or that the right file will be altered, is not trivial. This is especially true where, as here, the officer deliberately prints a file he knows is not the one he used to print the original document.
Exacerbating the problem is the fact that there is no good way for a reviewing court to distinguish between inadvertent and intentional alterations. It seems unlikely that an officer who purposely alters a warrant will admit it when called to testify in court. And, because the process of accessing a computer file involves a single person using a machine for just a few moments, there is no effective way to impeach an officer who claims he chose the wrong file by mistake.
Of course, distinguishing between intentional and negligent errors only becomes an issue if the discrepancy is detected. This is far from certain, as this case illustrates. The divergence between the two versions of Exhibit A came to light only because Sears filed an earlier motion to suppress, prompting the government to respond with a declaration from Officer Kas-per in which he revealed how he altered the judicially-approved warrant before giving it to the leader of his search team. Without this fortuitous chain of events, Officer Kasper’s actions would no doubt have remained undiscovered.
An officer who logs into his computer to reprint a file thus faces a negligible chance of detection if he selects the wrong file or makes changes to the right one. Human experience teaches that carelessness and temptation are most easily avoided when the risk of exposure is high and the penalty stiff. The corollary'is that processes insulated from effective scrutiny and subject to meager sanctions tend to encourage sloppiness — or worse.
Given the low likelihood of detection and the relatively wide margin for error or chicanery, I don’t find it at all self-evidént that an officer may duplicate a warrant by printing it afresh from a computer file. We should be very reluctant to approve such manipulation of court-approved documents. I would be more inclined to acquiesce in the procedure if it served some legitimate purpose that could not easily be achieved otherwise. Photocopying the warrant approved by the magistrate, for example, has no ready substitute and is, as the majority notes, indispensable to the execution and service of warrants. But the clandestine process adopted by the police in this case is completely unnecessary. The police department’s policy of not including the statement of probable cause when serving the warrant could easily be satisfied by covering up or detaching the sections relating, to probable cause when the warrant is photocopied,, or by printing the probable cause statement as a separate document in the first place. There was simply no need for Officer Kas-per to play mix-and-match with the pages of the search warrant after it had been considered and authorized by Judge Louie.
2. In any event, we need not decide the esoteric question of whether the warrant would be valid if Officer Kasper had succeeded in printing a file identical to Exhibit A. The fact is that he did not; the file he printed was substantively different from the Exhibit A approved by Judge Louie, and he omitted the Exhibit A that Judge Louie had approved. Without the approved list of seizable items, the warrant was a legal nullity; it was as if Officer Kasper had attached his grocery list as *1134Exhibit A. The warrant, and hence the search of 7 Maddux, was entirely invalid. See Groh v. Ramirez, 540 U.S. 551, 557, 124 S.Ct. 1284, 157 L.Ed.2d 1068 (2004).
3. The Supreme Court has emphasized that the exclusionary rule is to be applied pragmatically, balancing the costs of excluding evidence with the benefits of deterring overreaching by law enforcement officers. See Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340, 347, 107 S.Ct. 1160, 94 L.Ed.2d 364 (1987); United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 906-07, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984). Relying on cases dealing with overbroad warrants, my colleagues conclude that partial suppression — which in this case means suppression of nothing at all — is the appropriate remedy. But overbreadth analysis applies to situations where the warrant, as issued by the reviewing judge, authorizes searches too general to satisfy constitutional demands, or includes objects for which there is no probable cause. See, e.g., United States v. Clark, 31 F.3d 831, 836 (9th Cir.1994); In re Grand Jury Subpoenas Dated Dec. 10, 1987, 926 F.2d 847, 857-58 (9th Cir.1991). Severing and preserving the valid portions of such warrants is appropriate because those portions have been authorized in advance by a judicial officer, and because overbreadth problems are easily detected and frequently litigated. There is thus little risk that the constitutional defect will go undiscovered; the remedy need be no broader than the harm.
What we have here, by contrast, is an officer who doctored a judicially-approved warrant and told no one what he had done. This conduct was completely unauthorized, quite dangerous and could easily have remained undetected. Now that it’s come to light, it just won’t do to say “close enough for government work.” We must make sure that no police officer even thinks of pulling a stunt like this again.
My colleagues say that “if Officer Kas-per’s actions in this case had been shown to be standard practice in the SFPD, and the resulting problem seen here to be anything other than unusual and unforeseen, this would be a very different case.” Maj. op. at 1132. But why? Fourth Amendment rights are individual, not collective; I am aware of no doctrine that provides a different remedy for their violation depending on whether the rights of others are similarly violated. If Officer Kasper’s conduct was impermissible and resulted in a violation of defendant’s rights, as the majority eventually recognizes, see id., then defendant is entitled to the same relief whether he is the lone victim or one of many. Antiseptic suppression of the seized evidence — and a stern warning that this conduct will never be tolerated — is the only appropriate remedy.