Court Opinion

ID: 9486671
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 11:55:49.174193+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:51.771856
License: Public Domain

SUHRHEINRICH, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The majority reverses defendant’s conviction and remands this case for further proceedings. Because I do not believe that defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated, and because — even assuming a constitutional violation — I do not believe that the exclusionary rule should apply, I respectfully dissent.
I.
Officers responded to defendant’s residence pursuant to a radio call to the effect that a young girl was being held in the apartment against her will. When they arrived, they found the victim trapped inside the apartment by a locked, armored gate. The officers summoned their supervisor to the scene and he authorized a forced entry. Once freed, the victim told the officers that the defendant had raped her and threatened to shoot her or her family if she tried to escape. The victim directed the officers to the guns and the officers seized them. They did not look anywhere other than where the girl directed and they did not take anything other than the guns the girl had described previously.
I would hold that, when defendant converted his apartment from a home to a prison, he forfeited whatever reasonable expectation of privacy he had. For the Fourth Amendment to apply, the Supreme Court has recognized that the defendant must have suffered an invasion not only of a subjectively held expectation of privacy, but an expectation of privacy which “society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’ ” Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 361, 88 S.Ct. 507, 516, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967) (Harlan, J., concurring).
Here, unlike most crimes in which a defendant’s home is merely the location of the crime, the defendant converted his home into the very instrumentality of his crime. One cannot hold a person against her will unless he has a trap in which to hold her. Thus, I conclude that once the police broke into the defendant’s make-shift jail and freed his captive, they were free to seize any means he had employed to hold her against her will.
*685Though I believe that such a rule is justified, there is a narrower ground for holding that no Fourth Amendment violation occurred in this case. In Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 107 S.Ct. 1149, 94 L.Ed.2d 347 (1987), Justice Scalia, writing for the Court, addressed (albeit in dicta) the precise situation in this ease. In Hicks, officers made a warrantless entry into the defendant’s apartment; an entry justified by exigent circumstances. Id. at 324, 107 S.Ct. at 1152. Once inside, an officer noticed “suspicious” stereo equipment and moved it away from the wall to see the serial numbers. By moving the equipment, the Court held, the officer had conducted a search; a search beyond the scope of the exigencies which justified his warrantless entry. Id. at 324-25, 107 S.Ct. at 1152-53. The Court held that the evidence must be excluded because, without the information gained through this unlawful search, the police lacked the probable cause necessary to seize the equipment under the “plain view” doctrine. Id. at 326-27, 107 S.Ct. at 1153-54.1
In Hicks, Justice Powell asked in dissent, as I do here, “what [the officer] should have done in these circumstances.” Id. at 332,107 S.Ct. at 1156 (Powell, J., dissenting). Justice Scalia’s response, I propose, should control this case:
The answer depends, of course, upon whether [the officer] had probable cause to conduct a search, a question that was not preserved in this case. If he had, then he should have done precisely what he did [that is, go ahead and search].
Id. at 329, 107 S.Ct. at 1155 (emphasis added). Justice Scalia’s response indicates that once entry into the home has been effected legally, the police need only probable cause to conduct a search outside the scope of the justification for the entry; no further “warrant exception” is needed. Neither the concurring nor dissenting Justices in Hicks disputed this underlying assumption.
In this case, it is clear that the officer’s warrantless entry into the apartment was justified by exigent circumstances. It is also clear that the search of the closet exceeded the scope of this initial justification. Using the analysis underlying Hicks, however, the officers needed only probable cause to search the closet, nothing more. The circumstances of the crime, the young girl’s detailed description of the guns and their location, I believe, constituted probable cause to conduct the limited search and subsequent seizure which followed.2
II.
Finally, even assuming a violation of defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights in this case, I do not believe that the exclusionary rule should be applied. “If the prosecution can establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the information ultimately or inevitably would have been discovered by lawful means ... then the deterrence rationale [behind the exclusionary rule] has so little basis that the evidence should be received.” Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431, 444, 104 S.Ct. 2501, 2509, 81 L.Ed.2d 377 (1984).3 This “inevitable discovery” exception to the exclusionary rule is based upon the principle that, although the government should not be allowed to profit from its misdeeds, it should not be “put in a worse position simply because of *686some earlier police error or misconduct.” Id. at 443, 104 S.Ct. at 2508. In Nix, as should be the case- here, application of the exclusionary rule was found to be improper because “exclusion of evidence that would inevitably have been discovered would also put the government in a worse position, because the police would have obtained that evidence if no misconduct had taken place.” Id. at 444, 104 S.Ct. at 2509.
This court has recognized that illegally seized evidence may be used at trial if the government shows that there is a reasonable probability that, based upon information known to the officers prior to the illegal search, the evidence inevitably would have been discovered by lawful means. United States v. Buchanan (David), 904 F.2d 349, 356 (6th Cir.1990) (citing United States v. Webb, 796 F.2d 60, 62 (5th Cir.1986), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 1038, 107 S.Ct. 894, 93 L.Ed.2d 846 (1987)).4
In the present case, it is indisputable that, immediately prior to the officers seizing defendant’s weapons, the officers had sufficient probable cause upon which they could have obtained a warrant to search defendant’s apartment for guns. I believe that there is sufficient evidence to support a finding that, but for their warrantless search, they would have obtained a warrant. Given the accuracy of the young girl’s description and the fact that — by the defendant’s own admission — the police could easily have secured the apartment for the short time needed to get a warrant, there can be no doubt that the guns would have been found. See United States v. Buchanan (Collin), 910 F.2d 1571, 1574 (7th Cir.1990) (defendant’s cocaine inevitably would have been discovered because, had the officers not conducted their illegal search, they would have sought a warrant to search the hotel room — and that warrant would have issued — based upon their probable cause to believe that the defendant still had the gun with which he committed a murder some thirty-seven days earlier).
Although the record before us is sketchy, I would hold that it contains facts sufficient to establish the inevitable discovery of defendant’s weapons by lawful means. Even if not sufficient to conclude as a matter of law that the evidence is admissible, the record is certainly strong enough to warrant a remand in this case to enable the district court to make appropriate findings of fact on this issue; an issue it could not have reached given the nature of its findings concerning consent and exigency. See United States v. Richardson, 949 F.2d 851, 859 (6th Cir.1991) (remand for findings under the “inevitable discovery” doctrine necessary after reversing district court’s conclusion that search was lawful).
III.
Based upon the foregoing, I believe that there are two very clear grounds for holding that defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights were not violated in this ease. Additionally, even assuming a violation, I believe that application of the exclusionary rule is improper under the “inevitable discovery” doctrine. Therefore, I respectfully dissent.

. The “plain view" doctrine, of course, is not relevant to the present circumstances because the guns were found hidden in the defendant’s bedroom closet.

. Defendant's assertion that this case is controlled by Mincey v. Arizona, 437 U.S. 385, 98 S.Ct. 2408, 57 L.Ed.2d 290 (1978), and Thompson v. Louisiana, 469 U.S. 17, 105 S.Ct. 409, 83 L.Ed.2d 246 (1984), is unpersuasive. Here, the police seized only weapons and then only after the just-rescued victim described the guns and led the officers to where they were hidden. This is a far cry from the “general exploratory search for evidence of a crime," Thompson, 469 U.S. at 19, 105 S.Ct. at 410, which the Court ruled was illegal in those cases. See Mincey, 437 U.S. at 389, 98 S.Ct. at 2412 (police conducted four day, "exhaustive and intrusive” search, seizing 200 items); Thompson, 469 U.S. at 18-19, 105 S.Ct. at 409-10 (“2-hour general search remains a significant intrusion on petitioner's privacy”).

.The discovery of the victim's body in Nix was characterized by the Court as “inevitable" because, at precisely the moment that the police were conducting their illegal interrogation of the defendant, volunteer searchers were approaching the location where the defendant said the girl's body could be found. Nix, 467 U.S. at 448-49, 104 S.Ct. at 2511-12.

. In Buchanan, however, this court relied on Webb as authority for a requirement that the government also show that “the police were actively pursuing [an] alternate line of investigation prior to the misconduct.” Id. at 356-57. This "alternate investigation” requirement, most-likely born of the facts of the Nix case, see, supra at note 3, was roundly criticized in United States v. Boatwright, 822 F.2d 862, 864 (9th Cir.1987), and squarely rejected by the Supreme Court one year later. See Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533, 540 n. 2, 108 S.Ct. 2529, 2534-35 n. 2, 101 L.Ed.2d 472 (1988).