Court Opinion

ID: 9471568
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:35:51.836901+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:28.330671
License: Public Domain

MERRITT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The Court’s holding that narcotic agent Demnick’s encounter with the defendant at the Detroit airport constitutes an invalid seizure of the person under the Fourth Amendment appears to me to be directly contrary to the Supreme Court’s recent opinion in Florida v. Royer, _ U.S. _, 103 S.Ct. 1319, 75 L.Ed.2d 229 (1983), and, if allowed to stand, will put an end to the effectiveness of the Justice Department’s airport drug investigation program in the Sixth Circuit. I, therefore, dissent.
In Royer only one Justice expressed a view contrary to the following statement of the law in the Court’s opinion:
[L]aw enforcement officers do not violate the Fourth Amendment by merely approaching an individual on the street or in another public place, by asking him if he is willing to answer some questions, by putting questions to him if the person is willing to listen, and by offering in evidence in a criminal prosecution his voluntary answers to such questions, [citations omitted.] Nor would the fact that the officer identifies himself as a police officer, without more, convert the encounter into a seizure requiring some level of objective justification. United States v. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. 544 [100 S.Ct. 1870, 64 L.Ed.2d 497] (1980). The person approached, however, need not answer any questions put to him; indeed, he may decline to listen to the questions at all and may go on his way.
103 S.Ct. at 1324. That is all that happened here up to the point in time when the agent asked the defendant,. and the defendant specifically and expressly agreed, to come to an office at the airport “to clarify some discrepancies.” Before that time the agent *1234walked up to the defendant, and told him he was a narcotics agent and had some information about drug activities that he would like to ask the defendant about. The defendant answered the questions voluntarily. That was all there was to it. There was no detention and no seizure of the person — just some questions and answers on the street in front of the airport. No threats, no arrest, no hostility, no accusation beyond the suggestion of suspicion implied in all such airport encounters between a narcotics officer and a citizen who is approached.
What happened in that encounter, however, was very significant from the officer’s point of view. The defendant lied about taking an empty suitcase to New York earlier the same day. The defendant falsely claimed that some person in New York had given him the suitcase for delivery to a third person in Detroit and that he did not know what was in the suitcase. The agent knew that the defendant had carried an empty suitcase to New York and, as a result of the conversation, knew that the defendant was trying to conceal what was in the suitcase through a series of fabrications.
Knowing all that, the only remaining question is whether the agent had probable cause under the Fourth Amendment in light of United States v. Place, _ U.S. _, 103 S.Ct. 2637, 77 L.Ed.2d 110 (1983), to seize and hold the suitcase overnight for inspection. The District Court has not ruled on that question, and I would therefore remand the case to the District Court for consideration of the issue. We should not try to decide that issue until the record has been developed and the District Court has had an opportunity to consider it. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent from the opinion of the Court holding that an illegal seizure of the person occurred in this case.