Court Opinion

ID: 9459118
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:11:25.625213+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:01.961771
License: Public Domain

WILKEY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I concur in the dissent of Judge Robb. I also would like to state briefly an additional reason. My analysis of the facts relied on by the majority is:
1. At the stationhouse the defendant Mills knew he had a right to post collateral and avoid confinement.
2. The defendant apparently was under a misapprehension that he would be detained at the stationhouse, whether he was able to post collateral or not.
3. The defendant failed to clear up his own misapprehension by asserting his known rights to post collateral and thus avoid detention.
4. If the defendant had said “I want to post collateral,” on the version of the evidence necessarily relied on by the majority opinion itself, it is clear that defendant would have been released without the search which took place.
5. A reasonable routine administrative search cannot be vitiated because the defendant himself failed to speak up. The test is- not as the majority considers it, whether the police officer spoke up— the purpose of that would be to inform the defendant of his right to post collateral. This the defendant already knew.
6. Finally, the police officer knew that the defendant knew! The defendant had loaned the money and had seen his friend Tatum post collateral and be released, all in the presence of the police officer. So there was no reason for the police officer to speak up and tell the defendant Mills what he must have already known.
In my view, it is sufficiently irrational to exclude evidence and permit “[t]he criminal . . . to go free because the constable has blundered,” 1 yet the courts occasionally do it because that is the law established by the Supreme Court. But in Mills’ case, it wasn’t the constable who blundered — it was the criminal! By what rationality, then, should the criminal go free?

. See People v. Defore, 242 N.Y. 13, 21, 150 N.E. 585, 587 (1926) (Cardozo, J.), cert. denied, 270 U.S. 657, 46 S.Ct. 353, 70 L.Ed. 784 (1926), and cases there cited.