Court Opinion

ID: 9457100
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 20:12:31.513652+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:35:13.230862
License: Public Domain

TAMM, Circuit Judge
(concurring):
Judicial decisions have at best established ill-defined guidelines as to the ev-identiary requirements necessary to prove constructive possession. Especially in reported cases growing out of narcotics prosecutions the opinions are usually built upon involved and obscure reasoning which certainly suggests judicial subjectivity. The resulting confusion should convince those who read the cases that decisions in this area are made by a selective rather than a comprehensive application. See Annot., 91 A.L.R.2d 810 (1963). The rhetorical legerdemain compounded in this area of the law invokes abstractions which appear more designed to achieve a particular result in an individual case than to stabilize and formalize a workable index of objective standards. The more cases one reads on constructive possession the deeper is he plunged into a thicket of subjectivity. Successive cases enumerate a continuing re-interpretation which can only be described as judicial whimsy. To basic questions to which the an*704swer should be “Always”, judicial hairsplitting settles for a wavering “Sometimes”.
Confronted with a library of flexible abstractions, government and defense counsel alike must struggle, too often unsuccessfully, with a logically insoluble dilemma. The sum total of recorded cases can best be described as symbiotic.1 Both' prosecutor and defendant's attorney present their cases with the unfortunate knowledge that the law of constructive possession is what we will say it is in our next opinion. It is illogical to believe that from the chaotic patchwork which flows ex cathedra there is created a stable and definable body of law. It is the confusion and doubt unavoidable in the thinking of lawyers, created by our own meandering rulings, that results in the unfortunate waste of trial and appellate time which we have imposed upon ourselves.
The majority opinion accurately points out the affirmative conclusions which were not negated by the Government’s proof and which require reversal of the present ease. In so doing we make, to us, an acceptable disposition of the present case. Lawyers in future cases, concerned as to the issue of constructive possession, will still find most trial and appellate courts simultaneously looking in both directions.

. The usual approach to determination of the existence or presence of constructive possession is largely a matter of tone. To attempt to catalogue conflicting opinions would be tedious and perplexing. The lack of exactitude is illustrated by reference to the following cases :
United States v. Vasquez, 429 F.2d 615 (2d Cir. 1970) ; United States v. Febre, 425 F.2d 107 (2d Cir. 1970) ; United States v. Lopez, 355 F.2d 250 (2d Cir. 1966) ; United States v. Carter, 320 F.2d 1 (2d Cir. 1963) ; Hallman v. United States, 115 U.S.App.D.C. 350, 320 F.2d 669 (1963) ; United States v. Douglas, 319 F.2d 526 (2d Cir. 1963) ; United States v. Ramis, 315 F.2d 437 (2d Cir. 1963) ; United States v. Jones, 308 F.2d 26 (2d Cir. 1962) (en banc) ; Collis v. United States, 101 U.S.App.D.C. 160, 247 F.2d 566 (1957) ; People v. Pippin, 16 App.Div.2d 635, 227 N.Y.S.2d 164 (1962) ; People v. Jackson, 23 Ill.2d 360, 178 N.E.2d 320 (1961) ; Crisman v. Commonwealth, 197 Va. 17, 87 S.E.2d 796 (1955).
In approximately half of the cited cases constructive possession was found to exist. In the other half the court’s finding was in the negative. It is not difficult to visualize a different court holding exactly the opposite in most of these cases. The affirmative and negative rulings are in such obvious conflict that for the practitioner the problems are difficult to understand and apparently for the courts impossible to master.