Court Opinion

ID: 9480481
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:49:06.115914+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:42.666442
License: Public Domain

*352BOWMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
This case vividly illustrates the perversity of the exclusionary rule. Here, an officer’s educated hunch led to the discovery of evidence (nine kilograms of cocaine) of substantial criminal activity. This discovery occurred as a result of information the officer developed by asking questions and examining documents in the course of his routine check of a parked car and its occupants at a highway rest stop. The ordinary law-abiding citizen, I believe, would think the officer should be commended for his fine work, and the cocaine dealers punished. Instead, because we hold (as I agree, under the existing case law, we must) that a “seizure” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment occurred before the officer had formed an objectively reasonable basis for suspecting the defendants of criminal activity, the exclusionary rule requires that the evidence be suppressed. The defendants thus exit unpunished, free to continue dealing illegal drugs to the pathetic addicts and contemptible scofflaws who comprise the national market for these substances. As for the officer, far from his being commended, it is judicially recorded that he blundered, and the point once again is driven home that legalistic observance of even the most technical of the judge-created rules of search and seizure— rules which, like the Fourth Amendment itself, seek to protect law-abiding citizens from intrusive conduct by officers of the state — is more important than intelligent, courageous, and vigorous initiative to expose criminal activity and bring those responsible for it to the bar of justice.
It has been reported that since 1961, when in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 81 S.Ct. 1684, 6 L.Ed.2d 1081 (1961), the Supreme Court extended the federal exclusionary rule to the state courts, “the murder rate has doubled, rape has quadrupled and robbery has quintupled.” Wall St. J., May 7,1990, at A14, Col. 1. While it would be foolish to blame the exclusionary rule for all of this alarming increase in violent crime, I believe it is equally foolish to pretend that the exclusionary rule, and the Zeitgeist it has created, is to blame for none of it.
The time has come, it seems to me, for a serious reexamination of the exclusionary rule — its benefits, its costs, its consequences for the safety of our citizens, and its impact upon their confidence in the system of criminal justice their tax dollars support. This Court, however, is not the forum in which such a reexamination can take place. I therefore concur in today’s decision.