Court Opinion

ID: 9750753
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 15:29:41.780622+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:07:41.822453
License: Public Domain

SILVER, J.,
with whom LEVY J., joins,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
[¶ 25] The search of the computer was illegal; the search of the house was illegal; and the seizure of the videotape was illegal. The Court is drawing an imaginary line between the seizure of the videotape and the identities of the two witnesses. Their identities came directly from the videotape. We should not allow the prod*542uct of an illegal search to be admitted in evidence when it is so closely connected to the purpose of the search and when the same live witnesses could have come from truly independent, or at least constitutional, methods. The videotape was properly suppressed and I would have suppressed the testimony as well.
[¶26] The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and article 1, section 5 of the Maine Constitution require that citizens be secure in their homes and effects. These Constitutional provisions require that, except in limited circumstances that do not apply here, police officers who wish to search a home must first obtain a warrant by convincing an impartial magistrate that they have probable cause to believe they will find evidence of criminal wrongdoing during the search. See U.S. Const, amend. IV; Me. Const. art. I, § 5. This requirement applies no matter how abhorrent the suspected behavior. As a remedy for the failure of police to comply with the warrant requirement, evidence obtained from an unlawful search or seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment may be excluded from admission in evidence at trial. See State v. Nadeau, 2010 ME 71, ¶ 37, 1 A.3d 445. Here, suppressing the videotape discovered during the illegal search but admitting evidence obtained from the videotape does not rectify the violation of Bailey’s constitutional rights caused by the illegal search.
[¶ 27] One of the Ceccolini factors, and the one I consider the most important, is whether excluding the testimony would have a significant deterrent effect on police misconduct. See United States v. Ceccolini, 435 U.S. 268, 280, 98 S.Ct. 1054, 55 L.Ed.2d 268 (1978). The police misconduct here was flagrant enough to warrant vacating Bailey’s conviction the first time this case was before the Court. State v. Bailey, 2010 ME 15, ¶ 29, 989 A.2d 716. We held that the detective’s search of Bailey’s computer and the subsequent search of his home exceeded the scope of his consent and violated the Fourth Amendment. Id. ¶ 28. Although the detective was actually investigating child pornography, he entered Bailey’s home under the pretense of investigating “a problem in the neighborhood with people gaining access to someone else’s computer.” Id. ¶¶ 4-7. Our holding recognized that Bailey allowed the detective to look at his computer only because he believed the detective was trying to determine whether someone else was gaining unauthorized access to it. Id. ¶ 28. The detective violated Bailey’s constitutional rights by searching the computer for child pornography, questioning Bailey, and searching his home. Id. ¶¶ 9-10, 28. That illegal search led to the discovery of the videotapes that the Court agrees must be suppressed. Id. ¶ 10.
[¶28] The detective should have obtained a warrant, at the latest, once the search of the computer showed that it contained child pornography.4 If the detective had done so the live testimony would not be an issue. Proper police procedure would have enabled the State to use the physical evidence to successfully prosecute Bailey without violating his Fourth Amendment rights. The Court acknowledges that the videotapes were obtained unconstitutionally, but authorizes the State’s use of the videotape to obtain crucial testimony from the victims identified in the videotape and to use that testi*543mony against Bailey. By declaring the testimony to be constitutional the Court is effectively approving the illegal seizure of the videotape. This Court should not reward illegal searches and seizures by relying on an illusory distinction between the videotape and what surfaced from the videotape. This is a mythical distinction and a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.
[¶ 29] Part of the rationale for the result in Ceccolini was that witnesses might come forward on their own, notwithstanding an illegal search. See Ceccolini, 435 U.S. at 275-79, 98 S.Ct. 1054. The detective here also undermined that key justification for admitting live-witness testimony even when physical evidence has been suppressed. The detective actively sought out the witnesses in the same way he illegally sought out physical evidence. He discovered the videotape in the course of an illegal search. He used the videotape to identify, find, and question the victims about the crime. The court found that he did this a few days after he obtained the videotape. No other lead brought the victims forward. The victims did not come forward on their own. One of the victims testified that the detective and the State “helped [her] to have th[e] courage to come forward.” We will never know if these young victims would have come forward at some later point to reveal Bailey’s behavior. If they had come forward at any time in the future, Bailey would be subject to prosecution because there is no statute of limitations regarding the sexual assault of children. See 17-A M.R.S. § 8(1) (2011).
[¶ 30] An analysis of the other Ceccoli-ni factors indicates that the search and testimony are not attenuated enough to justify admitting the testimony here. In Ceccolini a police officer happened to find evidence of illegal betting while innocently talking to his friend in a flower shop. Ceccolini, 435 U.S. at 269-70, 98 S.Ct. 1054. The officer told detectives in his precinct, and the detectives in turn informed an FBI agent because the FBI had previously suspected that the shop was involved in illegal gambling. Id. at 270-71, 98 S.Ct. 1054. The FBI agent “was not fully informed of the manner in which [the police officer] had obtained the information,” so when he questioned a shop employee four months later he did not mention the evidence or the police officer who found it. Id. at 272, 98 S.Ct. 1054. The United States Supreme Court held that the employee’s testimony should not have been suppressed in the shop owner’s trial for perjury because it was sufficiently unrelated to the illegal search. Id. at 279-80, 98 S.Ct. 1054.
[¶ 31] The situation here is very different from Ceccolini. The detective went to Bailey’s home with the specific purpose of investigating child pornography. He obtained videotapes illegally by searching Bailey’s home without a warrant. He did not know the identity of the victims before the search. He identified the victims by making headshots from the videotape. He showed the headshot of each victim to Bailey’s daughter who identified each girl as a friend. Only then did the detective locate each victim. He referenced the headshots during his interviews with the victims. Each victim eventually disclosed that Bailey had sexually assaulted her, which led Bailey to be charged with thirteen counts of Class A, B, and C crimes. The same detective conducted the illegal search, found the videotapes, cropped the headshots, interviewed Bailey’s daughter to get the victims’ names, and then interviewed the victims. The events here — and the closeness of the connection between the illegal search and the live-witness testimony — are much different from Ceccolini and support a different result.
*544[¶ 32] Taken together, the Ceccolini factors weigh in favor of exclusion. I would not use them to excuse a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment involving a warrantless, nonconsensual search of a person’s home as harmless police behavior. I therefore dissent on this issue.

. At oral argument the State agreed that the detective should have stopped the search and obtained a warrant as soon as he saw the LimeWire icon indicating that Bailey had access to the peer-to-peer networking program through which child pornography was being shared, see State v. Bailey, 2010 ME 15, ¶¶ 4, 8, 989 A.2d 716, and that "nothing would have stopped him from getting a warrant at that point.”