Court Opinion

ID: 9459451
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:20:48.932908+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:09.896562
License: Public Domain

WILLIAM E. MILLER, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The starting point for analyzing this case is, of course, the Fourth Amendment. The case law interpreting the Amendment establishes that law enforcement officers conducting a search or seizure must obtain a warrant unless the circumstances under which they are acting fall within one of the limited and closely guarded exceptions to this general rule. Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971); Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967). One exception commonly referred to as the exigent circumstances rule, concerns the stopping of moving vehicles on the highway. Even when this exception is invoked and no warrant is obtained, a law enforcement officer must be acting upon knowledge amounting to probable cause that the vehicle he stops on the highway has committed or is committing an offense. Brinegar v. United States, 338 U.S. 160, 69 S.Ct. 1302, 93 L.Ed. 1879 (1949); Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132, 45 S.Ct. 280, 69 L.Ed. 543 (1925); United States v. McKenzie, 446 F.2d 949 (6th Cir. 1971). Therefore, it must be determined whether at the time the government agents halted the defendant’s truck they had probable cause to believe that the defendant was transporting illicit whiskey in the vehicle.
Probable cause has been defined by the Supreme Court as “facts and circumstances within their (the officers) knowledge and of which they had reasonably trustworthy information to warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief that” an offense is being committed or has been committed. Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132, 162, 45 S.Ct. 280, 288, 69 L.Ed. 543 (1925). Although this definition had its genesis in earlier cases1 this basic statement from Carroll has been quoted, paraphrased or cited approvingly throughout the search and seizure cases up to the present time. See Adams v. Williams, 407 U.S. 143, 147, 92 S.Ct. 1921, 32 L.Ed.2d 612 (1972).
The government asserts (and the majority apparently agrees) that the intercepting officers had a right to rely on the statement of Agent Rollins that a violation of the law was taking place and *1013that immediate action had to be taken. This argument, however, assumes too much and avoids the crux of the issue since only if Agent Rollins had probable cause to believe a violation of the tax laws was in progress could the actions of the intercepting agents, acting upon Agent Rollins’s instructions, be upheld. This same basic argument was proposed and specifically rejected in Whiteley v. Warden, 401 U.S. 560, 568, 91 S.Ct. 1031, 28 L.Ed.2d 306 (1971), which settles the issue here. No effort is made by the majority to distinguish this recent Supreme Court ruling.
The only observation of Agent Rollins which even hints at illegal activity was the viewing of 37 one gallon glass jugs containing a clear liquid being unloaded into the smokehouse by Henry B. Manners, Jr., and the subsequent loading of filled paper sacks into the defendant’s truck. Agent Rollins did not know what actually was in the jugs transferred from the car trunk into the smokehouse or even that the paper sacks subsequently loaded into the truck contained these same glass jugs. At best the government agent had a bare suspicion that the truck was carrying moonshine. Suspicion or even reasonable suspicion will not suffice and are not a substitute for the higher constitutional standard of probable cause. The record is barren of any evidence to indicate why surveillance of the Manners property had been •undertaken. There is no evidence that the defendant or the other men involved were known whisky runners. Nor is there evidence of any illegal distilling operation on the premises or in the area, or that the government agents were acting pursuant to an informer’s tip. Therefore, I conclude that Agent Rollins did not have sufficient knowledge to satisfy the constitutional standard of probable cause and that the agents acting under his instruction were in no better position. The district court in my view erred in overruling the defendant’s motion to suppress and the case should be reversed and remanded to the court below for further proceedings.2 The majority opinion, I believe, seriously erodes the protections of the Fourth Amendment and disregards controlling precedent. Since the search was illegal, the highly questionable means employed by the officers in effectuating the search need not be reached.
Addendum to above dissenting opinion of WILLIAM E. MILLER, Circuit Judge.
After the above dissenting opinion was written and circulated, the majority opinion was revised in certain minor respects. This necessitates a few additional observations:
1. Agent Rollins’ conclusory statement that “he is unloading whiskey” cannot rise to any higher level than the *1014observations upon which it was allegedly-based — observations which, in my view, fall far short of showing probable cause. Rollins could not possibly have had knowledge of the contents of the jugs or the sacks. At most he could only guess. But even so this conclusory statement was in effect stricken from the record by the trial court when he said, in response to an objection, “All right, let’s have what you saw. You saw they were full apparently and had liquid in them.” This was an admonition to the witness to stick to the facts — what he actually saw — and to avoid conclusions. Hence, I feel that my statement in the dissenting opinion above that the conclusion of Rollins was stricken from the record (see footnote 2) was, and is, correct. No magic or formal words are required to sustain objections to testimony or to strike or exclude it from consideration.
2. As stressed in the dissent, unless Rollins had probable cause from what he observed to believe that defendant was “unloading whiskey” — which I believe he clearly did not — his conclusory statement to that effect to the other officers adds nothing to the existence of probable cause, as Whiteley v. Warden, 401 U.S. 561, 91 S.Ct. 1031, 28 L.Ed.2d 306 (1971), teaches, a decision which the majority continues to ignore.
3. Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132, 45 S.Ct. 280, 69 L.Ed. 543 (1925), relied upon by the majority, was a prohibition case involving the stopping and search of an automobile and is factually a far cry from the case before us, although its definition of probable cause has continuing validity. As I evaluate the facts of this case the government has wholly failed to establish that the officers had a reasonably grounded belief that the law was being violated. What the government has failed to prove has been supplied by the majority opinion by its own ipse dixit.

. See Brinegar v. United States, 338 U.S. 160, 176 n. 15, 69 S.Ct. 1302, 93 L.Ed. 1879 (1949).

. My views would not undermine the authority of the opinion of this Court in United States v. Wells, 467 F.2d 65 (6th Cir., 1972), for I deem the cases to be clearly distinguishable upon their facts. First, in Wells, testimony of one of the investigating officers was admitted without objection that he thought that the containers which he observed “were liquor.” In the present case proffered testimony somewhat to the same effect was ordered by the district judge to be stricken from the record. Second, in Wells, there were additional facts, not present here, tending to support the idea that the automobile was transporting illicit whiskey. For example, Officer Batts. in that case testified that he noticed that the rear of the car was “sitting down” ; that the tires were “somewhat ballooned” ; and that the driver was “having some difficulty holding this ear on curves as he went around curves.” It is well known that testimony of this kind in liquor cases has been frequently sustained by the courts as relevant facts bearing upon the question of probable cause. In brief the prosecution in Wells, as this Court ruled, carried its burden of proof to establish probable cause, whereas the opposite is true in the present case.