Court Opinion

ID: 9790938
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 02:01:40.9844+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:32.717070
License: Public Domain

*284CONCURRING OPINION OF
PADGETT, J.
I concur in the result and in parts I through III of the opinion. I cannot agree with part IV for the reason that in my view it is pure obiter dictum.
No probation condition limited to searches by appellant’s correctional supervisor has been laid down, and, ergo, no search pursuant to such a condition has yet occurred. Yet, in the absence of any factual situation whatever, the opinion, in part IV, formulates a constitutional test for such searches. That test, the opinion says, is whether the correctional supervisor is able to point to “specific and articulable facts giving rise to a reasonable suspicion” that illicit drugs are concealed on the person, in the property or at the residence of the probationer, as distinguished from the test of “probable cause” necessary to support a warrant. Constitutional issues should not be decided in a vacuum. Much less should new constitutional tests be adopted in a vacuum. Yet that is what the opinion does.
Absent a specific factual situation to test that new constitutional standard against, I do not know what the standard means, and, I submit, neither will anyone else. A myriad of different factual situations involving searches by a correctional supervisor may arise. For example, I harbor grave doubts as to whether it is constitutionally impermissible to require a probationer, convicted of a drug offense, to submit to a warrantless search of his or her person by a correctional supervisor, as a matter of routine, at any scheduled meeting with such a supervisor, but the opinion would forbid this. I believe we should have a concrete factual situation before us before we undertake to lay down a constitutional standard with respect to searches of a probationer by a correctional supervisor pursuant to a probation condition. I therefore cannot agree with part IV, not because I necessarily view the legal pronouncements therein as wrong, but because, without objective facts to test them against, I cannot say that they are either right or wrong.