Court Opinion

ID: 9466752
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:26:34.939259+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:56.269250
License: Public Domain

*206MERRITT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Here the government concedes that the deputy sheriff of Claiborne County, Tennessee, who conducted the search in question was in the pay of a company trying to break a strike. We should therefore scrutinize even more carefully than usual any warrantless, nighttime search of the strikers’ personal effects conducted by the deputy upon information furnished by the company security guard — a man who was on loan from the deputy’s private security guard service.
My reading of the record convinces me that the deputy was told by the company guard only that the strikers had fired several volleys from a carbine rifle. There is no evidence that the strikers fired more than one weapon. The security guard for the company testified as follows:
Q. Now, while you were sitting in your pickup truck, did you observe the strikers there, or where the cars were parked down in this area?
A. Yes, sir. I could see them. And like I said, they had been shooting firecrackers.
As I was sitting in my truck I heard a couple of real loud- — it didn’t exactly sound like firecrackers. I turned to look, and I seen muzzle flashes.
Q. Where were the muzzle flashes coming from?
A. Right out of the middle of where they were.
Q. When you say “they,” the strikers? The court: What do you mean by “muzzle flashes?”
A. The fire that comes out of the end of a gun when you shoot it.
(App. 10-11)
Q. Have you formed a conclusion in your mind, based upon your knowledge of weapons as to what type of weapon it was that you saw discharge?
A. I really hadn’t given much thought about that. I just knew it was a gun.
Q. Haven’t you testified before that you believe this was a carbine?
A. It sounded like a carbine.
Q. And you owned an M-l carbine yourself?
A. Yes, sir, I have.
Q. At that moment you thought a carbine would be responsible for the fire?
A. Yes.
Q. Is that what you told Mr. Jesse and Mr. Ramsey [the police officers]?
A. I said it sounded like a carbine, but may not have been one. I wasn’t sure.
(App. 15-16)
Once the deputy found the carbine under the bus, he had no reason to search the strikers and their automobiles further. There was no probable cause to search for anything else. The subsequent search was simply a general exploratory search. This is the same kind of general exploratory search for weapons which led to the adoption of the Fourth Amendment. The British soldiers in Boston at least had a general warrant, or a “writ of assistance.” According to the defendant, the deputy had nothing to justify the exploratory search except the company’s money in his pocket.
Although I deplore the resort to violence in labor disputes, our history is replete with instances in which citizens engage in civil disobedience and resistance in labor disputes when they think that the authorities or the legal system has been bought off by their adversaries. Here all parties agree that the company was paying the deputy to furnish guard service and assist in breaking the strike. It may have led the strikers to believe that they could not depend on local law enforcement to protect them during the strike. It may have influenced them to resort to violence. Both sides were in the wrong. In such a situation, we should be careful to apply the law in a neutral and objective way. Since I can find no basis for a continuing search after the carbine was found, I would suppress the weapon in question.