Court Opinion

ID: 9729156
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 14:28:06.68693+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:55.778992
License: Public Domain

KAUS, P. J.—Dissenting.
The Fourth Amendment is not the hijacker’s license to do business. We *418all agree on that. The trouble with this case is not that the record unerringly demonstrates that Kratzer, the United States Marshal, violated defendant’s rights. Rather, it is that a slipshod presentation of the evidence of Kratzer’s justification for the invasion of defendant’s privacy leaves the record without any substantial evidence in support of the trial court’s ruling on the motion to suppress.1 This case has nothing to do with airplane safety. It is, instead, a lesson in how not to prove a prima facie case.
The evidence is fully and correctly set forth by the majority. What is not stated—because it is not there—is any articulation by Kratzer that his search of the cigarette package was in any way related to airplane safety.2 The thought that it was reasonable to suspect that the package contained explosives was the court’s. Judicial imagination is, however, no substitute for evidence. The principle recognized in People v. Miller, 7 Cal.3d 219, 226 [101 Cal.Rptr. 860, 496 P.2d 1228] is obviously based on the prophylactic rationale that officers should not be encouraged to make whimsical searches, secure in the belief that some smart prosecutor or judge will figure out a legal basis for their actions.
While one may suspect that Kratzer’s actions were related to the reason for his presence at the airport, unfortunately nobody ever asked him why he became so curious about the contents of defendant’s package of cigarettes.3
*419Defendant’s guilt is plain and there is no reason why the conviction should be reversed if the search was legal. The proper disposition of this case is to return it to the trial court for the purpose of conducting another hearing on defendant’s motion to suppress. (Pen. Code, § 1260.)4
Appellant’s petition for a hearing by the Supreme Court was denied July 12, 1973.

In the absence of a relevant and constitutional statute or administrative regulation, the courts will have to work out the criteria for permissible invasions of passengers’ persons on a case-by-case basis. I am inclined to believe that the majority is correct and that cases such as United States v. Moreno, 475 F.2d 44 (5th Cir., No. 72-2484, decided Mar. 12, 1973) are on the right track. In brief, they attempt to solve the problem by way of analogy to the rule of Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 [20 L.Ed.2d 889, 88 S.Ct. 1868] and the substantial body of law which has developed in connection with border searches.

Also unrelated—because it is not there either—is any evidence that any airline employee had anything to do with the search, either as a member of a “government-industry team” or as a truly private party. The simple fact is that on our record this search was not merely government inspired (cf. Stapleton v. Superior Court, 72 Cal.2d 97, 102-103 [73 Cal.Rptr. 575, 447 P.2d 967]), it was wholly government executed. It escapes me just what an F.A.A. regulation, which tells carriers how to run their airlines, has to do with this case.

The majority seems to assume that Kratzer noticed that the package he retrieved from defendant’s boot contained a second package, without opening the first. The record is silent on the point.

Extended comment on the majority’s curious venture into the wonderland of the Code of Federal Regulations—neither here nor below suggested by the People—would be counterproductive. If slogans or F.A.A. regulations can abrogate constitutional rights by transmuting U.S. Marshals into airline employees, one wonders why, in People v. McKinnon, 7 Cal.3d 899, 911-916 [103 Cal.Rptr. 897, 500 P.2d 1097], the court went to such lengths to show that an airline search was free from police involvement. There is simply no way to reconcile the accepted rule that searches by private individuals are not subject to Fourth Amendment strictures if and only if the police are not involved, with the majority’s discovery that an illegal police search is all right if the. officer has made a mythical “government-industry team.”