Court Opinion

ID: 9457473
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 20:22:53.311784+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:35:21.932955
License: Public Domain

*1356PER CURIAM:
Appellant was convicted of grand larceny 1 of a Chevrolet Corvette transmission, found by police in appellant’s garage immediately before and at the time of his arrest. After an evidentiary hearing, appellant’s pretrial motion to suppress the transmission as evidence because of a violation of the Fourth Amendment by an alleged illegal search and seizure was denied. The sole issue on this appeal is the legality of the seizure in appellant’s garage of the stolen transmission and its introduction in evidence. We affirm.
I. Facts Relevant to the Issue Presented
All the events took place on 18 May 1968, beginning at 5:00 a. m. when the police were notified that a 1967 Chevrolet Corvette had been stolen. By 4:20 p. m. Police Officers Huffstutler and Howard had located the Corvette, stripped of its transmission, engine, radiator, hood and steering wheel. From various pieces of evidence in and around the car Officer Huffstutler concluded that the Corvette had been stripped elsewhere, and by an examination of the terrain deduced the probable locale of the stripping within a three-block area. In a systematic survey of all streets and alleys they observed tell-tale sweepings of nuts and bolts in front of a three-ear garage, and in addition several red rags of the type previously noted on the stripped Corvette. A comparison of the rags found at the two locations showed they were identical. The officers returned to the garage.
The three sliding doors of the garage were not completely closed because of their construction and age, leaving an opening of approximately eight or nine inches. Inside it was “relatively dark,” so the officer employed his flashlight to look in through the gap. Lying ten feet away he noticed a transmission shaft. On his knees for a better view, he identified it as a Chevrolet product, and observed that the speedometer cable had been clipped. After returning to the stripped Corvette, a check of its speedometer cable showed it, too, had been clipped.
On notifying' the Auto Squad of his discoveries, Officer Huffstutler was advised to go to the garage and recover the stolen transmission. Instead, he returned to his precinct and began to type an application for a search warrant. On reflection, he decided it was better then to return to the garage, interview its owner, and set in motion the procedure to take fingerprints from the Corvette.2
On arrival at the garage Officer Huffstutler and his partner noted an automobile with its trunk open, parked so the trunk could be loaded from a little alleyway which led to the side door of the garage. Inside the open trunk were a steering wheel, clutch plate, and pressure plate, all 1967 Corvette equipment, and each of which corresponded to items stripped from the stolen car. With guns drawn the officers moved toward the open side door of the garage, and as they did appellant Wright and two others emerged. The three were arrested for possession of stolen property. Leaving them in custody, Officer Huffstutler entered the open door of the garage and located the Corvette transmission which had been moved to another place inside.
On the basis of these operative facts appellant contended in the trial court and here alleges that two searches and the resulting seizure were illegal; the first alleged illegal search being when Officer Huffstutler, with his vision aided by the flashlight, peered through the opening between the garage doors; the second being when he walked in through the open door to pick up the stolen auto*1357mobile transmission, which he had first seen in the garage less than two hours before.
II. Legality of the Officer’s First Look
Appellant contends strenuously that his rights under the Fourth Amendment3 were violated not once but twice by illegal search of the garage. He argues that the officer’s action in peering through the eight or nine-inch crack was a search, particularly since it was aided by artificial light; that such search was illegal; that this illegal search tainted the seizure thereafter of the auto transmission at the time of the arrest. As in Dorsey v. United States,4 “the Government argues there can be no question of an illegal search since there was no search at all.”
There was no search here. There are at least two doctrines or perhaps two different characterizations of the same doctrine, which we have enunciated in previous decisions on which the officer’s conduct was legally justified. For convenience they might be termed the “challenging situation” and “plain view” doctrines.
A. A closer look at a challenging situation.
In Dorsey, supra, two officers approached a parked car occupied by two recognized, known narcotics violators. Although it was 11:00 p. m. the officers could see the driver and the passenger were turned facing each other as though examining something on the seat. The officer on the driver’s side directed his flashlight into the car and illuminated in Dorsey’s hand a cellophane bag filled with white-powdered, gelatin capsules. When Dorsey placed the bag on the ledge of the glove compartment, the other of-fieer reached through the open window, seized the bag, and placed Dorsey under arrest. As the driver complained of the officer flashing his light inside the ear, the officer noticed that the driver was dropping heroin capsules on the floor. He, too, was arrested and nine heroin capsules were picked up off the floor.
Without either characterizing the officer’s action as a search or attempting to justify it as a search, we held that
The essential inquiry, as is customarily the case in Fourth Amendment claims, is the reasonableness of the police conduct under the circumstances. * * Reasonableness involves consideration of the nature of the police conduct as well as the occasion of its exercise. We think the evidence supported a view of that conduct as not transgressing the constitutional standard.
* * * When the officers suddenly saw [the appellants] situated as they were at the time and place in question, the former were entitled to extend their preventive patrolling mission to the extent of approaching the car and observing what was going on inside. * * * We do not think the need to employ a visual aid at night in the form of a flashlight converts this from lawful into unlawful conduct. A car parked at 14th and U Streets at eleven o’clock at night, occupied by known narcotics offenders, bears little resemblance to a home or dwelling. If policemen are to serve any purpose of detecting and preventing crime by being out on the streets at all, they must be able to take a closer look at challenging situations as they encounter them. All we hold here is that this was one of those situations, and that the police response to it was a justifiable one which did not project their law enforcement responsibilities *1358beyond permissible constitutional limits.5
We think the facts and holding in Dorsey, supra, are comparable and decisive of appellant’s contentions in regard to his first alleged illegal search.6
B. Plain view.
James v. United States7 is equally dispositive of appellant’s first claim and is closer on the operative facts. In James a police officer observed a partially stripped-down new Pontiac, and three days later observed that the stripping job had been completed. When he saw the new Pontiac the second time, completely stripped, the police officer entered the premises to investigate further, and in so doing secured the license number from the rear tag, the front license plate being missing.
On a pre-trial motion to suppress the District Court did exclude the rear license plate and the owner’s manual found through the officer’s entry on the unoccupied garage premises, but appellant also contended that all the stolen property discovered pursuant to a later issued search warrant should be suppressed, because this was the fruit of illegal observations by the officer from outside the garage which preceded his entry on the premises, and those observations violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The garage door was ajar and the officer was able to look under and observe parts and tools thrown about. In James we held that
The police are free to observe circumstances in evidence that are in “plain view” to the public * * * the plain view doctrine was reaffirmed in Harris v. United States, 390 U.S. 234, 88 S.Ct. 992, 19 L.Ed.2d 1067 (1968). That the policeman may have to crane his neck, or bend over, or squat, does not render the doctrine inapplicable, so long as what he saw would have been visible to any curious passerby.8
Quite contrary to what the dissent argues, in James on appeal before this court there was no issue whatsoever as to the evidence (license number and owner’s manual) already suppressed by the District Court. The issue on appeal concerned the validity of the warrant and the search made pursuant thereto, because “[w]hen an affidavit in support of a search warrant contains information which is. in part unlawfully obtained, the validity of a warrant and search depends on whether the untainted information, considered by itself, establishes probable cause for the warrant to issue.”9 In James we held that the officer’s observations, described above, “prior to his illegal entry, established probable cause for issuance of the warrant.”10 In James the two items of evidence, held illegally seized by the trial court, were never in the officer’s plain view and were never argued on appeal to be admissible, the only question was did their *1359seizure prior to the warrant taint the probable cause behind the warrant; hence, this court never decided any difference as to admissibility, “crucial” or otherwise, between the items legally and illegally seized. This court affirmed the legality of the officer’s viewing from outside the garage as the basis for a warrant. The parallel between James and this case is that the officer’s viewing was held legal, and here the officer saw much more than in James, i. e., the stolen transmission which he could positively identify as stolen, before he entered the garage. The legality of his entry and seizure without a warrant was thus justified under the plain view doctrine, while in James what the officer saw (no stolen property positively identified) was held to justify a warrant. In both cases it was the legality of the view from outside the garage to justify the officer’s subsequent action which was put in issue.
We had occasion to discuss the “plain view” doctrine at some length in United States v. Thweatt.11 There we reaffirmed out previous holding in Creighton v. United States,12 where we stated, “We have long since pointed out that mere observation does not constitute a search, as where the officer has good reason to believe that the fruits of crime are freely exposed on the suspect’s property.” 13
Although the Supreme Court last Term in Chimel v. California14 overruled its broader holdings on search and seizure, the Court made it evident that the “plain view” doctrine was not abrogated. In our en banc decision in Dorman v. United States 15 and in United States v. Harris,16 we applied the “plain view” doctrine subsequent to the Supreme Court decision in Chimel v. California.17 Before Chimel the Supreme Court had affirmed our en banc decision in Harris v. United States,18 and in so doing the Supreme Court said:
It has long been settled that objects falling in the plain view of an officer who has a right to be in the position to have that view are subject to seizure and may be introduced in evidence. Ker v. California, 374 U.S. [23, 42-43, 83 S.Ct. 1623, 1634, 1635, 10 L.Ed.2d 726 (1963); United States v. Lee, 274 U.S. 559, 47 S.Ct. 746, 71 L.Ed. 1202]; Hester v. United States, 265 U.S. 57 [44 S.Ct. 445, 68 L.Ed. 898] (1924).19
Whether it be considered that the transmission was in “plain view” to start with, or whether the officer took “a closer look at a challenging situation,” we conclude that no rights of appellant protected by the Fourth Amendment were violated by Officer Huffstutler peering through the gap between the garage doors.
III. Legality of the Seizure of the Transmission in the Garage
Appellant contends with equal vigor that the seizure of the auto transmission was illegal as being the product of an illegal search either if the entry of Officer Huffstutler into the garage is considered independently, or if his entry is considered as the product of his previously illegal search by peering through the gap in the garage doors. Appellant claims there could be no valid search incident to arrest, citing Chimel, supra, and Vale v. Louisiana.20
*1360Without making an elaborate comparison with Chimel or at this point with Vale, but noting that both those cases involved a dwelling where the protection of the Fourth Amendment is reasonably more extensive than in an open field, auto or a garage, we think that the action of the police officer can be justified as reasonable under the Fourth Amendment on either or both of two grounds.
A. Plain view.
All the authorities cited above in our discussion of the doctrine of “plain view” are equally applicable to Officer Huff-stutler’s seizure of the auto transmission. Obviously the doctrine of “plain view” would be a rather sterile doctrine if it extended only so far as police officers’ looking. In all of the “plain view” cases, the viewing has been followed by a seizure of evidence.
We do not ignore that Officer Huff-stutler had spotted the stolen auto transmission within ten feet of him, had noted the cut speedometer cable, had gone the few blocks to the stripped Corvette to see if its speedometer cable was cut (it was), then returned to the garage for a final look before going tó his precinct. After a short time there he returned to the garage, made the arrests, and seized the auto transmission. All of the events from the time the two officers first came upon the stripped Corvette, searched the neighborhood, made their observations in the garage, went back to the stripped Corvette, went back to the garage, went to the precinct, returned to the garage for the third time — all took place in exactly two hours. The time interval from when Officer Huffstutler first spotted the stolen transmission is not certain, but it probably was more than an hour and not more than an hour and a half.
What appellant is contending for here is to write into the doctrine of “plain view” a continuous observation requirement. Is the officer required to keep his eye glued to the knothole while he motions for help with a free hand? If the officer had known the additional fact of the Corvette’s speedometer cable being cut at the time he first saw the transmission, and had left his point of observation to return to his car to radio his headquarters, and then returned to the gap in the garage doors only to find the transmission had been moved out of his vision, would he then have been barred from moving inside the garage to seize what he was certain was stolen property ? If an interruption of the officer’s plain view of stolen property is allowed, how long an interruption is permitted?
In Creighton, supra, the police had observed various items of property openly displayed in appellant’s car, after he had been arrested for a traffic violation. Learning of a burglary later while appellant was still at the station house, police went to appellant’s car and seized the stolen property. We held that the goods were in plain view, and that there was no search, hence no warrant was required. In Creighton, as in the case at bar, the original “plain view” of the stolen property by the officers occurred at a time when the officers did not know the items were stolen.21 In Creighton there was an interval after the sighting, during which a phone call turned up a report of a burglary; in Wright here there was an interval after the officer’s first look, during which he checked the cut speedometer cable. In each case, after the clinching piece of information had been secured, the officer returned to the stolen property and seized it. No search was involved in either ease.
*1361In the circumstances of this case we believe that on the doctrine of “plain view” Officer Huffstutler was authorized to carry that doctrine to its logical conclusion, seize the stolen property he had observed, and that the one-hour to hour-and-a-half interval in which the other events connected with his investigation transpired did not preclude him from doing this. On his return to the garage at the time the arrests were made it was the officer’s duty to follow up, see if the transmission was still there, and recover the stolen property if he could. Whether he could see the transmission through the open door is in our judgment immaterial. He had seen it in the garage no more than an hour and a half before; it was not an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment for him to step inside, identify it again, and have it moved out along with the other stolen automobile parts that were already in the process of being spirited away.
Our holding on this point finds support in the American Law Institute Tentative Draft No. 3 of A Model Code of Pre-Ar-raignment Procedure (1970), Part II, Search and Seizure. Section 6.06, Seizure Independent of Search, provides:
An officer who, in the course of otherwise lawful activity, observes or otherwise becomes aware of the nature and location of things which he reasonably believes to be subject to seizure under Section SS 1.03, and which therefore can be seized without a search, may seize such things.
Section SS 1.03(b) lists as subject to search and seizure “contraband, the fruits of crime, or things otherwise criminally possessed.”
It was not necessary for Officer Huff-stutler to make a search to discover the auto transmission when he seized it at the time of the arrest. He had already observed the transmission and become aware that it was located inside the garage. He had carefully checked it to be the fruit of the crime he was investigating and, in the language of the American Law Institute draft, it was “subject to seizure (as fruits of crime) * * * and * * * therefore can be seized without a search.”22
The Commentary on this draft Section is illuminating:
The authorization with respect to the seizure of things plainly observable in private premises does raise some questions under Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10 [68 S.Ct. 367, 92 L.Ed. 436] (1948). There the opium was not visible, but it was plainly observable by odor perceptible off the premises. Nevertheless entrance and seizure without a warrant was held unlawful. * * * However, although the presence of opium was observable, its location was not evident, and a search was in fact necessary; the authorization in the draft does not cover a search, but only an entry for things already perceived and ready to hand. (Last emphasis supplied.)
The appellant here relies upon Johnson, supra; the ALI draft on search and seizure points up the important distinction between the fact in Johnson and that in the case at bar.
B. Seizure to prevent removal of evidence.
The police officer had seen the auto transmission shortly before, the other missing parts from the Corvette he was at the moment viewing in the trunk of another car, obviously in preparation to be hauled away. He was obligated to recover the stolen transmission without giving the miscreants a chance to spirit this away, too. The officers had no idea how many persons other than those visible were involved, hence
On the basis of such a plain view discovery of the fruits of a crime which were identified both by description and label, it was not only reasonable for the officers to seize them notwithstanding the absence of a search warrant, but it would have been a derelic*1362tion of their duty for them not to do so. To say that the police must leave evidence which they find (without engaging in an improper search) in order to go after a search warrant, on the assumption that the items will remain in the same place until they return with the warrant, is to ignore reality.23
The officers were confronted with a situation which called for immediate action. The action which they took, the seizure of the stolen transmission, was the reasonable action to satisfy the exigent circumstances present. Chimel and earlier Supreme Court precedents have recognized such preventive action as being constitutionally justified. As we said in Thweatt, supra, “Obviousness is a form of exigency in a sense that failure to act immediately when confronted with the evidence in this manner may result in its disappearance.” 24
IV. Inapplicability of the-Authorities Relied on by the Dissent
Our dissenting colleague invokes Vale v. Louisiana, supra, Taylor v. United States,25 Katz v. United States,26 and James v. United States, supra, in support of his view of what was reasonable for the two police officers in the circumstances of the case at bar. With all due respect to his analysis, we think our dissenting colleague’s reliance upon these cases as determinative of this appellant’s case is misplaced. Our own decision in James we have already discussed. We now turn to the three Supreme Court cases to show why they do not apply to Wright’s situation here.
In Vale v. Louisiana, supra, the rationale of the opinion is heavy with emphasis on the strict protection to be accorded to a “dwelling” by the Fourth Amendment and, of course, it is “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, etc.,” which is protected, houses apparently meaning dwelling, and being the only structure mentioned in the Fourth Amendment. A garage is not a house, nor is it a dwelling or home. We suggest that a garage is perhaps deserving of more strict protection than an open field a hundred yards from a home, perhaps as much or more than an automobile for housing which the garage is constructed, depending upon its location and use, but certainly the protection afforded is something less than that afforded the dwelling involved in Vale.
The dissent is somewhat misleading when it states “[t]he police did here precisely what the officers had done in Vale.” What the officers did may look similar, but the knowledge the officers possessed to justify what they did is quite different. A major distinction between Vale’s case and that of Wright here is that the police officers in Vale never had the narcotics illegally seized in the house in view, plain or otherwise. Vale was arrested standing on his front steps, and the subsequent search of his house was thought to be justified as incident to that arrest. While it may be possible to justify the seizure in the case at bar as the product of a search incident to arrest, we have not sustained it on that ground, but on two separate grounds, only one of which was peripherally involved in Vale, i. e., the necessity to prevent the removal or destruction of evidence.
Nor is Taylor v. United States, supra, appropos of the ease at bar. First, in that case, no “plain view” of stolen goods or contraband was relied upon to support the seizure of Taylor’s liquor in his garage. As the dissent says, the agents “saw many cardboard cases which they thought probably contained jars of liquor” (emphasis supplied). For all the agents saw, the cases could have contained cans of tomato soup.
*1363Secondly, the prohibition agents had “over a considerable period [received] numerous complaints” concerning the use of Taylor’s garage for making illicit liquor but “had made no effort to obtain a warrant for making a search.” As the dissent quotes the Supreme Court, “They had abundant opportunity [to obtain a warrant] * * * there was no probability of material change in the situation * * Not so here, where part of the stolen auto parts had already been loaded and appellant and his two confederates were obviously engaged in spiriting away the fruits of the crime.
Thirdly, in Taylor the agents had to break a fastening on a door to enter. Here the officer walked in through the open door of the garage.
Under the circumstances in Taylor, the Court found the agents’ act of physically breaking into the garage to be an exploratory search “undertaken with the hope of securing evidence upon which to indict and convict [Taylor].” Here Officer Huffstutler’s act of entering Wright’s garage was not to “search” it for evidence on which to convict him, but rather to “seize” stolen property (the transmission) that he had previously lawfully observed therein. As was said in Carroll v. United States,27 upon which the decision in Taylor principally relied:
The search for and seizure of stolen or forfeited goods, or goods liable to duties and concealed to avoid the payment thereof, are totally different things from a search for and seizure of a man’s private books and papers for the purpose of obtaining information therein contained, or of using them as evidence against him. The two things differ toto coelo. In the one case, the government is entitled to the possession of the property; in the other it is not. The seizure of stolen goods is authorized by the common law; and the seizure of goods forfeited for a breach of the revenue laws, or concealed to avoid the duties payable on them, has been authorized by English statutes for at least two centuries past; and the like seizures have been authorized by our own revenue acts from the commencement of the government.28
Katz v. United States, supra, is likewise inapposite to the case at bar, for it dealt entirely with protection of audible communication under the Fourth Amendment,29 and was, at least in part, formulated in reaction to the prospect of wholesale unwarranted “buggings” by the police. The decision, of course, is famous for its pronouncement that “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.” 30 But that pronouncement is immediately followed by the statement “What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection,” 31 and highly significant to the case at bar, citing as an example the “plain view” case of United States v. Lee,32 in which it was held not to be an illegal search where the Coast Guard played a spotlight on petitioner’s boat at night, disclosing on the deck several cartons of illicit liquor.
What Katz does broadly hint at is a basic principle that the Fourth Amendment protects from invasion by the police the actions and conversations that the ordinary individual would reasonably expect to be strictly private and free from perception by others, regardless of their locale. Thus, the remarks that:
One who occupies [a telephone booth], shuts the door behind him, and pays *1364the toll that permits him to place a call is surely entitled to assume that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will not be broadcast to the world. To read the Constitution more narrowly is to ignore the vital role that the public telephone has come to play in private communication.33
and,
The Government’s activities in electronically listening to and recording the petitioner’s words violated the privacy upon which he justifiably relied while using the telephone booth and thus constituted a “search and seizure” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.34
But even under this basic principle, the appellant cannot prevail. For it cannot be said that his actions in storing the stolen transmission — which, no doubt, he would like to have kept hidden — in a garage having a nine-inch gap between the doors were calculated to keep his possession of it “strictly private and free from perception by others” any more than the petitioner in Lee, supra, could have expected the presence at night of the contraband liquor on the deck of his boat to be so.
The dissent (see note 1) appears to read Katz as if this decision ruled out the plain view doctrine — without even discussing it. But subsequent to Katz (1967) the Supreme Court reaffirmed the plain view doctrine in Harris (1968) and Chimel (1969), as we did en banc in Dorman (1970).
Of some relevance to the eventual seizure of the stolen transmission, the Court in Katz did say, “[0]nce it is recognized that the Fourth Amendment protects people — and not simply “areas” — against unreasonable searches and seizures, it becomes clear that the reach of that Amendment cannot turn upon the presence or absence of a physical intrusion into any given enclosure.”35 This rationale would validate the physical intrusion of Officer Huffstutler into the garage following his plain view of the stolen property.
Basically, Fourth Amendment search and seizure questions turn, or should turn, upon a concept of reasonableness under the circumstances. Reasonableness has received many definitions in the thousands of cases arising under the Fourth Amendment. We consider and define the police conduct here as reasonable, and therefore the conviction is
Affirmed.

. 22 D.C.Code § 2201. Appellant was placed on probation for a period of three years.

. The latent prints taken from the Corvette were identified as those belonging to appellant. He explained their presence by claiming that the owner had brought the Corvette into the service station where appellant worked. The owner testified that he had patronized that service station, but never with his Corvette.

. Amendment IV (1791) :
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but on probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

. 125 U.S.App.D.C. 355, 372 F.2d 928 (1967).

. Id., at 358, id., at 931. (Emphasis supplied.)

. It makes no difference that we are here involved with the illumination by flashlight of a garage, rather than a car. This is not a circumstance where the garage is either attached or adjacent to a dwelling so that it could be argued to have absorbed by some form of legal osmosis the special Fourth Amendment protections afforded a dwelling. Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 89 S.Ct. 2034, 23 L.Ed.2d 685 (1969) ; Vale v. Louisiana, 399 U.S. 30, 90 S.Ct. 1969, 26 L.Ed.2d 409 (1970). Here we are dealing with a three-car rented garage facing onto an alley. And clearly, even if the record in this case unequivocally showed —which it does not — that what Officer Huffstutler saw when he beamed his flashlight through the crack in the doors could only have been otherwise observed if the light in the garage had been turned on, his conduct was still eminently reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Petteway v. United States, 261 F.2d 53, 54 (4th Cir. 1958) ; United States v. Callahan, 256 F.Supp. 739, 745 (D.Minn.1964).

. 135 U.S.App.D.C. 314, 418 F.2d 1150 (1969).

. Id., at n. 7.

. Id.

. Id., at 316, id., at 1152.

. 140 U.S.App.D.C. 120, 433 F.2d 1220 (1970).

. 132 U.S.App.D.C. 115, 406 F.2d 651 (1968).

. Id., at 116, id., at 652.

. 395 U.S. 752, 89 S.Ct. 2034, 23 L.Ed. 2d 685 (1969).

. 140 U.S.App.D.C. 313, 435 F.2d 385 (1970).

. 140 U.S.App.D.C., 270, 280, 435 F.2d 74, 84 (1970).

. Note 14, supra.

. 125 U.S.App.D.C. 231, 370 F.2d 477 (1966).

. 390 U.S. 234, 236, 88 S.Ct. 992, 993, 19 L.Ed.2d 1067 (1968).

. 399 U.S. 30, 90 S.Ct. 1969, 26 L.Ed. 2d 409 (1970).

. There is no distinction to be made because when Officer Huffstutler made his observations in this case his suspicions were aroused to a greater degree than those of the officers in Creighton. For almost fifty years the Supreme Court has characterized observations made by officers acting under a great degree of suspicion as “plain view” observations not constituting illegal searches. See the characterization of the observations made in Hester v. United States, 265 U.S. 57, 44 S.Ct. 445, 68 L.Ed. 898 (1924) as “plain view” in Harris v. United States, 390 U.S. 234, 236, 88 S.Ct. 992, 19 L.Ed.2d 1067 (1968).

. Section SS 6.06, Seizure Independent of Search, supra.

. United States v. Thweatt, 140 U.S.App.D.C. 120, 125, 433 F.2d 1226, 1231 (1970).

. Id., at 1231. Cf. United States v. Harris, supra, 435 F.2d at 80, 81, 83-84.

. 286 U.S. 1, 52 S.Ct. 466, 76 L.Ed. 951 (1932).

. 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed. 2d 576 (1967).

. 267 U.S. 132, 45 S.Ct. 280, 69 L.Ed. 543 (1925).

. Id., at 149-150, 45 S.Ct., at 284 (quoting Mr. Justice Bradley in Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 623, 6 S.Ct. 524, 29 L.Ed. 746).

. As to tlie limited applicability of the rationale in Katz to other possible Fourth Amendment violations, see the Supreme Court’s recent opinion in United States v. White, 401 U.S. 745, 91 S.Ct. 1122, 28 L.Ed.2d 453 (1971).

. 389 U.S. 347, 351, 88 S.Ct. 507, 511.

. Id.

. 274 U.S. 559, 563, 47 S.Ct. 746, 71 L.Ed. 1202 (1927).

. 389 U.S. 347, 352, 88 S.Ct. 507, 511.

. Id., at 353, 88 S.Ct., at 512.

. Id.