Court Opinion

ID: 9451059
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:04:46.141319+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:33.138188
License: Public Domain

McGOWAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) :
With all respect, I am not persuaded that there was, on this record, any serious question as to the validity of the arrest. The problem, then, is one of whether Preston v. United States, 376 U.S. 364, 84 S.Ct. 881 (1964), compels reversal because, in the Supreme Court’s words in that case, “the search was too remote in time or place to have been *1005made as incidental to the arrest * *.” I believe not.
Preston, it has always seemed to me, is to be read in the light of the central fact that the arrest made there was for vagrancy. It was only after (1) the ar-restees had been fruitlessly questioned for some time at the police station, (2) the car had been placed in a garage, and (3) an officer sent to examine it had come back with two loaded revolvers found in the glove compartment, that police were dispatched to the garage with instructions to break into the trunk of the car. It was what was found there that connected the arrestees with the crime of which they were convicted— conspiracy to commit a bank robbery. Thus, the search in Preston was used to convict persons arrested for vagrancy, not of having robbed a bank but of intending to do so in the future. It may well be that this all evokes disquieting echoes of what the framers of the Fourth Amendment had in mind, and that the Supreme Court was right in requiring a greater degree of circumspection in the use of search warrants in these circumstances, although the essential rationale of the holding impresses me as lying much deeper than what the Court had to say about the dangers of escape or of assault with concealed weapons. In Adams v. United States, 118 U.S.App.D.C. 364, 336 F.2d 752 (1964), cert. denied, 379 U.S. 977 (1965), we looked to what was done in Preston rather than to what was said, and we upheld a warrantless search presenting neither such danger. See also Price v. United States, No. 18,901, decided June 10, 1965. I think we should do so here because, on the facts of this record, I do not think the search was so remote in either time or place from the arrest as to be invalid.
As the Supreme Court also said in Preston, “even in the case of motorcars, the test still is, was the search unreasonable.” With the one overriding danger about which the Supreme Court was really concerned in Preston wholly absent here, I would have thought the answer to be clear on these facts. The authors of the Fourth Amendment have been spared the ordeal of living in a highly motorized 20th Century, but they, as men not given to ordering the affairs of life by absolutes, would surely have recognized some of its practical necessities.
I would affirm.