Court Opinion

ID: 9735559
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 18:23:45.98002+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:59.939972
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE MILLER, dissenting: I do not agree with the majority’s conclusion that the Illinois Constitution forbids in this case what the United States Constitution clearly allows. I would therefore apply the good-faith exception recognized by the Supreme Court in Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340, 94 L. Ed. 2d 364, 107 S. Ct. 1160 (1987), and reverse the circuit court’s order suppressing the evidence seized from the defendant. In People v. Tisler, 103 Ill. 2d 226, 245 (1984), this court defined the circumstances under which it is appropriate to interpret provisions of the Illinois Constitution differently from their federal counterparts: "After having accepted the pronouncements of the Supreme Court in deciding fourth amendment cases as the appropriate construction of the search and seizure provisions of the Illinois Constitution for so many years, we should not suddenly change course and go our separate way simply to accommodate the desire of the defendant to circumvent what he perceives as a narrowing of his fourth amendment rights under the Supreme Court’s decision ***. Any variance between the Supreme Court’s construction of the provisions of the fourth amendment in the Federal Constitution and similar provisions in the Illinois Constitution must be based on more substantial grounds. We must find in the language of our constitution, or in the debates and the committee reports of the constitutional convention, something which will indicate that the provisions of our constitution are intended to be construed differently than are similar provisions in the Federal Constitution, after which they are patterned.” In the present case, the majority does not point to anything in either the text or history of our state constitution that would warrant this court in reaching a result different from the one reached by the United States Supreme Court in Krull. In the absence of a valid ground for distinguishing the language of article I, section, 6, of the Illinois Constitution from the fourth amendment, I would adhere to Krull and recognize, in our own state constitution, a good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule when searches and seizures are conducted under statutes that are later held invalid. Because the statute here was not so obviously unconstitutional as to render the good-faith exception inapplicable (see Krull, 480 U.S. at 355, 94 L. Ed. 2d at 378-79, 107 S. Ct. at 1170), I would reverse the trial court’s order suppressing the evidence seized in this case. It should be noted, moreover, that the officers in the present case were not resting simply on their own interpretations of the statute but were acting pursuant to a warrant that authorized a no-knock entry; the warrant is defective only because the statute on which it depends is now found to be unconstitutional. A number of the concerns cited by the majority in opposition to Krull are therefore inapplicable to this case, in which a judicial intermediary stood between the statute and the search. Just as the majority follows federal law in evaluating the validity of the statute under both the federal and state constitutions, so too should we follow federal law in applying the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule. In comparing article I, section 6, and the fourth amendment, the majority correctly recognizes, "The language of the two constitutional provisions concerning unreasonable searches and seizures is nearly identical” (174 Ill. 2d at 65), and the majority invokes Tisler and other decisions involving the fourth amendment in determining that the statute at issue here is invalid. Having found the statute unconstitutional under federal law, however, the majority incongruously fails to follow the same line of authority in considering the application of the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule.