Court Opinion

ID: 9496442
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:26:56.276152+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:35.146644
License: Public Domain

O’SCANNLAIN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Binding Ninth Circuit authority compels the conclusion that the DNA Act passes muster under the Fourth Amendment. The court now blithely holds that our decision in Rise v. Oregon, 59 F.3d 1556 (9th Cir.1995), has been overruled. I respectfully disagree. In reaching its conclusion, the majority relies on the Supreme Court’s “special needs” decisions in Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32, 121 S.Ct. 447, 148 L.Ed.2d 333 (2000), and Ferguson v. City of Charleston, 532 U.S. 67, 121 S.Ct. 1281, 149 L.Ed.2d 205 (2001). This reliance, however, is misplaced because it merely begs the question we really need to be asking: whether the Supreme Court’s “special needs” jurisprudence is at all applicable to suspicionless searches of probationers conducted for the purposes of preventing crime. And even if one concedes the contention — voiced by the appellant and adopted by the majority — that Edmond and Ferguson cast doubt on our holding in Rise, it is clear that they have not done so to such a degree as to allow one three-judge panel of this court to overrule the holding of another three-judge panel. Accordingly, I must dissent.
In Rise, this court held that an Oregon statute requiring convicted murderers and sex offenders to submit a blood sample for inclusion in a DNA database did not violate the Fourth Amendment. We based our holding on a series of factors, including
the reduced expectations of privacy held by persons convicted of one of the felonies to which [the statute] applies, the blood extractions’ relatively minimal intrusion into these persons’ privacy interests, the public’s incontestable interest in preventing recidivism and identifying and prosecuting murderers and sexual offenders, and the likelihood that a DNA data bank will advance this interest.
Rise, 59 F.3d at 1562. Our analysis in Rise therefore employed the “general Fourth Amendment approach of examining the totality of the circumstances.” United States v. Knights, 534 U.S. 112, 118, 122 S.Ct. 587, 151 L.Ed.2d 497 (2001) (citing Ohio v. Robinette, 519 U.S. 33, 89, 117 S.Ct. 417, 136 L.Ed.2d 347 (1996)) (internal quotation marks omitted). Indeed, we explicitly rejected at the outset of our opinion in Rise the contention that special needs analysis was applicable:
The plaintiffs maintain that the “special needs” doctrine and the so-called “prison inmate” exception to the warrant and probable cause requirements do not apply because [the statute’s] sole purpose is to assist in the arrest and prosecution of suspected criminals. We need not determine whether [the statute] also serves legitimate penal interests, as the defendants argue, because we find that the statute is constitutional even if its only objective is law enforcement.
See Rise, 59 F.3d at 1559 (emphasis added).
Despite clear evidence to the contrary, the majority insists that Rise should be interpreted as applying the narrow special needs exception. The majority’s basis for *1115treating it as such appears to be the Rise court’s citation, near the start of its analysis, to the Supreme Court’s holding in Michigan Department State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444, 110 S.Ct. 2481, 110 L.Ed.2d 412 (1990),1 in support of the proposition that “[e]ven in the law enforcement context, the State may interfere with an individual’s Fourth Amendment interests with less than probable cause and without a warrant if the intrusion is only minimal and is justified by law enforcement purposes.” Rise, 59 F.3d at 1559.
Sitz, it must be conceded, is a special needs case. But the Rise court did not cite just to Sitz to establish the pedigree of its “totality of the circumstances” approach — it also cited to a more time-tested “totality of the circumstances” case: Terry v. Ohio, 892 U.S. 1, 20, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968). Thus, it simply does not suffice to point out the Rise court’s citation to Sitz and conclude on that basis alone that the former is a “special needs” case — yet this is precisely what the majority appears to do. See Majority Op. at 1108 n. 25.2 How else to read the majority’s conclusory assertion that “Rise relied on an interpretation of Supreme Court precedent that has since been wholly discredited by Edmond and further undermined by Ferguson ”? Maj. Op. at 1107 (citations omitted).
The reason for the majority’s insistence that Rise was, in fact, a “special needs” case is simple: The Supreme Court’s holdings in Edmond and Ferguson have held that no “special needs” exception exists where the searches at issue evince a purpose “ ‘ultimately indistinguishable from the general interest in crime control.’ ” Ferguson, 532 U.S. at 82, 121 S.Ct. 1281 (quoting Edmond, 531 U.S at 44, 121 S.Ct. 447). Thus, to the extent that Rise and the present case are cast as “special needs” cases, or analogues thereof, Edmond and Ferguson would appear to dictate the fate of each: Because the parolee’s DNA is sought primarily for the purpose of “detect[ing] evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing,” Edmond, 531 U.S. at 41, 121 S.Ct. 447, such searches cannot be justified by reference to any other special purposes they might happen to further.
Edmond and Ferguson, then, cast their shadows over Rise only insofar as Rise itself can be classified as a “special needs” case. But Rise specifically eschewed “special needs” analysis in favor of the traditional “totality of the circumstances” approach. Indeed, our decision in Rise to employ a “totality of the circumstances” approach when analyzing searches of probationers conducted for a law enforcement purpose received at least the tacit approval of the Supreme Court in Knights, a case that was handed down after Edmond and Ferguson. In Knights, the Supreme Court reversed our holding that a warrant-less search of a probationer’s apartment violated the Fourth Amendment. The Court noted that its holding in Griffin v. Wisconsin, 483 U.S. 868, 107 S.Ct. 3164, 97 L.Ed.2d 709 (1987), had applied special needs analysis to a Wisconsin regulation *1116that authorized warrantless searches of probationers, but rejected the assertion that Griffin required the use of “special needs” analysis in cases involving warrant-less searches of probationers:
In [Appellant’s] view, apparently shared by the Court of Appeals, a warrantless search of a probationer satisfies the Fourth Amendment only if it is just like the search at issue in Griffin — i.e., a “special needs” search conducted by a probation officer monitoring whether the probationer is complying with probation restrictions. This dubious logic — that an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a particular search implicitly holds unconstitutional any search that is not like it — runs contrary to Griffin’s express statement that its “special needs” holding made it “unnecessary to consider whether” warrantless searches of probationers were otherwise reasonable within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.
Knights, 534 U.S. at 117-18, 122 S.Ct. 587.
The Court then proceeded to apply what it described as the “general Fourth Amendment approach of examining the totality of the circumstances,” id. at 118, 122 S.Ct. 587 (internal quotation marks omitted), and concluded that the challenged search was constitutional. In reaching its conclusion, the Court noted first that the regulation that imposed the warrantless search requirement as a condition to probation furthered the two primary goals of probation — “rehabilitation and protecting society from future criminal violations,” id. — and that because “[t]he probation order clearly expressed the search condition and [Appellant] was unambiguously informed of it,” the condition “significantly diminished[Appellant’s] reasonable expectation of privacy.” Id. at 120, 122 S.Ct. 587. Second, the Court noted that, given this lowered expectation of privacy, the reasonable suspicion which both sides in the case admitted was present could be deemed sufficient to satisfy the Fourth Amendment.3
While distinguishable on its facts from the present case, Knights remains vitally important for two principal reasons. First, as set forth above, it is far from settled that “special needs” analysis remains applicable to searches involving probationers that, like this one, are conducted for a law-enforcement purpose. Indeed, Ferguson’s admission that “probationers have a lesser expectation of privacy,” Ferguson 532 U.S. at 79 n. 15, 121 S.Ct. 1281, when read alongside Knights ’ rejection of the argument that warrantless searches of probationers must be limited to the “special need” of ensuring compliance with probation restrictions, see Knights 534 U.S. at 117-18, 122 S.Ct. 587, renders the Ed-mondr-Ferguson line’s applicability to the probation context sketchy at best.
If the latter observation is true, and I believe it is, our panel must decide which analysis to apply. And Knights appears to answer that question for us by looking to the “totality of the circumstances.” See Knights 534 U.S. at 118-19, 122 S.Ct. 587 (“The touch-stone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness, and the reasonableness of a search is determined ‘by assessing, on the one hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individual’s privacy and, on the other, the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate government interests.”) (citations and internal quotations omitted).
*1117This leads to the second reason for Knights ’ significance here. Not only is Knights ’ analytical framework very similar to that employed by this court in Rise; the Knights Court expressly reserved the question whether “a search by a law enforcement officer without any individualized suspicion would have satisfied the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment.” Knights, 534 U.S. at 120 n. 6, 122 S.Ct. 587. The only possible inference to be drawn from the Court’s refusal to address the constitutionality of suspi-cionless searches of probationers is obvious: It is an open question. If Rise did not rely on special needs analysis, and the constitutionality of suspicionless searches of probationers remains an open question, then — quite clearly — the majority cannot legitimately contend that the Edmond-Ferguson line of cases has overruled Rise. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s own application of a Rise-style totality of the circumstances approach counsels that Rise is still good law. At the very least, it cannot be said that intervening Supreme Court decisions have so undermined this court’s holding in Rise that it can be overruled by a three-judge panel of the court.
The majority tries to skirt this reality by simply reclassifying Rise as a special needs case and then leaping to the conclusion that it has necessarily been overruled by Edmond and Ferguson. But if Rise is not a special needs case — and I take the Rise court at its word, see Rise, 59 F.3d at 1559 — the majority has no sanction whatever for its conclusion that Rise is no longer good law. Rise has already confronted the type of search we are presented with here and, applying the totality of the circumstances analysis endorsed by the Supreme Court in Knights, concluded that the extraction of a probationer’s blood for inclusion in a database designed to aid in swifter and more accurate resolution of crimes “is reasonable and therefore constitutional under the Fourth Amendment.” Rise, 59 F.3d at 1562.
■ Because in my view we are bound by our holding in Rise, I would affirm the judgment of the district court. Accordingly, I must respectfully dissent.

. In Sitz, the Supreme Court held that a roadblock designed to detect and remove from the road drunk drivers did not violate the Fourth Amendment because its principal purpose was to make the roads safer, even though it would result in some criminal prosecutions for those caught driving under the influence.

. Admittedly, the majority is not alone in erroneously reading Rise as a special needs case that has been undermined by the Supreme Court’s holdings in Edmond and Ferguson. Both of the recent district court cases considering the constitutionality of this statute conclude that Rise is essentially a special needs case. See United States v. Miles, 228 F.Supp.2d 1130, 1135 (E.D.Cal.2002); United States v. Reynard, 220 F.Supp.2d 1142, 1166 n. 29 (S.D.Cal.2002).

. In reaching this conclusion the Court went out of its way to note: "We do not decide whether the probation condition so diminished, or completely eliminated, Knights’ reasonable expectation of privacy ... that a search by a law enforcement officer without any individualized suspicion would have satisfied the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment.” Id. at 120 n. 6, 122 S.Ct. 587.