Court Opinion

ID: 9490634
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:49:53.738097+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:13.454692
License: Public Domain

*822DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the judgment of the court and with most of the analysis provided in the thorough majority opinion. Nonetheless, I consider it important to emphasize the standard of review that we are applying here, and I also have a different view of the way we should analyze some of Mr. Sholola’s claims.
My additional remarks can be brief. First, as the majority indicates both when it describes the applicable standard of review for Sholola’s Fourth Amendment claims and at the conclusion of the opinion, we are required under Ornelas v. United States, — U.S. -, 116 S.Ct. 1657, 134 L.Ed.2d 911 (1996), to conduct a de novo review of the district court’s determination of reasonable suspicion and probable cause to search. Id. at-, 116 S.Ct. at 1663. In so doing, we must give “due weight” to the inferences drawn from the facts by the district court and by local law enforcement officials. “Due weight,” however, must mean less deference than a “firm and definite conviction that an error has been made,” for the latter phrase describes the clearly erroneous standard of review that the Supreme Court explicitly rejected for these questions in Ornelas. The majority recognizes all this, but I am concerned that its statement that we must give “special deference” to the district court’s findings can lead to confusion. I find it hard to equate “special deference” with “due weight.” To the contrary, it seems to me that the Supreme Court deliberately chose a formulation that allows the court of appeals to give deference where that is due, but to reject deference where its independent review suggests it is not due. The very meaning of “de novo” review is that the appellate court approaches its task from a clean slate, basing its ruling on the record that has been developed, but drawing its own conclusion on this particular mixed question of law and fact. In the end, I believe that the result the majority reaches does not conflict with these rules, but this is an area where the court must take special care with the language it uses, lest we be found to have disregarded the Supreme Court’s very recent instructions to us.
My disagreements with the way in which the majority has applied the relevant law to the facts of this case similarly reflect a concern with the fine tuning of the opinion, not its broad conclusions. First, I think the majority has not been as careful as it should be with the evidence on which it relies to uphold Officer Farrell’s initial decision to stop Sholola in the parking lot of the garden supply store. It summarizes that evidence on pages 813-814 of the opinion as follows:
The decision to stop Sholola for questioning was based on Farrell’s first-hand observations of the defendant (1) when he entered the Bank, looking disheveled in appearance, and was not familiar to Farrell as a regular customer, (2) when he used the bogus driver’s license to obtain a large cash advance from the teller, and (3) when, following the dubious transaction, Sholola attempted to elude the uniformed Officer Farrell in the parking lot by “peek[ing] out” at him from “alongside of the pickup truck,” walking briskly in the opposite direction, and initially failing to respond to the officer’s call to stop.
(Emphasis in original.) Points (1) and (3) are unobjectionable: they clearly describe facts known to Officer Farrell at the time he made his decision to stop Sholola for preliminary questioning. Point (2), however, implies that Officer Farrell already knew that Sholola’s driver’s license was bogus. As the earlier description of the facts shows, this is not true. The most we can say is that Officer Farrell knew that there was a good chance that the driver’s license was bogus, because he already knew that the California Department of Motor Vehicles (CDMV) had no record of any such license. I agree with the majority that the mere fact that there might have been some innocent explanation of this fact was not enough to render it irrelevant for Officer Farrell’s purposes; in most states, driver’s license records are entered very promptly into computer systems, and Officer Farrell was entitled to treat this piece of information as something tending to show that Sholola’s license might have been *823bogus. I note, in this connection, that the additional fact mentioned by the majority to the effect that the CDMV still had no record of the “Alejandre” license immediately before the evidentiary hearing is utterly beside the point. There is no way Officer Farrell could have known that fact, six months before it occurred, and thus no way he could have relied upon it when he decided to stop Sholo-la. In the final analysis, however, I agree that the totality of the circumstances supported Officer Farrell’s decision to stop Sho-lola for questioning.
Second, I agree with the majority that Officer Farrell had probable cause to arrest Sholola by the time he did so, and that the warrantless search of Sholola’s Honda Acura was a valid search incident to an arrest. We must be careful, however, not to extend New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454, 101 S.Ct. 2860, 69 L.Ed.2d 768 (1981), too far beyond its facts. In Belton, the Supreme Court held that the police may lawfully search an automobile when they have made a lawful custodial arrest of its occupant. Id. at 460, 101 S.Ct. at 2864. This court rephrased that rule in United States v. Adams, 26 F.3d 702 (7th Cir.1994), when it found a search outside the scope of Belton under circumstances in which the defendant was “neither an occupant of the searched vehicle nor positively linked to it prior to his arrest.” Id. at 705. The majority’s use of the “positive link” language from Adams could, I fear, be misunderstood in a future case, if it is not confined to the factual circumstances of this case.
The “positive link” required must, in keeping with Belton, be one that requires physical proximity that is the equivalent of occupancy of the automobile. Here, of course, that is true. Sholola himself went to his car, unlocked it with his own keys, opened the door, and stood there. One more step would have made him a literal “occupant” of the car. That kind of positive link fits easily within both Belton and Adams, and on that understanding I agree with the outcome here. Other “positive links” would plainly fall outside the scope of Belton. For example, the police could observe a suspect parking a ear in an off-street legal parking lot, and then walking two blocks away from it, keeping both vehicle and suspect under constant surveillance. If they then arrested the suspect, in my view they would need something other than Belton to justify a search of the car, even though a “positive link” might be said to exist. Or the police could find a certificate of title to an automobile on the person of a suspect whom they had subjected to a lawful search incident to an arrest, positively linking the person to the car, even though it was parked halfway across town. Again, even if a search of that car might be justified on some other theory (including, obviously, pursuant to a warrant), Belton would be of no help.
Last, I am concerned that some of the majority’s discussion of County of Riverside v. McLaughlin, 500 U.S. 44, 111 S.Ct. 1661, 114 L.Ed.2d 49 (1991), could be misconstrued. Sholola’s key argument here is that the Orland Park Police, working cooperatively with the Secret Service, detained him an extra day for the sole purpose of developing evidence about a crime for which he had not yet been charged. Under this court’s decision in Willis v. City of Chicago, 999 F.2d 284, 289 (7th Cir.1993), such a course of conduct would violate the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights. Even though, in the language of Riverside, it would not amount to delay for the purpose of gathering additional evidence to justify the initial arrest, nor would it be delay motivated by ill will, it would be a special case of delay for delay’s sake: buying time for the investigation of the second crime by dragging one’s feet in bringing the defendant before a judicial officer to test the legality of the first detention. In keeping with our decision in Willis, I believe that such a course of conduct would be unlawful. I therefore regard the majority’s statement at 820-821 that the police may always hold an individual “while investigating other crimes that he may have committed, so long as they have sufficient evidence to justify holding the individual in custody in the first place,” (emphasis in original), as inconsistent with the holding of Willis.
Nevertheless, the majority goes on to show why Willis is easily distinguishable from this ease, and by so doing, makes it clear that the overbroad statement quoted above is dicta. In Willis, the Chicago Police Department *824conceded that it was detaining Willis for the purpose of using him to investigate other crimes, whereas in our case, the evidence showed that the relevant officers had no such intent. Because Sholola’s hearing took place within 48 hours, it was his burden to show that the delay was unreasonable. This included the burden of proving that there was some substance to his suspicions about Agent Oliphant’s role in the timing of his probable cause hearing. As the majority indicates, Sholola did not persuade the district judge that his account was true, and he has shown this court no reason why we should disturb the district court’s conclusion. I therefore agree that there was no Riverside violation here, and thus no reason to exclude the evidence on the drug charges that was collected during the critical time period (as well as its fruits).
For these reasons, I concur in the judgment of the court.