Court Opinion

ID: 9469748
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:48:07.161882+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:32.707821
License: Public Domain

OAKES, Circuit Judge
(concurring):
I do not understand the majority opinion since I do not know how the court can reach the question whether the exclusionary rule is applicable in a given instance until it determines whether the search or seizure is illegal. I agree with Judge Tannenwald of the Tax Court, for the reasons stated in his opinion, Tirado v. Commissioner, 74 T.C. 14 (1980), that the items seized were properly within the scope of the warrant and accompanying affidavit.1 Therefore, I also would affirm and hence concur in the judgment. In this view, I would not reach the exclusionary rule question.
But if it were necessary to do so, and to seek to answer “whether the exclusionary rule is to be applied in a civil proceeding involving an intrasovereign violation,” the question left open in United States v. Janis, 428 U.S. 433, 456 n. 31, 96 S.Ct. 3021, 3033 n. 31, 49 L.Ed.2d 1046 (1976), I would not reach the majority’s result. For reasons that I will not elaborate here at length since I have done so elsewhere,2 I would hold that federal criminal agents cannot hand federal civil agents the fruits of an illegal search or seizure on a silver or any other platter.
This is not because I necessarily disagree with the analysis of the majority in terms of deterrence and its effects; rather it is because I disagree that deterrence is the sole rationale of the exclusionary rule. When that rule was first announced for a unanimous Court in Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383, 34 S.Ct. 341, 58 L.Ed. 652 (1914), there was not a word about deterrence of police conduct in the opinion. Rather, Justice Day stressed personal rights and correlative governmental duties.
*316The effect of the Fourth Amendment is to put the courts of the United States and Federal officials, in the exercise of their power and authority, under limitations and restraints as to the exercise of such power and authority, and to forever secure the people, their persons, houses, papers and effects against all unreasonable searches and seizures under the guise of law. This protection reaches all alike, whether accused of crime or not, and the duty of giving to it force and effect is obligatory upon all entrusted under our Federal system with the enforcement of the laws. The tendency of those who execute the criminal laws of the country to obtain conviction by means of unlawful seizures . . . should find no sanction in the judgments of the courts which are charged at all times with the support of the Constitution and to which people of all conditions have a right to appeal for the maintenance of such fundamental rights.
Id. at 391-92, 34 S.Ct. at 343-44 (emphasis added).
Thus, all branches of the government are understood to be one unit with a duty to its citizens that does not permit separation of the means (the search or seizure) from the ends (subsequent use of evidence at trial). I have said elsewhere, “[t]he governmental duty makes not only the Fourth but the Fifth and Sixth Amendments meaningful in the sense that the judiciary avoids validating or sanctioning unconstitutional conduct by closing its eyes.”3
This view of the exclusionary rule as constitutionally based upon a duty of a unitary government to its citizens was further explicated by Justice Holmes in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 U.S. 385, 391-92, 40 S.Ct. 182, 182-83, 64 L.Ed. 319 (1920), in which there is no mention of deterrence, and by Justices Holmes and Brandéis, dissenting separately in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 469, 471, 48 S.Ct. 564, 569, 570, 72 L.Ed. 944 (1928). Olmstead permitted evidentiary use of wiretap information obtained by federal agents in Washington State, where wiretapping was a misdemeanor. Justice Brandéis noted:
When the Government, having full knowledge, sought, through the Department of Justice, to avail itself of the fruits of these acts in order to accomplish its own ends, it assumed moral responsibility for the officers’ crimes. And if this Court should permit the Government, by means of its officers’ crimes, to effect its purpose by punishing the defendants, there would seem to be present all the elements of a ratification. If so, the Government itself would become a lawbreaker.
277 U.S. at 483, 48 S.Ct. at 574 (Brandéis, J., dissenting) (citations omitted).
True, more recent Supreme Court decisions have stated that the primary purpose, “if not the sole one,” of the exclusionary rule is its deterrent effect. United States v. Janis, 428 U.S. at 446, 96 S.Ct. at 3028. See id. at 444-47, 96 S.Ct. at 3027-28; United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338, 347-48, 94 S.Ct. 613, 619-20, 38 L.Ed.2d 561 (1974). Although this may be the dominant message that the Court has been expressing, I do not see in it a flat or total rejection of the Weeks-Silverthorne view of the historical objective and purpose of the exclusionary rule.4 See, e.g., United States v. Janis, 428 U.S. at 446, 458 n. 35, 96 S.Ct. at 3028, 3034 n. 35; United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. at 355-62, 94 S.Ct. at 623-26 (Brennan, J., dissenting). Furthermore, the Court has refused to abandon or abolish the exclusionary rule as recently as United States v. Johnson, - U.S. -, -, 102 S.Ct. 2579, 2592, 73 L.Ed.2d 202 (1982), and United States v. Ross, -U.S. -,-, 102 S.Ct. 2157, 2171, 72 L.Ed.2d 572 (1982), which leads me to assume that the *317constitutional theme of Weeks-Silverthorne may still have meaningful overtones. Cf. Brown v. Walker, 161 U.S. 591, 596-97, 16 S.Ct. 644, 646-47, 40 L.Ed. 819 (1896) (Fifth Amendment inadmissibility of coerced admissions or coercions is based on historical underpinnings).
“We have to choose, and for my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the Government should play an ignoble part. For those who agree with me, no distinction can be taken between the Government as prosecutor and the Government as judge.” Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. at 470, 48 S.Ct. at 569 (Holmes, J., dissenting). The overall stakes are high enough5 to wait for the Supreme Court to tell us when it considers deterrence of unlawful police conduct the sole purpose of the exclusionary rule and totally casts aside the teachings of those who adopted the exclusionary rule as necessary to Fourth Amendment rights, as well as those who utilized it also in respect to the Fifth Amendment, Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966); Bram v. United States, 168 U.S. 532, 18 S.Ct. 183, 42 L.Ed.2d 568 (1897), and the Sixth Amendment, Escobedo v. Illinois, 378 U.S. 478, 84 S.Ct. 1758, 12 L.Ed.2d 977 (1964); Massiah v. United States, 377 U.S. 201, 84 S.Ct. 1199, 12 L.Ed.2d 246 (1964).6 Therefore, in the intrasovereign context present in this case, had I concluded that federal narcotics agents engaged in an unlawful search or seizure, I would preclude use by federal internal revenue agents of the evidence obtained.

. I retain some concern that the boilerplate language of the warrant comes very close to being a general warrant, leaving too much to the discretion of the searching officers, and therefore impermissible under Marron v. United States, 275 U.S. 192, 196, 48 S.Ct. 74, 76, 72 L.Ed. 231 (1927), et al. The warrant itself gave Tirado no notice that all records of his financial life would be subject to seizure in a search for “narcotics.” However, like Judge Tannenwald, I am satisfied that the open-ended tag line, “the means of committing a crime or offense, and the means of preventing a crime or offense from being discovered,” should be read in connection with the affidavit to which it was attached at the time of service. 74 T.C. at 22 n. 10. Thus, the affidavit’s specification of “property or evidence” of the crimes of possession and trafficking in drugs limited the officers’ discretion, and removes any impermissible ambiguity.

. See Oakes, The Exclusionary Rule — A Relic of the Past?, in Constitutional Government in America 151 (R. Collins ed. 1980); Oakes, The Proper Role of the Federal Courts in Enforcing the Bill of Rights, 54 N.Y.U.L.Rev. 911, 934-38 (1979).

. Oakes, The Exclusionary Rule, supra note 2, at 152.

. For a discussion of this history, see Schrock & Welsh, Up From Calandra: The Exclusionary Rule as a Constitutional Requirement, 59 Minn. L.Rev. 251 (1974); see also People v. Cahan, 44 Cal.2d 434, 445, 282 P.2d 905, 912 (1955) (Traynor, J.).

. See Oakes, The Proper Role, supra note 2, at 924-25.

. That the Amendments are interrelated I have little doubt. Id. at 919-23. As Justice Bradley noted, “the Fourth and Fifth Amendments run almost into each other.” Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630, 6 S.Ct. 524, 532, 29 L.Ed. 746 (1886).