Court Opinion

ID: 9712039
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 04:45:08.603857+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:09.410654
License: Public Domain

RUIZ, Associate Judge,
concurring:
I agree that appellant was not entitled to suppression of the undercover officer’s identification of appellant as the person who sold him the drugs in an undercover transaction and that his conviction, therefore, should be affirmed. I do so based on a straightforward application of New York v. Harris, 495 U.S. 14, 110 S.Ct. 1640, 109 L.Ed.2d 13 (1990), where the Supreme Court held that:
where the police have probable cause to arrest a suspect, the exclusionary rule does not bar the State’s use of a statement made by the defendant outside of his home, even though the statement is taken after an arrest made in the home in violation of Payton.
Id. at 19, 110 S.Ct. 1640. (Emphasis added).
*210In this case, the police seized appellant after making a warrantless entry into the home he shared with his fiancée and took him out to the street so that he could be seen by the undercover officer who then identified him. The majority opinion argues that Harris’s logic applies equally and should be extended to a situation where the police had reasonable articula-ble suspicion to seize (but not probable cause to arrest) the suspect independent of the warrantless entry into the home where only a seizure has taken place inside the home. The majority cites no case authority for this proposition.
We do not need to reach that issue because it is not presented in the case before us. Here, appellant has conceded that the police had probable cause. Although the trial court appears to have had some doubt on the issue of probable cause, we are not bound by the trial court’s determination on the ultimate legal question of probable cause vel non, and nothing in our cases suggests that appellant has made an improvident concession that the court should not accept. Compare Best v. United States, 582 A.2d 966, 968-69 (D.C.1990) (holding that hearing on motion to suppress was unnecessary because trial evidence was “ample” to establish probable cause where defendant was arrested based on a description of suspect as “wearing a baseball-style cap with a star on it, black jacket, gray jeans and tennis shoes ... and the street location where [suspect] was hiding his supply of cocaine behind a basement wall”), and Glass v. United States, 395 A.2d 796, 803-04 (D.C.1978) (holding there was probable cause to arrest where defendants were in a car that was stopped “a few minutes” after robbery in a car “about five or ten blocks” from where robbery occurred, car was heading away from the scene of the crime and had run a red light and car’s occupants matched “descriptions of the suspects” — “height, weight, color, facial hair, length of hair, stringy hair and all that sort of stuff’ even though there was significant discrepancy in height of one of the suspects), with Junior v. United States, 634 A.2d 411, 419-20 (D.C.1993) (holding there was no probable cause and Harris would not apply because a “central” component to establish probable cause was obtained as a result of the illegal entry into the home, i e., discovery of the suspect’s presence in the place where the undercover drug purchase had taken place). In our case, not only did appellant match the description given in the lookout as to gender, height, build, race and clothing, but also he was seen — from outside the door — in the same apartment from which the drug dealer had emerged, just a few minutes after the undercover drug purchase. This case, in other words, is more like Best and Glass, where we concluded there was probable cause, than to Junior, where we concluded there was not.
In Harris, a five-justice majority of the Supreme Court declared that the exclusionary rule did not apply because the suspect’s statement at the station house was not the “product” of an unlawful detention or the “fruit” of the officer’s unlawful warrantless entry into the home. 495 U.S. at 19, 110 S.Ct. 1640. The Court majority reasoned that because the officers already had probable cause, they could have waited for Harris to emerge from his home and arrested him on public space and then taken him to the police station for interrogation. Id. at 18, 110 S.Ct. 1640. Four justices filed a vigorous dissent contending that the majority’s per se rale ignored the flagrant nature of the constitutional violation and avoided the Court’s longstanding fact-based attenuation analysis to determine whether evidence should be excluded as the “tainted fruit” of the constitutional violation. By *211essentially looking past the constitutional violation and its effect on the evidence sought to be suppressed, the dissenters argued, the majority undermined the “principal purpose of the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule [] to eliminate incentives for police officers to violate that Amendment.” 495 U.S. at 22, 110 S.Ct. 1640 (Marshall, J., joined by Brennan, Blackmun and Stevens, JJ, dissenting).
We are, of course, bound to follow the Court’s constitutional rulings, and that is what I propose we should do: to follow Harris according to its terms, where the police, as here, had probable cause. But I would not go further. The Court has not ruled on the precise issue that the majority decides, that mere reasonable articula-ble suspicion also suffices to overlook a constitutional violation so long as the police could have seized the suspect outside the home. That conclusion might well be, as the majority argues, a logical extension of the reasoning of Harris, but taking an argument to its logical end might stretch too far and should yield to the imperative to safeguard constitutional rights and deter constitutional violations that the exclusionary rule was designed for. It is a step, moreover, that appears other courts have not been willing to take — even twenty years after Harris was decided — as the majority cites no case or other authority that extends Harris to similarly except application of the exclusionary rule to situations where there has been a warrantless entry into a home so long as the police officers had only reasonable articulable suspicion to stop the suspect outside the home. Nor has the government made that argument in this appeal; instead, it bases its case for affirmance on the officers’ having independent probable cause to arrest appellant, as in Harris.1
In short, the existence of probable cause is not in contention, the government has not made the argument on which the majority relies, the issue has not been briefed or presented at oral argument (the appeal was not argued), and there appears to be no controlling or even persuasive authority for extending Harris to situations where there is only reasonable articulable suspicion. In these circumstances, I resist reaching to decide that the exclusionary rule does not apply at all so long as the police have reasonable articulable suspicion — the lowest form of justification under the Fourth Amendment — even when there is a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s clear injunction against warrantless entries into the home — “the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.” Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 585, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980); see Harris, 495 U.S. at 17, 110 S.Ct. 1640 (“It is also evident, in light of Payton that arresting Harris in his home without an arrest warrant violated the Fourth Amendment.”). To do so is unnecessary and, in my view, unwise.
For these reasons, I concur that the conviction should be affirmed but do not join the opinion for the court.

. Indeed, the government's principal argument on appeal is that the warrantless entry into the home was justified because probable cause entitled the officers to enter the home without a warrant due to “exigent circumstances” — the "imminent” loss of evidence (drugs and pre-recorded funds used in the undercover purchase) and possible escape of the suspect — citing Dorman v. United States, 140 U.S.App. D.C. 313, 435 F.2d 385 (1970) (en banc) (cited in United States v. (Mark) Harris, 629 A.2d 481, 486 (D.C.1993)). The trial court rejected that rationale, but concluded that "simply stepping across the threshhold for a Terry stop for an on-scene ID was entirely reasonable.” Neither the majority nor I rely on the trial court’s reasoning or on the government’s principal argument.