Court Opinion

ID: 9460031
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 21:38:08.583322+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:36:26.298432
License: Public Domain

LEVIN H. CAMPBELL, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I am unable to accept the broad ruling suggested by the court — that the police, although armed with a warrant, may *433search an individual’s personal effects found on premises only if they know at the time of a close relationship between the person and the premises.
The rule eviscerates the authority conferred by a valid warrant to search premises. To obtain such a warrant, officers must show probable cause to search the premises for described evidence or contraband. That showing, I believe, justifies whatever intrusion may result from searching all articles found on the premises having characteristics making it possible for them to harbor the matter described in the warrant. There is an exception, it is true; such a warrant does not ordinarily sanction a search of persons found on the premises. That exception results from recognition that a personal search may involve a peculiarly obnoxious physical intrusion and molestation. Only rarely — as, perhaps, when necessary to avoid the removal or destruction of articles suddenly seized by a suspect in view of the officers— might we permit a search of the body on the mere authority of a warrant to search premises.1
The court unnecessarily enlarges the personal search exception when it grants possible sanctuary to all manner of arguably intimate personal effects carried upon the premises and then set down.
A search of such objects is neither more nor less intrusive than would be the search of similar objects whose owner, having deposited them, had left the premises before the police arrived. Any search is an invasion of privacy; but I think the cause for issuance of the original warrant allows a search of relevant personal effects not in the possession of their owner as well as of all other relevant objects on the premises. The contraband or incriminating evidence covered by the warrant is as likely to be within briefcases or bags just brought on the premises as within other objects on the premises.2 It is true that if the officer knows the owner of the briefcase has no “relationship” to the premises, he might have less reason to search. But in many cases the police would have no way of knowing, in advance, what is the individual’s actual connection with the premises. When the stranger in the betting parlor solemnly announces that he is the family doctor, I am less sure than is the court that I would require police to believe him — or inquire further before searching his bag.
In the present ease the agents had a warrant permitting the suspect premises to be searched for “counterfeit Federal Reserve Notes, materials” and related equipment. A briefcase lying on these premises, whenever and by whomsoever brought, was an obvious likely hiding place for counterfeit notes. Here, as it happened, the agents knew that the owner of the briefcase was closely involved with activities oh the premises. But I do not think that their right to execute the warrant should so fortuitously turn on what they happened to know or think at the time. Given the probable association of couriers, purchasers, bagmen and other accomplices with the counterfeiting scheme, the briefcase was a suspicious object and, therefore, would have merited search had its purported owner been a total stranger to the agents, or had he introduced himself as an itinerant peddler, a salesman, a lost out-of-towner, or even a minister or priest. Had the agents known less about Miche-li, I cannot for a moment believe that they would constitutionally have been required to grant sanctuary to Micheli’s briefcase, found, as it was, on premises *434covered by the warrant, and relevant to the purposes of the warrant.
Sometimes the police may know in advance that X is a bagman; sometimes they may not. But when, in execution of a warrant, they find X’s bag on a table within a room where there was probable cause to suspect a criminal scheme was taking place, I can see no reason for immunizing the bag.
The test proposed by the court is, moreover, likely to prove impractical. It may make necessary a lengthy inquiry into the police officer’s subjective knowledge at the time of the search. Since the nature and quantum of “relationship” cannot readily be defined, officers and courts may be bedevilled with uncertainty in a field where certainty is especially desirable. The “test may dissolve into a protracted hunt for guidelines so faint as to be unrecognizable. And it invites a host of other niceties : such as whether the police knew or should have known that the bag had recently been brought on the premises by someone; how near the bag must be to its owner before the police need inquire into the latter’s “relationship” to the' premises; and other refinements which I think society has no vital stake in pursuing.
The rare situation which might give us pause, e. g., the search of the restaurant customer’s raincoat under authority of a warrant to search the restaurant, can be dealt with on its peculiar facts under the traditional rule that “a search which is reasonable at its inception may violate the Fourth Amendment by virtue of its intolerable intensity and scope.” Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 18, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 1878, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1967). If the warrant was issued because the restaurant was suspected to be a betting parlor, a reasonable execution of the warrant might include a search of customers’ raincoats (assuming the coats to be deposited on the premises, and not still on the backs of the customers). On the other hand, if the warrant is for a meat cleaver believed to have been used as a murder weapon a week earlier by the chef, a search of raincoats just deposited by customers might be intolerable. Much would depend on the facts of each case. The court can be expected to suppress evidence seized in a search which goes beyond the authority reasonably conferred by the warrant. But I think that a search warrant of the kind here in question affords authority to search all objects found on the premises of a character which might reasonably contain the articles for which a search is permitted.

. I leave to another day, and to the fact-pattern of that case, whether a brief case or wallet held in hand can be searched. Cf. Walker v. United States, 117 U.S.App.D.C. 151, 327 F.2d 597 (1963), cert, denied 377 U.S. 956, 84 S.Ct. 1635, 12 L.Ed.2d 500 (1964).

. This may not, of course, be always so, as where the object of the search is a sub-machine gun, and the article searched is a woman’s handbag. But in such a case, the handbag is protected not because of the new rule proposed by the court but simply because the search would exceed the scope of the warrant.