Court Opinion

ID: 9467884
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:58:50.375734+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:34.584922
License: Public Domain

CHOY, Circuit Judge:
The district court suppressed a jar of heroin taken from the defendant’s backyard, and the government appealed under 18 U.S.C. § 3731.1 After a panel of this court had concluded that reversal was necessary, the panel suggested that the court consider the question en banc. The panel decision has been withdrawn, and the following opinion reflects the view of the majority of the court en banc.
I. Statement of the Case
Two years of Seattle police investigation led officers to believe that Clara Penn was distributing heroin from her residence. Evidence sufficient to justify a search warrant indicated that some of the Penn children were buying items used in the packaging and distribution of narcotics and that, when a delivery was to be made to a customer, one of the children was sent to retrieve drugs from a cache believed to be in the backyard.
A state magistrate issued a search warrant which described the premises to be searched as the residential premises, including the yard. The police surrounded the house, entered, and seated in the living room the approximately 10 persons found on the premises. Clara Penn’s children, *879ranging in age from 5 to 22, were among them. They, along with the rest of the group, were uncooperative and combative.2 In taunting the police they revealed their awareness of drug-related activities.3
Officers conducting the search found a quantity of cocaine in the Penn home. After a half hour of looking they had found no heroin. At that point, Reggie, the youngest of Clara Penn’s children (age 5), asked to go to the bathroom. A police officer took him. While in the bathroom with the child the policeman asked Reggie (as an “afterthought,” according to the officer’s testimony) if Reggie knew where the little balloons (of heroin) were hidden. Reggie nodded in the affirmative to the officer’s question, indicating that he knew where the heroin could be found.
While the officer had good reason to believe that Clara Penn’s children were assisting her in her drug operations and that some of them might know where the heroin was located, there is no evidence that Reggie specifically was known to be a participant in his mother’s drug dealings.
Because of a commotion outside the bathroom door, the officer did not pursue his conversation with Reggie. But 10 minutes later, when the commotion had ended, the officer spoke with Reggie again, this time in the kitchen. The officer asked Reggie if Reggie would take him out to where the heroin was located. Reggie answered yes, then hesitated. The officer then offered to give Reggie five dollars if Reggie would show him the location of the cache. The boy thereupon walked out to the backyard and pointed to some soft sod. Under the sod the police discovered a glass jar containing 132.9 grams of heroin. Police later found in the yard, but without Reggie’s assistance, a second jar containing 14.6 grams of heroin. (Because of the hostility of Reggie’s brothers, the officer was unable to give Reggie the five dollars.)
After a state prosecution was terminated following a successful suppression motion,4 the federal government prosecuted Clara Penn under 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1) for possession of controlled substances with intent to distribute them. The prosecution sought to introduce the state-suppressed evidence taken from the yard. On motion by the defense, the district court suppressed the jar of heroin that had been found with Reggie’s help,5 on the ground that the police conduct violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. According to the court’s memorandum:
The bribery of a child of tender age by a policeman in order to obtain evidence to be used against a parent represents police conduct which is shocking to the conscience and is, in the opinion of this Court, so violative of the decencies of civilized conduct to be a deprivation of due process. Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 72 S.Ct. 205, 96 L.Ed. 183 (1952).
*880II. Constitutional Grounds
A. Due Process
Courts should tread gingerly when faced with arguments that the “fundamental fairness” component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause requires the suppression of evidence. Only the most serious cases, which truly shock the conscience as well as the mind, call for invocation of the Constitution itself rather than of our prudential powers. The Constitution was designed to define the boundaries and framework of civilized and orderly government; it is not to be used to convert into a command a judge’s every notion of what is morally best. But when the truly outrageous case, “shocking to the universal sense of justice,” is before us, it is our duty to uphold the Constitution and invoke the Due Process Clause of the Fifth or Fourteenth Amendment. Betts v. Brady, 316 U.S. 455, 462, 62 S.Ct. 1252, 1256, 86 L.Ed. 1595 (1942), overruled on other grounds, Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335, 83 S.Ct. 792, 9 L.Ed.2d 799 (1963).
The district court below relied on Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 72 S.Ct. 205, 96 L.Ed. 183 (1952) (forcible insertion and use of stomach pump), to suppress the evidence, on the ground that the police tactic used to obtain the evidence shocked the conscience. It was technically incorrect to rely on Rochin ; we have strictly limited the Rochin line of precedent to cases of physical assault on a suspect’s person. See Rivas v. United States, 368 F.2d 703, 710 (9th Cir. 1966), cert. denied, 386 U.S. 945, 87 S.Ct. 980, 17 L.Ed.2d 875 (1967). Nonetheless, the Rochin line represents only a subset of the broader category of due process violations by police in the course of investigations, see United States v. Russell, 411 U.S. 423, 431-32, 93 S.Ct. 1637, 1642-43, 36 L.Ed.2d 366 (1973), and Penn’s case conceivably could fall within the broader category.
We hold, however, that it does not, although we disapprove of the police tactic used here. Due process arguments are to be “tested by an appraisal of the totality of facts in a given case.” Betts v. Brady, 316 U.S. at 462, 62 S.Ct. at 1256. Under the facts of this case, the tactic did not violate the Fifth Amendment; under the facts of another, it might. See id.
Penn’s case is based on a combination of factors that, considered individually, are universally agreed not to violate due process. Reggie (1) was bribed to give information; (2) was a very young child; and (3) was a close relative of Clara Penn — indeed, her son. But the police may pay informants to give information; very young children may aid criminal investigations; and sons may inform or testify against mothers.
Moreover, we think that there is general agreement that the combination of any two of these factors would not violate due process. A very young child may be given money in exchange for information about a non-family member; an adult son (or brother, or spouse) may be paid to inform against his mother, etc.; and a very young son may freely inform or testify against his mother.
Indeed, there are situations where all three factors may be said to be present, and no due process violation appears. If a mother’s picture is on a reward poster and her very young son, having learned its import, offers to reveal to the police her hiding place, the police are not obligated to refuse to hear the information or to withdraw the reward offer as to the son. Or suppose that a bruised, very young child enters a police station and says, “Every day in my house I fall down the stairs and get hurt. I need a new home. Please send me to one.” The police correctly deduce that his mother is beating him, but respond, “We can’t give you a new home just because you fall down stairs. You’d have to give us a better reason.” Eventually the child accepts the “bribe” of the safe home, fearing another beating if he returns to his family home, and reveals the fact of the beatings. The mother is arrested and tried for child abuse. Consider, finally, Judge Goodwin’s example of a bribe of a young son to reveal the location of an underground box where his parents’ kidnap victim is suffocating.
*881We do not look on these three analogies, which may be distinguishable (at least in tone), as dispositive. Instead, we look to the other facts in the case that militate against a finding of a due process violation. These include:
(1) The police had probable cause to suspect Clara Penn of heroin dealing.
(2) The police had a quite broad, but un-disputedly valid, search warrant and were legitimately in the house.
(3) The policeman had a legal right to be alone with Reggie in the bathroom and the kitchen.
(4) The police never threatened or badgered Reggie.
(5) The police did not trick or deceive Reggie.
(6) The police conduct violated no law.
(7) The police had reason to believe that Clara Penn involved her children in her drug operations.
(8) Before the bribe was offered, Reggie told the policeman he knew where the heroin was hidden, and in fact he did know.
(9) Heroin dealing is an extremely serious crime, and the government’s interest in discovering and punishing dealers is correspondingly strong.
(10) It was and is not a regular practice of the Seattle or any other police department to bribe young children to inform against their parents. This was an isolated incident with minimal potential for repetition.
Judge Goodwin points out that the police had a valid search warrant for the yard, and that if Reggie had not cooperated they would have dug up the whole yard to find the heroin. (Indeed, a second jar of heroin was independently dug up soon after, and it is undisputed that this jar was untainted evidence.) These facts argue both for and against a finding of a due process violation. On one hand, the unnecessariness of the police tactic underscores its disagreeableness. On the other hand, since the evidence would have been obtained in any event it does not seem fundamentally unfair to admit it. On balance, this factor does not persuade us to find a Fifth Amendment violation.
Judge Goodwin tells us that our holding undermines the interests of preserving family units and the exchange of information within them. From the viewpoint of the individual, these interests may be significant ends in and of themselves. But from the viewpoint of society and the law, these interests are also, and perhaps primarily, important as means to a greater end. “Our decisions establish that the Constitution protects the sanctity of the family precisely because the institution of the family is deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition. It is through the family that we inculcate and pass down many of our most cherished values, moral and cultural.” Moore v. City of East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494, 503-04, 97 S.Ct. 1932, 1938, 52 L.Ed.2d 531 (1977) (plurality opinion) (footnotes omitted).
When pondering how deeply our consciences are shocked by the police’s intrusion into the Penn family’s circle of confidence, we would not fulfill our duty to consider “the totality of facts,” Betts v. Brady, 316 U.S. at 462, 62 S.Ct. at 1256, unless we took into account what manner of family unit it was. It was a family unit in which the mother involved her children deeply in the actual operation of her heroin-dealing business.6 Perhaps even 5-year-old Reggie was involved, for he knew exactly where in the backyard the heroin was buried.
In Blackford v. United States, 247 F.2d 745 (9th Cir. 1957), cert. denied, 356 U.S. 914, 78 S.Ct. 672, 2 L.Ed.2d 586 (1958), we upheld against a due process challenge evidence obtained by a rectal search of a physically resisting suspect. Judge Chambers, concurring, wrote:
When Rochin was announced I was enthusiastic about it. I still am.
*882But as I see it, the Supreme Court’s policy is to uphold human dignity. .
But here it was Blackford who created, who first takes us into this disgusting sequence. He made the deposit in his body . . . . What the officers did was not torture or abuse. I do not say that the depraved have no rights. But I do say that to my sensibilities all of the shockingness was Blackford’s.
Id. at 754; accord, Rivas v. United States, 368 F.2d at 710; King v. United States, 258 F.2d 754, 755 & n.6 (5th Cir. 1958), cert. denied, 359 U.S. 939, 79 S.Ct. 652, 3 L.Ed.2d 639 (1959). Analogously, the information was in Reggie’s mind because Clara Penn put it there for her own criminal purposes. She did so even though to put it there was disgusting. The police used disagreeable means to extract the information, but “to [our] sensibilities all of the shockingness was [Penn’s].”
Tacitly conceding the force of this argument, Judge Goodwin argues that the presumption of innocence forces us to regard the Penn family not as a criminal one but as an innocent, protection-worthy one. Whatever the applicability of the presumption of innocence in other contexts, see generally Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 533, 99 S.Ct. 1861, 1870, 60 L.Ed.2d 447 (1979) (presumption inapplicable to pretrial matters), the question here is not guilt or innocence, but the nature of the relationships within the Penn family unit. At any rate, we should not let any presumption blind us to the nature of the Penn family’s exchange of information, when our duty is to consider “the totality of facts.” Moreover, before the bribe was offered Reggie had already told the policeman he knew where the heroin was hidden, thus rendering quite hollow any presumption of innocence and any presumption of normal family roles and affairs. Viewing “the totality of facts,” we find that the police intrusion into the circle of family confidence here does not shock the universal sense of justice.
Finally, Judge Goodwin says that when a more mature Reggie realizes that his youthful decision sent his mother to jail, he will be left with “permanent scars” and “irreparable psychological damage.” Sadly, this may be true. But, when we consider the alternative, this possibility does not shock our consciences. Reggie might equally well suffer “permanent scars” and “irreparable psychological damage” from the reflection that his mother led him to spend his childhood spreading heroin and misery throughout his community. On balance, we cannot adopt this ground for affirming the suppression order.
It is urged to us that we should not limit our vision to the facts of this case, for a reversal of the suppression order here would lead to systematic government programs to “persuade” young children to inform against their parents, as in the societies created by George Orwell and Adolf Hitler. If we agreed with this logic, we would of course affirm the district court. We have no reason to believe, however, that this kind of information-gathering method is or will become anything remotely approaching standard procedure in any law enforcement community in the United States.
B. Fourth Amendment
Because the district court relied on the Fifth Amendment to suppress the challenged evidence, it did not reach Penn’s Fourth Amendment argument. We hold that Clara Penn cannot invoke the Fourth Amendment to exclude the evidence from her trial because the search was not constitutionally “unreasonable” and because no legitimate expectation of privacy of hers was violated.
The constitutional “reasonableness” of the search for and seizure of the heroin was established by the valid search warrant. Such initial “reasonableness” can be vitiated, however, by the manner in which the police conducted the search, even if the conduct did not rise to the shocking level of a due process violation.7 See Dalia v. Unit*883ed States, 441 U.S. 238, 258, 99 S.Ct. 1682, 1694, 60 L.Ed.2d 177 (1979); Irvine v. California, 347 U.S. 128, 133, 74 S.Ct. 381, 383, 98 L.Ed. 561 (1954) (discussing Rochin), United States v. Valenzuela, 596 F.2d 824, 829-30 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 441 U.S. 965, 99 S.Ct. 2415, 60 L.Ed.2d 1071 (1978). Claims that otherwise reasonable searches have been conducted in an unconstitutionally unreasonable manner must be judged under the facts and circumstances of each case. See Harris v. United States, 331 U.S. 145, 150, 152-53, 67 S.Ct. 1098, 1101, 1102, 91 L.Ed.2d 1399 (1947), overruled on other grounds, Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 89 S.Ct. 2034, 23 L.Ed.2d 685 (1969).
Under this case’s facts and circumstances, we find that the police conduct was not “unreasonable” under the Fourth Amendment. We have held that, where there is a clear indication of narcotics trafficking, border officials may command a rectal search despite the suspect’s physical resistance. Rivas v. United States, 368 F.2d 703; Blackford v. United States, 247 F.2d 745. Here there was abundant probable cause to suspect Clara Penn of narcotics trafficking, and before the bribe was offered Reggie had revealed that he knew where the heroin was hidden. The increment of unreasonableness between a bribe of a young son and a rectal search despite physical resistance, if indeed the former is more unreasonable than the latter, is not of constitutional significance.
Moreover, the same factors which, we held supra, made the police conduct not fundamentally unfair also indicate that it was not unreasonable.
After Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128,139-40, 99 S.Ct. 421, 429, 58 L.Ed.2d 387 (1978), the inability of one person to assert the violation of another’s Fourth Amendment rights is expressed not in terms of standing, but in the substantive terms of “whether the disputed search and seizure has infringed an interest of the defendant which the Fourth Amendment was designed to protect.” The police’s interaction with (“search” of, perhaps) Reggie, even if it was unreasonable, did not violate any legitimate expectation of privacy or other Fourth Amendment interest of Clara Penn. Therefore, the Fourth Amendment does not exclude the evidence from her trial.
If we could say that the police searched Reggie or seized information from him, within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, at all, it could only be on the theory that Clara Penn had put information “in” Reggie, just as she might have written it down and put it in a drawer. But although she might have had a legitimate expectation of privacy in a drawer, she had none in Reggie, because he was free to reveal the information at will to anyone in the world. Even if somehow this was a “search” of Reggie that violated his Fourth Amendment rights, there was no violation of Clara Penn’s Fourth Amendment rights.8 The fruit of that “search” is admissible at her trial.
C. Substantive Due Process
Penn alleges that the evidence should be suppressed, even if it otherwise could not be under the Fifth or Fourth Amendment, because the bribe of Reggie violated substantive due process in that it intruded on a “zone of privacy” comprising family life. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965).
However, Penn is not entitled, under past cases, to a constitutional remedy for this intrusion into the family circle. This case does not involve the special intimacy characteristic of the areas of sexual relations *884and reproduction, see id.; Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S.Ct. 705, 35 L.Ed.2d 147 (1973), nor does it involve any fundamental parental right, see Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 45 S.Ct. 571, 69 L.Ed. 1070 (1925) (choice of child’s education); Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 92 S.Ct. 1526, 32 L.Ed.2d 15 (1972) (choice of child’s religious practices). Therefore, no “family” interest of constitutional stature is implicated here.
Moreover, past substantive due process cases based on “family” interests all have involved systematic regulation of the interest, Doe v. Irwin, 615 F.2d 1162, 1168 (6th Cir. 1980). See, e. g., Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S.Ct. 1678, 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (birth control — statute); Moore v. City of East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494, 97 S.Ct. 1932, 52 L.Ed.2d 531 (extended family—zoning ordinance); Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur, 414 U.S. 632, 94 S.Ct. 791, 39 L.Ed.2d 52 (1974) (maternity leave— school regulations). Here we have only a single, isolated intrusion, with no apparent threat of repetition. We choose to keep our constitutional powder dry against the day when we are shown that repetitions have occurred or even that this kind of conduct has become regular police policy.
D. Sixth Amendment
Even if the police violated Reggie’s Miranda rights, Clara Penn has no standing to assert the violation. United States v. Pruitt, 464 F.2d 494, 495 (9th Cir. 1972). The Sixth Amendment does not prohibit the introduction against her at trial of Reggie’s statements or any evidence derived from them.
III. Non-Constitutional Grounds
A. Supervisory Power
Although if we were to affirm the suppression order it would be more appropriate for us to do so under our supervisory power than under the Constitution, we decline to exercise our supervisory power in this case. The role of the supervisory power is not “to give the federal judiciary a ‘chancellor’s foot’ veto over law enforcement practices of which it [does] not approve.” United States v. Russell, 411 U.S. at 435, 93 S.Ct. at 1644 (quasi-entrapment); see also Hampton v. United States, 425 U.S. 484, 493, 96 S.Ct. 1646, 1651, 48 L.Ed.2d 113 (1976) (Powell, J., concurring in the judgment); id. at 490, 96 S.Ct. at 1650 (plurality opinion). We have recently stated that although “we could neither endorse nor condone” using an improper source of funds to pay an informant to testify, “resort to the exercise of the Court’s supervisory power [to strike the testimony] would be an improper use of the power merely to foreclose law enforcement practices which we do not approve.” United States v. Shelton, 588 F.2d 1242, 1246 (9th Cir. 1978), cert. denied, 442 U.S. 909, 99 S.Ct. 2822, 61 L.Ed.2d 275 (1979).
The Sixth Circuit has gone further, holding that
the traditional area for exercising [supervisory] powers has been within the framework of judicial proceedings. . It is quite another matter, however, to extend the court’s supervisory power to areas outside this traditional domain of the court. To do so here, where the government conduct does not offend a personal right of any defendant, would be directly “to give the federal judiciary a ‘chancellor’s foot’ veto over law enforcement practices of which it did not approve.” . . . This is particularly so where, as here, no precise violation of any penal statute by the officers in question is shown.
United States v. Leja, 563 F.2d 244, 247 (6th Cir. 1977) (quasi-entrapment), cert. denied, 434 U.S. 1074, 98 S.Ct. 1263, 55 L.Ed.2d 780 (1978).
The same palliative factors that we considered supra persuade us that, although we disapprove of the policeman’s conduct, this is not an appropriate case in which to exercise our extraordinary supervisory power and exclude the challenged evidence.
B. Privilege
Federal Rule of Evidence 501 declares that the existence and extent of priv*885ileges “shall be governed by the principles of the common law as they may be interpreted by the courts of the United States in the light of reason and experience.”
There is no judicially or legislatively recognized general “family” privilege, cf. Trammel v. United States, 445 U.S. 40, 100 S.Ct. 906, 63 L.Ed.2d 186 (1980) (spouse may testify against her mate over his objection); United States v. Lefkowitz, 618 F.2d 1313 (9th Cir. 1980) (spouse may provide information to police for use in search directed against her mate), and we decline to create one here.
IV. Conclusion
No legal basis, constitutional or other, supported the district court’s suppression order. Therefore, we reverse the order.
REVERSED and REMANDED.

 Section 3731 provides in relevant part:
An appeal by the United States shall lie to a court of appeals from a decision or order of a district courts [sic] suppressing or excluding evidence or requiring the return of seized property in a criminal proceeding, not made after the defendant has been put in jeopardy and before the verdict or finding on an indictment or information, if the United States attorney certifies to the district court that the appeal is not taken for purpose of delay and that the evidence is a substantial proof of a fact material in the proceeding.

. Police report, and defendant does not deny, that she urged her children through much of the episode “not to talk to the officers, ... to hate whitey and to hate the pigs.”

. According to the officer who eventually found the heroin, the children “were continually . . talking in terms about dope, we were not going to find anything there .... One of the older children was making remarks about how he could beat the police in drug dealing, that he was too smart for the pigs to catch them.”

. The record from the district court indicates that sometime prior to the proceedings before that court the State of Washington had sought to charge Clara Penn in Washington state court for possession and distribution of narcotics. The charges were supported in part by the same contraband seized by the Seattle police as that under review here. In a preliminary proceeding, the state court suppressed the heroin found in the backyard of the Penn home. It relied on the Fourth Amendment, noting that
[t]he enticement of 5 year old Reginald Penn with five dollars to disclose the whereabouts of contraband is clearly an unreasonable search and seizure in light of the Fourth Amendment’s protection. . The contraband found in the backyard of the residence was found as the result of an unreasonable search and seizure and shall be suppressed.

. The government could proceed with the prosecution in this case using as evidence the unsuppressed 14.6 grams of heroin found without Reggie’s aid. However, it might well have a hard time securing a conviction on the intent-to-distribute charge with approximately one-half ounce of heroin admissible at trial.

. It was also a family unit in which hate for “whitey” and the “pigs” was inculcated. See note 2 supra.

. A warranted search is unreasonable if it exceeds in scope or intensity the terms of the warrant. Cf. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 17-19, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 1877-78, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968) *883(generally as to searches reasonable at their inception). The portion of a search that exceeds the scope of a warrant is, of course, unwarranted. The allegation here is rather that the search was too “intense.”

. Clara Penn had no special Fourth Amendment interest in the confidence of her intra-family communications that might have been violated by a “search” of Reggie. See the discussion in subpart C infra (no substantive due process exclusionary rule for intra-family communications).