Court Opinion

ID: 9613309
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:16:01.750105+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:03:27.650594
License: Public Domain

LOKEN, Chief Judge,
concurring.
I join the opinion of the court except Part II.A, which I consider unnecessary. Part II.A concludes that the police need probable cause, but not a warrant, to open a single-purpose container in plain view. The probable cause requirement is needed, the court explains, to make clear that the police may not “open any seemingly innocuous single-purpose container.” Ante at 774. Though the concern is legitimate, the court’s remedy is redundant. The plain view doctrine authorizes seizure of an item only when the incriminating nature of the item is immediately apparent. As the court explains in Part II.B, the incriminating nature of the firearm kept in Banks’s single-purpose container was immediately apparent, which satisfied the probable cause requirement. In other words, requiring probable cause adds nothing to the safeguards inherent in the narrow plain view and singlepurpose-container doctrines. See United States v. Weinbender, 109 F.3d 1327, 1330 (8th Cir.1997) (“The immediately apparent requirement means that officers must have probable cause to associate the property with criminal activity.”) (quotation omitted).
The more difficult issue is whether the police must also obtain a warrant before opening a single-purpose container that the plain view doctrine authorizes them to seize, when that container has been found during the consensual search of a home. See United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1, 11-13, 97 S.Ct. 2476, 53 L.Ed.2d 538 (1977). The issue is difficult because the Supreme Court’s decisions applying the warrant clause to searches of personal property are not models of consistency. See California v. Acevedo, 500 U.S. 565, 581-85, 111 S.Ct. 1982, 114 L.Ed.2d 619 (1991) (Scalia, J., concurring). As the court notes, we held in United States v. Miller, 929 F.2d 364, 364-65 (8th Cir.1991), that the plain view exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement applies to the search of a single-purpose container. We relied in Miller on a footnote in a Supreme Court decision later overruled on other grounds, but other circuits have more recently reached the same conclusion. See United States v. Meada, 408 F.3d 14, 22-24 (1st Cir.2004), and cases cited. I agree that Miller is still good law and therefore concur.