Court Opinion

ID: 9542492
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:35:00.792354+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:08:07.984540
License: Public Domain

Judge SCHWARTZMAN,
concurring.
I write separately only to express a few observations on human behavior and its interrelationship with constitutional protections.
Harwood’s disclaimer of “ownership” and “knowledge” of the fanny pack’s contents, under the circumstances (the detective was familiar with Harwood as “being a person in the drug community”), would send out a “red flag” to any self-respecting, reasonably suspi-' cious/skeptical police officer that (1) the fanny pack probably belonged to Harwood and (2) that it probably contained contraband, i.e. drugs. Why Harwood would ever “consent” to this whole train of events, leading to his own incrimination (hoist on his own petard, so to speak), defies my view of common sense. Nevertheless, it must be so.
But let us keep the constitutional question in perspective. There is no such thing as a right against consensual self-incrimination. There is only a right against compelled self-incrimination. This distinction was elegantly expressed by Judge Moylan of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals in Cummings v. State, 27 Md.App. 361, 341 A.2d 294, 297 (1975), quoting State v. McKnight, 52 N.J. 35, 243 A.2d 240, 250 (1968):
There is no right to escape detection. There is no right to commit a perfect crime or to an equal opportunity to that end. The Constitution is not at all offended when a guilty man stubs his toe. On the contrary, it is decent to hope that he will. Nor is it dirty business to use evidence a defendant himself may furnish in the detectional stage____ [A]s to the culprit who reveals his guilt unwittingly with no intent to shed his inner burden, it is no more unfair to use the evidence he thereby reveals than it is to turn against him clues at the scene of the crime which a brighter, better informed, or more gifted criminal would not have left____ It is consonant with good morals, and the Constitution, to exploit a criminal’s ignorance or stupidity in the detectional process.
(Emphasis mine.) So let it be in this case!