Court Opinion

ID: 9467401
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:47:57.668739+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:19.810717
License: Public Domain

SNEED, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I join in the opinion of Judge Kennedy. As that opinion makes clear, the result we reach is required by our reading of the applicable Supreme Court authorities.
No doubt law enforcement efforts would be less hampered were the probable cause sufficient to justify a seizure without a warrant of a closed receptacle, such as a suitcase, valise, attache case, or gym bag, also considered sufficient to support its search without a warrant on the spot when the probable cause to seize arises in connection with an investigatory stop of an automobile which itself was based either on probable cause or founded suspicion. This does not appear to be the law, however.
Under what we perceive to be the law, the officers, after stopping Adams and Williams and not observing any contraband in plain view, either should have let them go, arrested them and brought them back to either Imperial or El Centro and obtained a *654warrant to search the car and any closed receptacles, or held them at the point at which they were stopped until a warrant to search was obtained pursuant to Rule 41(c)(2), F.R.Crim.P. The first course would avoid all constitutional problems; the same cannot be said for the second or third. Perhaps both would survive any constitutional attack, perhaps not. It remains to be seen.
In any event, the controlling Supreme Court authorities make clear that, when confronted by circumstances such as exist in this case, the actions of police who, following this decision, choose not to release those reasonably and strongly suspected of illegality, will impose a strain on the concepts of probable cause to arrest suspects and to seize their automobiles, together with their contents, as well as those enunciated in Dunaway v. New York, 442 U.S. 200, 99 S.Ct. 2248, 60 L.Ed.2d 824 (1979). It is my hope that the strain will accommodate a course of action other than releasing the suspects.