Court Opinion

ID: 9482029
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:38:05.561213+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:43.162597
License: Public Domain

TJOFLAT, Chief Judge, specially
concurring:
Although I concur in the result reached by the court today, I cannot agree with the court’s analysis. This case does not require an analysis of the niceties of state or federal law on persons authorized to execute a search warrant. Instead, this case presents a straightforward fourth amendment issue. Struggling to distinguish the old fifth circuit opinion of United States v. Martin, 600 F.2d 1175 (5th Cir.1979), overruled on other grounds by United States v. McKeever, 905 F.2d 829 (5th Cir.1990) (en banc), cert. denied sub nom. Newman v. United States, — U.S. -, 111 S.Ct. 790, 112 L.Ed.2d 852 (1991),1 the court fails to focus on the decisive issue of whether the search in question constituted an unreasonable search in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The district court’s denial of appellant’s motion to suppress the rifle and the cocaine bags should be affirmed because this evidence was seized in the course of a reasonable search of appellant’s home. This search was conducted pursuant to a search warrant issued by a "neutral and detached magistrate,” see Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 14, 68 S.Ct. 367, 369, 92 L.Ed. 436 (1948), namely the Chief Judge of the Fourth Judicial Circuit of Florida. Moreover, the warrant was clearly issued on probable cause, based on a firefighter’s observation of a short-barrelled rifle in appellant’s residence. As a matter of fact, appellant does not even contest the reasonableness of the search which produced the evidence he sought to suppress at trial. The Fourth Amendment, however, protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. As the search of appellant’s residence was not unreasonable, the district *1543court’s denial of appellant s motion to suppress must be affirmed.
I agree with the court that Martin compels a finding that the officers executing the search warrant in this case were not authorized to do so. Unlike the court, however, I would affirm the judgment below not because the warrant’s shortcoming “implicated none of the interests that the Fourth Amendment protects,” ante at 1541, nor because “[sjtate authority ... clearly empowered [the officers] to execute warrants at the location at issue in this search,” ante at 1541, but simply because the warrant’s execution constituted a reasonable search not in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The search in this case implicated appellant’s Fourth Amendment interest in being free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The search was constitutional because it was not unreasonable. Given that, as the court repeatedly points out, see ante at 1541, our federal constitutional review of the district court’s judgment does.not rely on Florida state law pertaining to persons authorized to execute a warrant, the court’s reliance on “[s]tate authority” is misplaced.
Instead of claiming the inapplicability of the Fourth Amendment to government searches and of appealing to irrelevant state authority, the court would have done better to consider the reasonableness of the search the fruits of which appellant sought to suppress below.
As I find fault with the court’s analysis for the reasons stated above, I concur in the judgment only.

. In Bonner v. City of Prichard, 661 F.2d 1206, 1209 (11th Cir.1981) (en banc), this court adopted as binding precedent all decisions of the former Fifth Circuit handed down prior to October 1, 1981.