Court Opinion

ID: 9481517
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:21:40.486702+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:22.539487
License: Public Domain

SILBERMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment:
I regard McCrory’s Fourth Amendment claim as substantially more difficult than do my colleagues. The police and prosecution tactics employed in this case may not require reversal of McCrory’s sentence but they are certainly troublesome. Two undercover officers purchased a small amount of crack cocaine from McCrory in an apartment. They then broadcast the location of the apartment, and a veritable SWAT team descended upon it, carrying everything except a search warrant, and conducted what the government has conceded was an unconstitutional search in which they found a large cache of drugs and guns.
The prosecution readily agreed not to use this evidence at trial, and McCrory was indicted and tried only on the small drug sale. The illegally-seized evidence, however, was introduced at the sentencing phase as “relevant conduct” under the sentencing guidelines, and McCrory predictably received almost the precise sentence he would have gotten had he been indicted, tried, and convicted for possession of all the drugs and guns in the apartment.1 McCrory claims, understandably, that a *71more patent end-run around the exclusionary rule is hard to imagine.
The exclusionary rule, as matters currently stand, is in certain circumstances a mandatory remedy for a Fourth Amendment violation, see Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 81 S.Ct. 1684, 6 L.Ed.2d 1081 (1961). And those circumstances are determined by reference to “whether the [exclusionary] rule’s deterrent effect will be achieved, and ... [a balance] of the likelihood of such deterrence against the costs of withholding reliable information from the truth-seeking process.” Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340, 347, 107 S.Ct. 1160, 94 L.Ed.2d 364 (1987). Where this balance indicates that exclusion of the evidence is necessary to offset an unacceptably high incentive for police to violate the Fourth Amendment, the rule applies irrespective of whether the particular search or seizure involved in the case was in fact motivated by that incentive; the rule is a prophylactic. See, e.g., United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338, 348, 94 S.Ct. 613, 620, 38 L.Ed.2d 661 (1974).
Before promulgation of the sentencing guidelines, this balance tipped toward admissibility at sentencing of illegally-seized evidence. See United States v. Graves, 785 F.2d 870 (10th Cir.1986); United States v. Butler, 680 F.2d 1055 (5th Cir.1982); United States v. Lee, 540 F.2d 1205 (4th Cir.), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 894, 97 S.Ct. 255, 50 L.Ed.2d 177 (1976); United States v. Schipani, 435 F.2d 26 (2d Cir.1970). Even if district judges could take illegally-seized evidence into account at sentencing, the final sentence was almost entirely at their discretion (within generally broad statutory maxima and minima), and there was thus not much predictability as to the consequence of putting this kind of evidence before them, see generally Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361, 109 S.Ct. 647, 651, 102 L.Ed.2d 714 (1989) (discussing the unpredictability of pre-guidelines sentences). There was thought to be little deterrent justification for excluding the evidence at the sentencing phase. In a sense the very arbitrariness in the sentencing process that led to the promulgation of the guidelines meant that law enforcement officials would not be likely to seize evidence illegally and then refrain from charging crimes based upon it and instead introduce that evidence only at sentencing.
In the post-guidelines world, however, the government’s motivation might well be somewhat different, especially when (as here) the prosecution has more than enough evidence to convict the defendant on a lesser charge before they conduct the illegal search. The prosecution will know, based upon the indictment it urges and the “extra” evidence it has, almost exactly what the sentence will be in the event of conviction because of the guidelines’ mandate that the sentence be increased by a specific number of offense levels in light of other “relevant conduct” proven by a preponderance of the evidence. This means the police and prosecution now have something of an incentive to seize evidence illegally and then introduce that evidence only at the sentencing phase (unless the exclusionary rule applies at sentencing). If the police and prosecution know beforehand that they can get a conviction on a relatively minor offense which has a broad statutory sentencing range and that they can guarantee a sentence near the maximum by seizing other evidence illegally and introducing it at sentencing, there is nothing to deter them from seizing the evidence immediately without obtaining a warrant, especially when a conviction on a “greater” crime would lead to a similar sentence.2
I think what my colleague Judge Williams calls “truth-in-judging,” Walsh v. Brady, 927 F.2d 1229, 1238 (D.C.Cir.1991) (Williams, J., concurring), obliges us to recognize this analytical problem, but I confess I do not have a very satisfactory answer to it. The majority seems not to *72recognize that the guidelines change the government’s incentive structure and therefore implicate the basic rationale of Mapp v. Ohio. Accordingly, the majority’s suggested safety valve — holding open the question whether suppression is necessary if it can be shown that the police understood an illegal search “for the very purpose of obtaining evidence to increase a defendant's sentence,” Maj.Op. at 69 — is quite inconsistent with Mapp’s logic. The exclusionary rule is a prophylactic; it applies across the board in situations where the incentives for the police and the deterrence provided by the rule are such that exclusion is required and without reference to what motivated the particular search at issue. The majority would turn the exclusionary rule — at least in this context — into a form of subjective inquiry into police motivation.
In any event, the majority’s tentative limiting principle appears to me to be a chimera. It reminds me of what was often said of Chinese-American food of forty years ago — it leaves you empty shortly after reading. I cannot imagine how a defendant could ever show that the police illegally broke in to search his house for the very (and presumably sole) purpose of enhancing his sentence. In these drug cases the police and prosecutors wish to shut down the crack houses as well as make arrests, gain convictions, and seek severe sentences. I doubt whether we will ever see a stronger case for application of the exclusionary rule to the sentencing proceedings than here, where the break-in occurred after the police had already obtained sufficient evidence to convict the defendant.
Nevertheless, I do not dissent. The Supreme Court in recent years has been extremely hesitant to extend the exclusionary rule, see, e.g., New York v. Harris, - U.S. -, 110 S.Ct. 1640, 109 L.Ed.2d 13 (1990); Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340, 107 S.Ct. 1160, 94 L.Ed.2d 364 (1987); United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984); United States v. Havens, 446 U.S. 620, 100 S.Ct. 1912, 64 L.Ed.2d 559 (1980); but see James v. Illinois, 493 U.S. 307, 110 S.Ct. 648, 107 L.Ed.2d 676 (1990), and particularly to extend it to non-trial proceedings, see, e.g., INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032, 104 S.Ct. 3479, 82 L.Ed.2d 778 (1984) (deportation proceedings); Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465, 96 S.Ct. 3037, 49 L.Ed.2d 1067 (1976) (habeas corpus review); Calandra, 414 U.S. 338, 94 S.Ct. 613, 38 L.Ed.2d 561 (grand jury proceedings). Congress, moreover, has expressly stated that “[n]o limitation” shall be placed on the evidence a sentencing judge may consider, 18 U.S.C. § 3661, which is an implicit challenge to the extension of the exclusionary rule to sentencing procedures. Since the Supreme Court currently views the rule to be a remedial device rather than a constitutional right of a defendant, see, e.g., Calandra, 414 U.S. at 347, 94 S.Ct. at 619, I think it unlikely that the Court would override congressional desires, at least so long as other remedies to deter unconstitutional behavior {e.g., Bivens actions) were available.3 In sum, I concur in the judgment but think it important to recognize that we are taking a big bite out of the exclusionary rule.

. The guidelines provide for enhancement of a defendant's "offense level" by all "relevant conduct" — defined as all acts and omissions by the defendant in furtherance of the charged offense, see United States Sentencing Guidelines § lB1.3(a)(l) & (2) — proven by a preponderance of the evidence (e.g., possession of additional quantities of drugs). As the offense level for drug offenses is a function of the total amount of drugs involved without regard to the proportion associated with charged or with relevant conduct, this process results in the offense level (and, depending on the statutory maximum for the charged offense, the sentence) being the same whether the defendant is tried and convicted on all the drugs involved or whether he is tried and convicted on only a portion and the rest is brought in at sentencing as relevant conduct.

. By contrast, in the sole post-guidelines case cited by the majority dealing with the application of the exclusionary rule at sentencing, United States v. Torres, 926 F.2d 321 (3d Cir. March 1, 1991), this incentive was not present. There, all the physical evidence against the defendant had been seized in the same warrantless search. See at 322. The police therefore could not have known before the search that they had sufficient evidence to convict, and the possibility of suppression of the seized evidence at trial would thus have constituted deterrence enough.

. To be sure, it is hard to understand why state legislatures should not have the same latitude as Congress, which may mean that Mapp v. Ohio will have to give way in a sentencing context — if it survives at all.