Court Opinion

ID: 9480972
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:04:00.662317+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:01.499504
License: Public Domain

BEAM, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur with the result reached in this case. I write separately to suggest that United States v. Drinkard, 900 F.2d 140 (8th Cir.1990) cannot be so easily distinguished as stated in footnote 2 of the opinion. Ante at 1080 n. 2. This circuit has birthed, in addition to Drinkard, at least a brace of other eases which can be interpreted to stand for the proposition that the second showing of a badge coupled with the announcement that illegal drug commerce is the subject of the encounter transforms the detention into a stop contemplated by Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968). See United States v. Condelee, 915 F.2d 1206 (8th Cir.1990); United States v. Millan, 912 F.2d 1014 (8th Cir.1990). In my view, Drinkard, Condelee, and Millan are at odds with the holdings in United States v. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. 544, 100 S.Ct. 1870, 64 L.Ed.2d 497 (1980) and Florida v. Royer, 460 U.S. 491, 103 S.Ct. 1319, 75 L.Ed.2d 229 (1983). In Mendenhall and Royer, the Supreme Court expressly declined to do what this circuit has done in the three cited cases, that is, adopt a litmus test for such fourth amendment seizures.
In Mendenhall, the Supreme Court reversed the conclusion of the court of appeals that Mendenhall’s conviction had been obtained in violation of the fourth amendment.1 Agents of the DEA stopped Mendenhall in the airport concourse, identified themselves as federal agents, asked to see her identification and her plane ticket, noted discrepancies between the two, and then one agent specifically identified himself as a federal narcotics agent. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. at 547-48, 100 S.Ct. at 1873. The officers asked Mendenhall to accompany them up a flight of stairs to the DEA’s airport office, where Mendenhall consented to a search of her person. On these facts, the opinion of Justice Stewart found no fourth amendment seizure. By definition, “a person has been ‘seized’ within the *1082meaning of the Fourth Amendment only if, in view of all the circumstances surrounding the incident, a reasonable person would have believed that he was not free to leave.” Id. at 554, 100 S.Ct. at 1877. The court continued by setting forth several illustrative circumstances in which a fourth amendment seizure might occur.
Examples of circumstances that might indicate a seizure, even where the person did not attempt to leave, would be the threatening presence of several officers, the display of a weapon by an officer, some physical touching of the person of the citizen, or the use of language or tone of voice indicating that compliance with the officer’s request might be compelled.
Id. Thus, even though an officer specifically identified himself as a drug enforcement agent, thereby making Mendenhall aware that she was the focus of a drug investigation, Justice Stewart found no fourth amendment seizure. Yet it is this focus upon which the Eighth Circuit cases now rely, and not on the illustrative factors set forth by the Supreme Court. Significantly, none of these factors exist in this or our other cited cases.
In Royer,'2 the Supreme Court affirmed the conclusion of the Florida District Court of Appeal that Royer had been illegally detained and that the search of his luggage was tainted by the illegal detention. Royer was stopped at the airport by state narcotics investigators who identified themselves as police officers, asked to see Royer’s plane ticket and driver’s license, and then informed him that they were, specifically, narcotics investigators with reason to suspect him of drug trafficking. Royer, 460 U.S. at 493-94, 103 S.Ct. at 1321-22. The officers then asked Royer to accompany them to a room, which the Court characterized as a large storage closet, in which Royer consented to the search of his luggage. Id. at 494-95, 103 S.Ct. at 1322. The Supreme Court found a fourth amendment seizure "when the officers identified themselves as narcotics agents; told Royer that he was suspected of transporting narcotics, and asked him to accompany them to the police room, while retaining his ticket and driver’s license and without indicating in any way that he was free to depart.” Id. at 501, 103 S.Ct. at 1326.
Were Mendenhall and Royer definitive that a fourth amendment seizure occurs when an officer identifies himself as a federal narcotics agent and informs the defendant that he is under investigation, our cases could draw support from them for their conclusion. To the contrary, however, Mendenhall and Royer reach different conclusions even though the agents in both cases identified themselves as federal narcotics agents. Simply put, these cases do not require the conclusions drawn in our cases. Indeed, the illustrative factors cited in Mendenhall suggest a contrary result. In Mendenhall, for instance, the Court suggested that the “threatening presence of several officers” might indicate a fourth amendment seizure. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. at 554, 100 S.Ct. at 1877. By contrast, while several officers were present in Drinkard, it is not at all clear that Drinkard even knew of their presence. Also, the court in Drinkard does not indicate that their presence was in any way “threatening.”
As indicated, while Royer does rely in part on the focus on a particular defendant which our cases find definitive, Royer cannot be read so narrowly. We should not discount the importance of the fact in Roy-er that defendant was taken to a large closet and interrogated therein, a fact which both dissenters in Royer commented on. Royer, 460 U.S. at 517 and n. 2, 103 S.Ct. at 1334 and n. 2 (Blackmun, J., dissenting); id. at 532 and n. 10, 103 S.Ct. at 1342 and n. 10 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting). Thus, while the Court in Royer found a seizure partly because “the officers identified themselves as narcotics agents, [and] told Royer that he was suspected of trans*1083porting narcotics,” Royer, 460 U.S. at 501, 103 S.Ct. at 1326, the Court also relied on the agents’ request that Royer follow them to a police room while they retained his identification and plane ticket. By contrast, the defendants in none of our eases were taken to a police room while the agents retained identification and plane tickets. See id. The difference should not be slighted, for the Court concluded that a reasonable person in Royer’s place would not have felt free to leave only with reference to all of the circumstances, including detention in the police room. See id. at 501-02, 103 S.Ct. at 1326. Given that the Court had already noted that “the fact that the officer identifies himself as a police officer, without more, [would not] convert the encounter into a seizure,” id. at 497, 103 S.Ct. at 1324, this factor, not present in our cases, seems especially significant.
In short, our cases effectively do what the Supreme Court in Royer warned against:
We do not suggest that there is a litmus-paper test for distinguishing a consensual encounter from a seizure or for determining when a seizure exceeds the bounds of an investigative stop. Even in the discrete category of airport encounters, there will be endless variations in the facts and circumstances, so much variation that it is unlikely that the courts can reduce to a sentence or a paragraph a rule that will provide unarguable answers to the question whether there has been an unreasonable search or seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Royer, 460 U.S. at 506-07, 103 S.Ct. at 1329. These airport-stop drug cases involve difficult factual questions with which district courts often struggle in suppression hearings. Their conclusions should not be overturned as clearly erroneous on the basis of a few factors, drawn not from Supreme Court jurisprudence but from a few circuit cases, and reduced to a sentence or a paragraph, which masquerade as a “rule that will provide unarguable answers.” Id. Given our cases, it is my view that it is time for this circuit to reconsider this issue en banc.

. The Supreme Court was oddly divided in Mendenhall. Justice Stewart wrote the opinion of the Court, in which only Justice Rehnquist fully joined. Justice Stewart's opinion was also partially joined by Chief Justice Burger and Justices Blackmun and Powell, but these justices did not necessarily concur in Justice Stewart's conclusion that no fourth amendment seizure occurred. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. at 560 n. 1, 100 S.Ct. at 1873 n. 1 (Powell, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment). Rather, they concluded, in an opinion by Justice Powell, that, assuming that a fourth amendment seizure occurred, it was supported by reasonable suspicion. Because Justices Stewart and Rehnquist found no seizure, they did not reach the issue of reasonable suspicion. Thus, Justice White wrote in dissent that the Court's conclusion that the agents had acted lawfully was “particularly curious because a majority of the Members of the Court refuse to reject the conclusion that Ms. Mendenhall was 'seized,' while a separate majority decline to hold that there were reasonable grounds to justify a seizure." Id. at 566, 100 S.Ct. at 1883 (White, J., dissenting).

. Only a plurality in Royer concluded that a fourth amendment seizure occurred. Rather than diminishing the importance of these cases, however, the fractured nature of the Court in Royer and Mendenhall indicates the difficulties inherent in fourth amendment analysis, and the inappropriateness of the facile "test” this circuit is in effect adopting.