Court Opinion

ID: 9472229
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:53:40.345561+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:49.208358
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the judgment and in the reasons given except I would not use the words “compelled” or “forced” to describe the impact of the Supreme Court’s Oliver decision upon my thinking. “Led” would be more to my taste. It is not true that but for our highest tribunal having spoken, I would have gone the opposite way. Actually, there was an important difference in the cases. The possibility of marijuana plantations being detected from the air was a mere speculation in Oliver, yet is referred to there as tending to undermine the reasonableness of the grower expecting privacy in his illicit activity, even though in fact such surveillance did not occur. In this case it did occur and was the origin of the enforcement officer’s suspicions. What was seen from the air would, I should think, have afforded probable cause if a warrant had been applied for. By modern aviation law, as I understand it, aircraft are free to come and go at over 500 feet without trespass upon the rights of the surface landowner. There was no suggestion the enforcement officers used or needed any kind of unusual or sophisticated equipment to detect the marijuana. There is nothing clandestine or secret about a helicopter thundering overhead.
I would have held, therefore, that the marijuana was in “plain view,” just as if it could have been seen from the highway and one who places an article in such plain view has no reasonable expectation that it will not be seen. I would have thought, though Oliver was decided by divided tribunals, both in this and in the Supreme Court, some of the dissenters in either place might reasonably have been persuaded by the factual differences in this case. It was the major premise of both dissents that Oliver, by “no trespassing” signs, locked gates, etc., did what he could to assure privacy, and presumably the result would have been different, in the eyes of dissenters, had he not done so. The defendants here did nothing to keep helicopters away, and nothing to conceal what might have been seen from them, the plantation being wide-open to aerial view. The marijuana plant is distinctive. Once one is seen, others are readily recognized.