Court Opinion

ID: 9842946
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 02:22:30.545273+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:14:21.797356
License: Public Domain

OAKES, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
I adhere to my previous opinion and therefore dissent from the denial of rehearing and affirmance of the judgment on the second alternative ground advanced in the original opinion. I take it that the majority’s sole reliance on the second alternative ground is an abandonment of its original position that somehow the defendant had an obligation to raise the issue whether officers who arrested him in his home had a warrant for Gilberto, a third person, who was not found in the home. Surely, at least, the admission of the Government that there was in fact no warrant for Gilberto’s arrest demonstrates the validity of the proposition that once a defendant has produced sufficient evidence that he was arrested or subjected to a search without a warrant, the rule should be, as I believe the basic federal rule is, that the burden shifts to the Government to justify the warrant-less arrest or search. See at 993 (Oakes, J., dissenting).
As for the alternative ground-that Arboleda abandoned any reasonable expectation of privacy when he tossed the package onto the two-foot ledge outside of his apartment-I think the subject is adequately covered in the original dissenting opinion. The fact that the package, at least according to the detective, hit the fire escape before it came to rest on the ledge is wholly immaterial. The case is not one involving a package being thrown onto an area as to which there was no expectation of privacy. If my back yard is enclosed by a fence that shields it from an alleyway and I throw an object against the fence that remains in the yard, I do not think that any officer who happens to come down the alleyway at the time I throw the object and even sees me throw it has a right to climb the fence to determine what that object is. See Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 466, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 2038, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971).
I would still reverse.