Court Opinion

ID: 9428437
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:23:47.927584+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:13.427841
License: Public Domain

Justice Stewart,
with whom Justice Brennan and Justice Marshall join,
dissenting.
The Court is correct in stating that “some seizures significantly less intrusive than an arrest have withstood scrutiny under the reasonableness standard embodied in the Fourth Amendment.” Ante, at 697. But to escalate this statement into some kind of a general rule is to ignore the protections that the Fourth Amendment guarantees to us all. There are only two types of seizures that need not be based on probable cause. The first, represented by the Terry line of cases, is a limited stop to question a person and to perform a pat-down for weapons when the police have reason to believe that he is armed and dangerous. E. g., Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S. 1, 23-24. The second is a brief stop of vehicles near our international borders to question occupants of the vehicles about their citizenship. E. g., United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S. 873, 881.
From these two special exceptions to the general prohibition on seizures not based on probable cause, the Court leaps to the very broad idea that courts may approve a wide variety of seizures not based on probable cause, so long as the courts find, after balancing the law enforcement purposes of the police conduct against the severity of their intrusion, that the seizure appears “reasonable.” Ante, at 700-701, and nn. 11, 12. But those two lines of cases, do not represent some sort of exemplary balancing test for Fourth Amendment cases. Rather, they represent two isolated exceptions to the general rule that the Fourth Amendment itself has already performed the constitutional balance between police objectives and personal privacy. The seizure permitted by the Court today, the detention of a person at his home while the police execute a search warrant for contraband inside it, is categorically *707different from those two special exceptions to the warrant and probable-cause requirement, and poses a significantly greater threat to the protections guaranteed by the Constitution.
I
The common denominator of the Terry cases and the border checkpoint cases is the presence of some governmental interest independent of the ordinary interest in investigating crime and apprehending suspects, an interest important enough to overcome the presumptive constitutional restraints on police conduct. At issue in Terry was “more than the governmental interest in investigating crime; in addition, there is the more immediate interest of the police officer in taking steps to assure himself that the person with whom he is dealing is not armed with a weapon that could unexpectedly and fatally be used against him.” Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S., at 23. Though the officer in Terry was engaged in investigating crime, the governmental purpose that justified the stop and patdown was not the investigation itself, but “the neutralization of danger to the policeman in the investigative circumstance.” Id., at 26. Stating its essential holding, the Court said: “When an officer is justified in believing that the individual whose suspicious behavior he is investigating at close range is armed and presently dangerous to the officer or to others, it would appear to be clearly unreasonable to deny the officer the power to take necessary measures to determine whether the person is in fact carrying a weapon and to neutralize the threat of physical harm.” Id., at 24.
Similarly, in Adams v. Williams, 407 U. S. 143, the officer had received an informant’s tip, not amounting to probable cause, that Williams was carrying narcotics and a gun. The Court held that the officer acted legally in reaching into the car and intruding on Williams’ person to see if Williams indeed was in possession of a lethal weapon. In so holding, the Court made clear that what justified this intrusion on Williams’ person was not the possibility of finding contraband *708narcotics, but rather the officer’s need to protect himself from harm by seizing the suspected gun: “The purpose of this limited search is not to discover evidence of crime, but to allow the officer to pursue his investigation without fear of violence . . . Id., at 146; accord, Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U. S. 106, 110. See Ybarra v. Illinois, 444 U. S. 85, 93.
In United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, supra, the Court approved a limited stop of vehicles by patrols of immigration officers near the Mexican border, but in doing so it stressed the unique governmental interest in preventing the illegal entry of aliens. The Court held that brief stops and inquiries based on less than probable cause to search or arrest were necessary because the entry of undocumented aliens creates “significant economic and social problems, competing with citizens and legal resident aliens for jobs, and generating extra demand for social services.” 422 U. S., at 878-879. And in United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U. S. 543, upholding similarly brief stops and inquiries at permanent checkpoints, the Court relied on the unique difficulty of patrolling a 2,000-mile long and virtually uninhabited border area, a difficulty that would prove insuperable if the Government could stop a vehicle only on the basis of probable cause to believe that that particular vehicle contained illegal entrants. Id., at 552.
It seems clear, therefore, that before a court can uphold a detention on less than probable cause on the ground that it is “reasonable” in the light of the competing interests, the government must demonstrate an important purpose beyond the normal goals of criminal investigation, or must demonstrate an extraordinary obstacle to such investigation.
II
What the Court approves today is justified by no such special governmental interest or law enforcement need. There were only two governmental purposes supporting the deten*709tion of the respondent.1 One was “the legitimate law enforcement interest in preventing flight in the event that incriminating evidence is found.” Ante, at 702. The other was that “the orderly completion of the search may be facilitated if the occupants of the premises are present.” Ante, at 703. Unlike the law enforcement objectives that justified the police conduct in Terry and the border stop cases, these objectives represented nothing more than the ordinary police interest in discovering evidence of crime and apprehending wrongdoers. And the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments impose significant restraints upon these traditional police activities, even though the police and the courts may find those restraints unreasonably inconvenient.
If the police, acting without probable cause, can seize a person to make him available for arrest in case probable cause is later developed to arrest him, the requirement of probable cause for arrest has been turned upside down. And if the police may seize a person without probable cause in order to “facilitate” the execution of a warrant that did not authorize his arrest, the fundamental principle that the scope of a search and seizure can be justified only by the scope of the underlying warrant has suffered serious damage. There is no authority in this Court for the principle that the police can engage in searches and seizures without probable cause simply because to do so enhances their ability to conduct *710investigations which may eventually lead to probable cause. See Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U. S. 721, 726-727.2
Beyond the issue of the governmental interest justifying the detention, I question the Court’s view that the detention here is of the limited, unintrusive sort that permits the Court to engage in a “reasonableness” balancing test. As the Court said in Dunaway v. New York, 442 U. S. 200, 210, Terry v. Ohio “defined a special category of Fourth Amendment 'seizures’ so substantially less intrusive than arrests that the general rule requiring probable cause to make Fourth Amendment 'seizures’ reasonable could be replaced by a balancing test.” (Emphasis added.) As we then noted in Dunaway, the patdown searches in Terry, Adams, and Mimms were declared legal because they were extremely limited in time and in the degree of personal intrusion. 442 U. S., at 210-211. The Court also noted that in the border cases, the stops normally consumed less than a minute and involved no more than brief interrogation. Id., at 211. Thus, in the rare cases in which the Court has permitted an independent balancing of interests, the police intrusion has been extremely narrow. Moreover, the Court has required that the stop and inquiry or search be “reasonably related in scope to the justification for their initiation,” Terry v. Ohio, 392 U. S., at 29; see United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U. S., at 881, and, under that requirement, the unusual governmental or law enforcement interests justifying the patdown stops and border stops *711have provided a limiting principle ensuring the narrowness of the police action. The detention approved by the Court today, however, is of a very different order.
The explicit holding of the Court is that “a warrant to search for contraband founded on probable cause implicitly carries with it the limited authority to detain the occupants of the premises while a proper search is conducted.” Ante, at 705 (footnotes omitted). Though on superficial reading, this language may suggest a minor intrusion of brief duration, a detention “while a proper search is being conducted” can mean a detention of several hours.3 The police thereby make the person a prisoner in his own home for a potentially very long period of time.4 Moreover, because of the ques*712tionable nature of the governmental interest asserted by the State and acknowledged by the Court in this case, the requirement that the scope of the intrusion be reasonably related to its justification does not provide a limiting principle for circumscribing the detention. If the purpose of the detention is to help the police make the search, the detention can be as long as the police find it necessary to protract the search.5
In Dunaway, the Court reaffirmed that the “ ‘long-prevailing standards’ of probable cause embodied ‘the best compromise that has been found for accommodating [the] often opposing interests’ in ‘safeguard [ing] citizens from rash and unreasonable interferences with privacy’ and in ‘seek[ing] to give fair leeway for enforcing the law in the community’s protection.’ ” 422 U. S., at 208, quoting Brinegar v. United States, 338 U. S. 160, 176. Because the present case presents no occasion for departing from this principle, I respectfully dissent.

 As the Court acknowledges, ante, at 702, the record in this case presents no evidence whatsoever that the police feared any threat to their safety or that of others from the conduct of the respondent, or that they could reasonably have so feared. The Court says that this nevertheless was the “kind of transaction that may give rise to sudden violence . . . .” Ibid. But where the police cannot demonstrate, on the basis of specific and articulable facts, a reasonable belief that a person threatens physical harm to them or others, the speculation that other persons in that circumstance might pose such a threat cannot justify a search or seizure. Ybarra v. Illinois, 444 U. S. 85, 92-93.

 In a perplexing citation, the Court notes our holding in Payton v. New York, 445 U. S. 573, that an arrest warrant based on probable cause justifies entering a person’s home to carry out the arrest, and declares that Payton “is relevant today.” Ante, at 704. But I had thought that the very point of the passage the Cburt quotes from Payton, is that the police would be justified in arresting a person in his own home because they had a warrant for his arrest based upon probable cause to believe that he had violated the criminal law. Since it is the absence of such probable cause that lies at the heart of this case, I fail to understand Payton’s “relevance.”

 The record does not clearly reveal the length of the search in this case. In Harris v. United States, 331 U. S. 145, a Federal Bureau of Investigation search of a one-bedroom apartment for burglar tools and a pair of checks consumed five hours. See also Stanford v. Texas, 379 U. S. 476, 477.

I also question the Court’s confident assertions about the inoffensive nature of the detention in this case. First, the Court says the detention was innocuous because it was less intrusive than the search that was mandated by the warrant. Ante, at 701. This reasoning is, of course, circular, since the very question of the severity of the detention arises only because it was not based on a warrant or probable cause.
Second, the Court says that the intrusion was not a serious one because a reasonable-minded citizen would in fact want to be present at a search of his house unless.he was fleeing to avoid arrest. Ibid. But I must infer that the respondent here did not want to be present in his house during the search, else he would not have brought this claim, and the law cannot penalize him for “fleeing arrest” when the police did not have probable cause to arrest him. This second reason amounts to the view that a person cannot assert his rights under the exclusionary rule if he stands to benefit from the exclusion.
Finally, the Court observes that this sort of detention is not likely to be exploited or unduly prolonged by the police, since the officers are more likely to find the information they seek through the search than through the detention. Ibid. I confess I do not understand this reason. It seems no more than a restatement of the view that the police may detain the person to have him available for arrest when they com-*712píete the search, but that view merely begs the question whether the potential duration of the search threatens the person with a lengthy detention.

 The Court adverts to this problem only by suggesting that “special circumstances, or possibly a prolonged detention, might lead to a different conclusion in an unusual case.” Ante, at 705, n. 21. But the Court provides no criteria for identifying “special circumstances” or for determining when a detention is “prolonged”; in particular, it fails to tell law enforcement officers whether a detention will always be permissible, however protracted, so long as it does not exceed the length of the search of the house. This ambiguity casts doubt on the Court’s assertion, ante, at 705, n. 19, that its holding will not require individual police officers to engage in the sort of on-the-scene, ad hoc legal judgments which pose a serious threat to Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment protections. Dunaway v. New York, 442 U. S. 200, 213.