Court Opinion

ID: 9464039
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 23:23:42.971308+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:38:25.723754
License: Public Domain

GOLDBERG, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent. My disagreement relates to the seizure of the receiver portion of the gun from the cabinet below which the barrel was discovered. The majority’s approval of this seizure means one of two things. The majority may have concluded that the cabinet door was open. While that fact would bring the discovery of the stock within the protection of the plain view doctrine, the district court expressly declined to resolve the evidentiary dispute regarding the cabinet door and acted on the assumption that the door had been closed. The contrary certainly does not so leap from the cold record as to merit appellate fact-finding.
Alternatively, as its opinion occasionally suggests, the majority may feel that the seizure from the cabinet was justified notwithstanding that it was closed. If this be the theory, I must vigorously disagree. Approval of the seizure of the receiver portion of the gun from a closed cabinet would signify that a plain view sighting of evidence legitimates a subsequent warrantless search of private places for other evidence one would necessarily expect to be in the proximity of that first sighted. At least where no exigency compels the subsequent exploration, and I can find none here, such a proposition is wholly unsupported and unsupportable.
I.
The starting point for analysis of appellant’s claims should not require repeating:
It is well settled under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments that a search conducted without a warrant issued upon probable cause ‘is per se unreasonable . subject only to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions.’
Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218, 219, 93 S.Ct. 2041, 36 L.Ed.2d 854 (1973), quoting Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 357, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967). See also United States v. United States District Court for Eastern District of Michigan, 407 U.S. 297, 314-18, 92 S.Ct. 2125, 32 L.Ed.2d 752 (1972); Vale v. Louisiana, 399 U.S. 30, 34, 90 S.Ct. 1969, 26 L.Ed.2d 409 (1970); Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 760-62, 89 S.Ct. 2034, 23 L.Ed.2d 685 (1969); Amsterdam, Perspectives on the Fourth Amendment, 58 Minn.L.Rev. 349, 358 (1974).
The officers here acted without a warrant. Thus the initial entry of appellant’s residence, as well as the sightings of the gun barrel and the receiver, must each be justified by reference to an exception to the warrant requirement.
I agree that the officers’ initial entry of appellant’s home in order to execute the warrant for his arrest was lawful. A reasonable belief that appellant was inside the dwelling was of course a prerequisite to lawful entry. As the majority carefully notes, the police could reasonably expect appellant, whom they had no cause to believe was employed, to be at his home at 8:30 a. m. on a week day.
Moreover, I agree that the plain view doctrine protects the sighting of the shortened gun barrel protruding from beneath the dining room cabinet. The officers discovered the barrel while passing through each room of the house; the discovery was within the legitimate scope of a search for the subject of an arrest warrant. Given the plain view justification, the issue of Brenda Jones’s consent is irrelevant. Those comments in the majority opinion suggesting that she consented to portions of the search are therefore unnecessary to its holding.
I must add, however, that any suggestion of consent is unfounded. The district court made no such finding, and the record could not support one. Accepting the testimony offered by the government, the officers had entered and proceeded with their search to the center of the house before meeting Ms. Jones. The officers announced that they were in the house for the purpose of serv*668ing the warrant on appellant. In such circumstances, and certainly where the issue of consent is as undeveloped as it is in this record, the language of Bumper v. North Carolina, 391 U.S. 543, 550, 88 S.Ct. 1788, 1792, 20 L.Ed.2d 797 (1968), governs:
When a law enforcement officer claims authority to search a home under a warrant he announces in effect that the occupant has no right to resist the search. The situation is instinct with coercion— albeit colorably lawful coercion. Where there is coercion there can be no consent.
Accordingly, while I agree that the discovery of the gun barrel was proper under the plain view doctrine on which the majority chiefly relies, I reject the suggestions that Ms. Jones may have consented to portions of the search. I repeat that those suggestions are unnecessary to the court’s holding.
II.
My concurrence with the majority must regrettably terminate with the plain view discovery of the gun barrel.
After discovering that barrel on the floor, the officer located the remainder of the gun in a cabinet above. The district court did not attempt to resolve the conflict in the testimony regarding whether the cabinet was open. Rather, the court below assumed that it was closed but opined that the discovery of the barrel justified opening the cabinet to search for the remainder.
This court’s opinion is distressingly silent on this issue. While the majority quotes that portion of the district court’s denial of the suppression motion in which it expressly assumed the cabinet door had been closed, ante at 663, the majority also mentions a finding “that the shotgun was in plain view” (emphasis added). Ante, at 663. To the extent this implies a finding that the cabinet that contained the receiver portion was open, it overstates the district court. Moreover, there is no basis for appellate resolution from the cold record of the square conflict in government and defense testimony on this issue. If the majority has indulged in the factual assumption that the cabinet was open, its conclusion that the discovery of the stock was within the officer’s plain view is legally sound. Such a factual assumption, however, would be error.
The majority may indeed have accepted the assumption that the cabinet was closed, but joined the district court’s opinion that searching it was constitutional. If so, it offers no explanation for its apparent belief that the plain view sighting of the barrel permitted a warrantless search of a closed cabinet for the receiver. Nor does it offer any limitations on the “search for related evidence” rationale that such a holding would imply.
The question may be simply put: which of the few, narrow exceptions to the fourth amendment’s warrant requirement justified the officer’s opening the dining room cabinet? Discovery of the gun barrel admittedly provided probable cause to believe that the remainder of the gun lay somewhere nearby. Yet probable cause to believe that contraband is in a particular place protected by the fourth amendment is never sufficient standing alone to excuse the warrant requirement.
The plain view doctrine cannot save the search of the cabinet. Retrieving the gun barrel from beneath the cabinet did not cause the door to open. Under the facts assumed by court, the officer had to open a closed cabinet to discover the receiver. Probable cause, even certain knowledge, that contraband lies behind closed doors does not endow a law enforcement official with x-ray vision. The discovery of the gun barrel did not provide the officer with “plain view”, literally or legally, of the receiver within the cabinet. Upon delving into closed cabinets, the peripatetics of the officers assumed a license that the fourth amendment does not tolerate. The search was kaleidoscopic, not microscopic. The object was unseen and not even unplainly viewed.
Nor were exigent circumstances present to justify the cabinet search. Without the barrel the gun was inoperable. Moreover, *669the police had no particular reason to fear concealment or disposal of the rest of the gun. When they left the house to search further for appellant, the officers left the gun under a detective’s surveillance. The risk that appellant might have managed to enter the house and remove the gun from the scene without observation is far too speculative to constitute exigent circumstances sufficient to justify a warrantless search, if the warrant requirement is not to be stripped of all meaning. Search warrants may be on their way to obsolescence, with “exigent circumstances” fast becoming little more than an empty incantation in the lexicon of fourth amendment cases. Yet whatever tomorrow’s chapter in the erosion of liberty and cherished rights, today a warrant or truly exigent circumstances is still compulsory.
No other exception to the warrant requirements seems even remotely applicable, and the majority offers none.1 Perhaps both the district court and the majority here may feel constrained to uphold the cabinet search because of its proximity to the gun barrel in time and place. Neither measure, however, provides a qualitative or intelligible quantitative basis for limiting the type of search approved today. What is to distinguish today’s case from one in which the first cabinet does not yield the rest of the gun, so the search continues to the chest of drawers or the desk in the bedroom upstairs? Surely the majority would recognize such a warrantless search to be unconstitutional. Nonetheless, the uncertain implications of its apparent holding are troubling.
The plain view doctrine permits law enforcement officers the full use of their eyes in places the officers have a right to be. The difficulty with today’s decision is that the discovery of the gun barrel never gave the officers at appellant’s home a “right to be” inside the cabinet. Just as probable cause to believe an unregistered gun inside the house could not alone have justified a warrantless entry of the home and a search through cabinets and closets, so the officer’s reasonable belief upon discovery of the barrel that the remainder of the weapon lay nearby provided no basis for a warrantless search of areas of the house not within the officer’s plain view. The officer who stands warrantless before a closed cabinet occupies the same legal position as one who remains outside a home. However certain his knowledge of contraband within, he may search only upon a magistrate’s authorization or in response to exigent circumstances. Here there was neither. No other established exception to the warrant requirement protected the search of the cabinet. The majority has articulated no reason for a new exception, nor have I found one. Without plain view or any other exception, we have a fourth amendment violation. Suppression of the stock is the only tenable result.
I respectfully dissent.

. The majority does cite United States v. Ca-tanzaro, 368 F.Supp. 450 (D.Conn.1973), for the proposition that the fact that the gun was in two pieces did not remove it from the statutory definition of a shotgun. With that proposition no one could quarrel; to the extent it is intended to justify the closed cabinet search for the second part of the gun, however, the case is inapposite.