Court Opinion

ID: 9481046
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:06:14.46646+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:03.928469
License: Public Domain

WILL, Senior District Judge,
concurring.
I join in the judgment and agree with most of the reasoning of Judge Flaum’s *424opinion. I write separately, and with reluctance, in light of Judge Posner’s concurrence, to elaborate further on the reasons why, absent a decision from the Supreme Court changing the established rule, I believe that fourth amendment findings of probable cause to conduct a search both are and should continue to be reviewed under a “substantial basis” standard rather than some less demanding standard such as “clear error.”
1. Obviously, negligence and probable cause are similar in that both are mixed questions of law and fact. See Posner concurrence, supra at 419-20. I also agree that “appellate review of the application of law to fact should be deferential.” Id. But it does not follow from there, as Judge Posner would have it, that the standard of appellate review, even though generally deferential for mixed questions, is (or even ought to be) “clear error” for all mixed questions.
Probable cause is a constitutionally mandated standard. Negligence isn’t. A determination of probable cause for the issuance of a search warrant is made in an ex parte proceeding. A finding of negligence is not. These are key differences. Our review of the ex parte application of important constitutional standards to facts both is and ought to be more rigorous and searching than the review, after a trial, of a finding of negligence, by jury or judge, in which no constitutional standards are implicated. Even appellate review of facts is sometimes more rigorous and searching when a constitutional norm is at issue. See Rosenbloom v. Metromedia, 403 U.S. 29, 54, 91 S.Ct. 1811, 1825, 29 L.Ed.2d 296 (1971) (first amendment questions of “constitutional fact” compel de novo review); Bose Corp. v. Consumer Union, 466 U.S. 485, 104 S.Ct. 1949, 80 L.Ed.2d 502 (1984) (same).
It is simply inaccurate to say that reviewing findings of probable cause under a more searching standard than clear error somehow “implies that probable cause is a question of ‘law.’ ” Matin, supra, 908 F.2d at 169 (Easterbrook, joined by Posner, concurring). All that is “implied” — or, more accurately, what the use of a substantial basis standard reflects — is that the application of important constitutional rules demands greater scrutiny and review than the application of some other rules. See also United States v. Hawkins, 823 F.2d 1020, 1022 (7th Cir.1987) (de novo review for another mixed question of constitutional law and fact — the voluntariness of confessions).
Cooter & Gelt v. Hartmarx Corp.,—U.S.-, 110 S.Ct. 2447, 110 L.Ed.2d 359 (1990) and related decisions are not pertinent here. There is a world of difference between enforcing Rule 11 and vindicating rights secured by the fourth amendment. Rule 11 determinations of “frivolousness,” as well as findings of negligence or determinations about who is and who isn’t a “buyer in the ordinary course" (Fog v. First National Bank, Posner supra), and even rulings that a defendant arrested for a minor offense was not arrested as a pretext for collecting statements and evidence relating to his involvement in other crimes (United States v. D Antoni, Posner supra), are all properly reviewed for clear error only. But when it comes to basic constitutional protections, such as the guarantee that “no Warrant shall issue, but upon probable cause,” our duty is higher and so is the standard of review — as it ought to be.
There is no “trend” toward revising the standards by which we review the application of constitutional standards to facts or to mixed questions of facts and law. Nor should there be any such trend. United States v. D Antoni is not contrary. There was no review in D’Antoni of the application of any constitutional rule. The issue in the case was ordinary fact — was D’Anto-ni arrested for the traffic offense or only so that he could be grilled about other crimes? The broad language in the opinion —“motions to suppress evidence will be affirmed on appeal unless ... clearly erroneous” — comes out of nowhere, and the citation that follows it, to United States v. Binder, 794 F.2d 1195 (1986), is no support for it. Binder stands only for the simple proposition that “[t]he credibility of witnesses at a suppression hearing is a matter *425for the trial judge to determine, and his credibility findings will not be reversed unless they are clearly erroneous.” Binder, 794 F.2d at 1199. Neither D Antoni nor Binder holds, or offers any rationale, argument, or Supreme Court precedent to support the broad proposition that a constitutional ruling made during the course of a suppression hearing should be reviewed for clear error only. Take, for example, a due process ruling that a witness identification was not prompted by undue suggestion, was reliable under the totality of the circumstances, and was therefore admissible. Our review of that ruling would not be limited to a run-through check for clear e See Neil v. Biggers, 409 U.S. 188, 193 n. 3, 93 S.Ct. 375, 379 n. 3, 34 L.Ed.2d 401 (1972) (“It is said that we should not ‘. reverse findings of fact ... unless shown to be clearly erroneous.’ This rule of practice ... is a salutary one to be followed where applicable. We think it inapplicable here where the dispute between the parties is not so much over the elemental facts as over the constitutional significance to be attached to them.”)
Constitutional review is of a different order than most other appellate review, because constitutional rights are of a different magnitude than most other rights, and there is nothing either extraordinary or inexplicable about the proposition that district judges’ and magistrates’ constitutional rulings, applying constitutional standards to facts, should be reviewed under a more stringent standard than clear error. This is not to say that the “clearly-erroneous rule [does] not apply [to any ruling] in any constitutional case.” Posner, supra at 422. It is simply to say that in constitutional eases appellate review of mixed questions should proceed under a more searching standard than simple clear error, a proposition which Judge Posner offers no reasons for doubting.
In any event, unless and until the Supreme Court mandates a change in the standards of review, I see no reason for lower courts to revise them and thereby diminish constitutional protections. I firmly believe the present standards to be correct and in my opinion, the old maxim “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies here.
2. The difference between the substantial basis standard and a clearly erroneous standard of review is significant. At first glance it may look like semantics — define a clearly erroneous decision as a ruling without substantial evidentiary support, and the difference between a ruling without a substantial basis and a clearly erroneous one seems nonexistent. But there is at least a psychological (and accordingly, in practice, a quite real) difference between saying (a) that we will reverse only if the decision below is clearly erroneous and (b) that we will affirm, if, giving deference to the lower court’s determination, that determination has a substantial basis. The first formulation amounts to a recipe for almost routine affirmance. The second, by contrast, ensures a more detailed and searching review than a clear-error standard does and is the appropriate and correct standard for reviewing constitutional determinations. There are cases that will be decided differently, and the fourth amendment protection will be different, depending on whether a “substantial basis” or a “clearly erroneous” standard is used.
3. Judge Posner urges, in part, that review of determinations of probable cause should be limited to review for clear error because an appellate panel will be farther removed from the facts and less able to assess their significance than the district judge or magistrate. Posner, supra, p. 420. This is only rarely true. In cases where a hearing was held before the warrant issued, virtually all the facts known to the district judge or magistrate will be in the officer’s sworn affidavit. A warrant hearing is not an adversarial hearing, and no substantial record is developed. The officer is not normally cross examined and the informant referred to in the affidavit, if there was an informant, does not usually appear in court. There is no weighing of the testimony of disagreeing witnesses.
In my experience, district judges and magistrates do not generally refuse to issue warrants based on credibility determinations or go behind the statements in the *426affidavit. If the affidavit appears to satisfy fourth amendment criteria, they issue the writ. Almost always, the decision to issue or refuse a warrant is made on the basis of the facial sufficiency of the accompanying affidavit — an affidavit which an appellate panel can review just as easily as the district judge or magistrate did in the first instance.
In cases where a warrant issued, and the only hearing was ex parte, an appellate panel will generally be in the same position to evaluate the facts as the district judge or magistrate was. Distance from the facts is no justification for a clear error standard in such a case. In this connection, it is important to recognize that substantial basis review does not mean no deference and that the deference inherent in the substantial basis standard allows for sufficient consideration of any advantage in observing the evidence which the lower court may have had.
In cases where a hearing was held only after the search, no warrant having issued, the circumstances are somewhat different. A hearing after a search, as opposed to a hearing on a request for a warrant, will not generally be ex parte. Frequently it will be fully adversarial and often it will result in a substantial record with live testimony from several witnesses. I see no compelling reason why such fully adversarial hearings, filled with live testimony, should be reviewed de novo, though that has apparently been the rule in this circuit. See Flaum, supra p. 413. I agree with Judge Posner that in such “nonwarrant” cases the district judge will generally be closer to the facts than an appellate panel and that de novo review is, accordingly, inappropriate. I do not agree with Judge Posner, however, that the solution is to adopt a clearly erroneous standard for all probable cause determinations. I would review “nonwarrant” cases under a substantial basis standard, the same as cases in which warrants issued.
4. As a general principle, and all other things being equal, legal rules should, if sound, also be simple and uniform. Rules that are vague or needlessly complex are inefficient — because of the uncertainty over how far they reach and what they mean, they commonly deter more behavior than they were meant to. For that reason, rules governing conduct should, generally, be simple and uniform. But the point has much less force in the context of standards of review, which are not rules that have any significant effect on conduct. There is no per se reason that standards of review should be either simple or uniform. A proliferation of detailed standards of review, with different standards in different areas, is not a problem in itself — so long as each standard is clear and administrable and the categories of rulings to which it applies is plainly defined. Occam’s razor to the contrary notwithstanding, it is OK, desirable, and the law, see Illinois v. Gates, supra, that negligence and probable cause are reviewed under different standards and that the standard for probable cause is whether the factfinder below had a “substantial basis” for concluding that probable cause existed. In the last analysis, it is more important that rules be just than that they be simple and uniform.
Whether uniform use of a clear-error standard would be a “cleaner” approach to appellate review, Posner supra at 423, is beside the point. Deciding whether a finding of probable cause has a substantial basis is often more difficult, and less tidy, than deciding only whether the finding was clearly erroneous or not. Judges, however, are called on to make hard decisions. Justice is not separated from injustice by a bright line. The difficulty of discerning the difference between the existence of probable cause and the lack of it is no reason for shirking a constitutionally mandated responsibility to distinguish them. Clear error may be a less complicated and less time-consuming standard to apply, than substantial evidence. But it is a standard that will diminish constitutional protections and lead to less just results in some cases, and caving in to injustice, because guaranteeing justice is “complicated” or “expensive,” is not the role of a judge.
Judge Posner also suggests that using a clear-error standard across the board would be a “more honest” approach to ap*427pellate review. Posner, supra p. 423. But there is nothing dishonest about insisting on a more rigorous level of review for probable cause determinations than clear error review entails and nothing dishonest about using different levels of review in different cases. And as Judge Flaum points out, the traditional position, that different phrases mean different things (i.e., that “substantial basis” does not mean “clear error”) is at least as “honest” and no more dependent on a faith in words than Judge Posner’s suggestion that one phrase, “clear error,” means different things in different contexts.
5. The government has not argued that the standard for reviewing probable cause determinations should be lowered from “substantial basis” to “clear error.” That circumstance would generally spell waiver in this circuit. And this court has, on at least one past occasion, stated that the government not having challenged the present standard of review, the issue is “all by the way” and “we must therefore” refrain, in such a case, from switching to a “clear error” standard. See United States v. Rutledge, 900 F.2d 1127, 1129 (7th Cir.1990) (Posner, J.).
Conclusion
This is not a hard case for which the standard of review makes a difference. The information in Officer Kettlekamp’s affidavit easily supported the issuance of a warrant to search the residence at 2238 Laurel. The magistrate’s finding of probable cause would obviously have sailed through clearly erroneous review but our affirmance under the more searching substantial basis standard is, on these facts, equally unmistakable.
It should be noted that challenging a search conducted pursuant to a warrant, on grounds that there was no probable cause, is an uphill exercise. That’s not because probable cause for conducting a search and negligence are similar rules governed by like considerations and subject to the same, clearly erroneous standard of review. The differences between constitutional rules and others, and between substantial basis review and clear error review, are significant and vital and should not be ignored in the interests of simplicity and uniformity. But the fact that probable cause is a constitutionally mandated standard, and that findings of probable cause must have a substantial basis to be affirmed, will rarely shape the outcome in a case like this one where there was a warrant. For in cases where a warrant has issued, the importance of probable cause has been substantially eclipsed by the “good faith” exception to the fourth amendment. United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 104 L.Ed.2d 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984). Unless the officer executing the warrant knows or reasonably should have known that it was procured improperly, his “good faith” reliance on it will be sustained. In this case, even if there had been no probable cause (no matter what the standard of review) to issue a warrant for the search which turned up McKinney, the guns, and the cocaine, the result of our review would have been the same. There is no evidence to suggest anything but that the warrant which issued in this case was signed by a detached and neutral magistrate, facially valid, and acted upon by the police in good faith.
A final observation. It is unfortunate, since in this case all three members of the court reach the same result, that so much time, energy and money have been devoted to discussing whether or not a new standard of review not yet mandated by the Supreme Court should be applied in this type of case. I would have preferred to leave that question to a case in which it made a difference in the result.