B Good Faith/mistake of Law

• Library: Illinois Decisions on Search and Seizure (2017 Ed.)

B. Good Faith/Mistake of Law

Utah v. Strieff, ___ U.S.___, 136 S.Ct. 2056 (2016) (An anonymous tip was sent to the South Salt Lake City police's drug-tip line to report "narcotics activity" at a particular residence. A narcotics detective investigated the tip and an officer conducted intermittent surveillance over the course of "about a week." The number of people he observed making brief visits to the house over the course of a week made police suspicious that the occupants were dealing drugs. After observing defendant leave the residence, the officer detained defendant at a nearby parking lot, identifying himself and asking him what he was doing at the house. He then requested defendant's identification card, which he provided, and the officer relayed the information to a police dispatcher, who informed him that defendant had an outstanding arrest warrant for a traffic violation. The officer arrested defendant searched him, and found a baggie methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia. The State charged defendant with unlawful possession of methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia. Defendant moved to suppress the evidence, arguing that the evidence was inadmissible because it was derived from an unlawful investigatory stop. At the suppression hearing, the prosecutor conceded that the officer lacked reasonable suspicion for the stop but argued that the evidence should not be suppressed because the existence of a valid arrest warrant attenuated the connection between the unlawful stop and the discovery of the contraband. The trial court agreed with the State and admitted the evidence. The trial court found that the short time between the illegal stop and the search weighed in favor of suppressing the evidence, but that two countervailing considerations made it admissible. First, the court considered the presence of a valid arrest warrant to be an " 'extraordinary intervening circumstance.' " (quoting United States v. Simpson, 439 F.3d 490 (8th Cir. 2006)). Second, the trial court stressed the absence of flagrant misconduct by the officer, who was conducting a legitimate investigation of a suspected drug house. Defendant conditionally pleaded guilty to reduced charges of attempted possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia, but reserved his right to appeal the trial court's denial of the suppression motion. The Utah Court of Appeals affirmed. The Utah Supreme Court reversed. It held that the evidence was inadmissible because only "a voluntary act of a defendant's free will (as in a confession or consent to search)" sufficiently breaks the connection between an illegal search and the discovery of evidence. Because the officer's discovery of a valid arrest warrant did not fit this description, the Supreme Court ordered the evidence suppressed. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve disagreement about when an officer makes an unconstitutional investigatory stop, learns during that stop that the suspect is subject to a valid arrest warrant and proceeds to arrest the suspect and seize incriminating evidence during a search incident to that arrest. Compare, e.g., United States v. Green, 111 F.3d 515 (C.A.7 1997) (holding that discovery of the warrant is a dispositive intervening circumstance where police misconduct was not flagrant), with, e.g., State v. Moralez, 297 Kan. 397, 300 P.3d 1090 (2013) (assigning little significance to the discovery of the warrant). HELD: The evidence the officer seized in this case as part of the search incident to arrest is admissible because the officer's discovery of a valid, preexisting, and untainted arrest warrant attenuated the connection between the unconstitutional investigatory stop and the evidence seized incident to a lawful arrest based on an application of the attenuation factors from Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590 (1975). Additionally, there was no flagrant police misconduct. The exclusionary rule is the primary judicial remedy for deterring Fourth Amendment violations. It encompasses both the "primary evidence obtained as a direct result of an illegal search and seizure" and, relevant here, "evidence later discovered and found to be derivative of an illegality." Segura v. United States, 468 U.S. 796 (1984). But to ensure that those deterrence benefits are not outweighed by the rule's substantial social costs, there are several exceptions to the rule. Three of these exceptions involve the causal relationship between the unconstitutional act and the discovery of evidence: (1) the independent source doctrine allows trial courts to admit evidence obtained in an unlawful search if officers independently acquired it from a separate, independent source.

Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533 (1988); (2), the inevitable discovery doctrine allows for the admission of evidence that would have been discovered even without the unconstitutional source. Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431 (1984); (3) and at issue here, is the attenuation doctrine: Evidence is admissible when the connection between unconstitutional police conduct and the evidence is remote or has been interrupted by some intervening circumstance, so that "the interest protected by the constitutional guarantee that has been violated would not be served by suppression of the evidence obtained." Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U.S. 586 (2006) As a threshold matter, the attenuation doctrine is not limited to the defendant's independent acts. The doctrine therefore applies here, where the intervening circumstance is the discovery of a valid, pre-existing, and untainted arrest warrant. Assuming, without deciding, that the officer lacked reasonable suspicion to stop defendant initially, the discovery of that arrest warrant attenuated the connection between the unlawful stop and the evidence seized from defendant incident to his arrest. The second question is whether the discovery of a valid arrest warrant was a sufficient intervening event to break the causal chain between the unlawful stop and the discovery of drug-related evidence on defendant's person. Three factors articulated in Brown v. Illinois guide the analysis into whether the attenuation doctrine applies to allow admission of evidence obtained following unconstitutional conduct. First, consideration must be given to the "temporal proximity" between the unconstitutional conduct and the discovery of evidence to determine how closely the discovery of evidence followed the unconstitutional search. Precedent has declined to find that this factor favors attenuation unless "substantial time" elapses between an unlawful act and when the evidence is obtained. Kaupp v. Texas, 538 U.S. 626 (2003) (per curiam ). Here, the first temporal proximity between the initially unlawful stop and search favors suppressing the evidence because the officer discovered drug contraband on defendant only minutes after the illegal stop. Second, one must consider the "presence of intervening circumstances." In Segura, the Court deemed the evidence admissible notwithstanding the illegal search because the information supporting the warrant was "wholly unconnected with the [arguably illegal] entry and was known to the agents well before the initial entry. Segura applied the independent source doctrine because the unlawful entry "did not contribute in any way to discovery of the evidence seized under the warrant." But the Segura Court suggested that the existence of a valid warrant favors finding that the connection between unlawful conduct and the discovery of evidence is "sufficiently attenuated to dissipate the taint." That principle applies because here, the existence of a valid warrant, predating the investigation and entirely unconnected with the stop, favors finding sufficient attenuation between the unlawful conduct and the discovery of evidence. The warrant was valid, it predated the officer's investigation, and it was entirely unconnected with the stop. That warrant authorized the officer to arrest defendant, and once the arrest was authorized, his search of defendant incident to that arrest was undisputedly lawful. Third, particularly significant is the "purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct", which strongly favors the State because the exclusionary rule exists to deter police misconduct. Davis v. United States, 564 U.S. 229 (2011). Here, the officer was at most negligent, but his errors in judgment hardly rise to a "purposeful or flagrant" violation of defendant's Fourth Amendment right. For the violation to be flagrant, more severe police misconduct is required than the mere absence of proper cause for the seizure. Kaupp (finding flagrant violation where a warrantless arrest was made in the arrestee's home after police were denied a warrant and at least some officers knew they lacked probable cause). Here, the officer made two good-faith mistakes: (1) he had not observed what time defendant entered the suspected drug house, so he did not know how long defendant had been there. The officer thus lacked a sufficient basis to conclude that defendant was a short-term visitor who may have been consummating a drug transaction. Second, because he lacked confirmation that defendant was a short-term visitor, the officer should have asked defendant whether he would speak with him, instead of demanding that defendant do so. The officer's stated purpose was to "find out what was going on [in] the house. Nothing prevented him from approaching defendant simply to ask. Florida v. Bostick, 501 U.S. 429 (1991) ("[A] seizure does not occur simply because a police officer approaches an individual and asks a few questions"). Moreover, there is no indication that "after the unlawful stop, his conduct was lawful, and there is no indication that the stop was part of any systemic or recurrent police misconduct." Applying these factors, the evidence discovered on defendant' person was admissible because the unlawful stop was sufficiently attenuated by the preexisting arrest...