D Attenuation

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

D. Attenuation

New York v. Harris, 495 U.S. 14 (1990) (where police conduct warrantless arrest of defendant contrary to Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573 (1980), assuming police had probable cause to arrest, defendant would not be "unlawfully in custody when he was removed to the station house, given Miranda warnings, and allowed to talk. [The] station house statement in this case was admissible because [defendant] was in legal custody...and because the statement, while the product of an arrest and being in custody, was not the fruit of the fact that the arrest was made in the house rather than someplace else").

Dunaway v. New York, 442 U.S. 200 (1979) (Without probable cause, detectives took defendant into custody without telling him he was under arrest. In an interrogation room at the police station, defendant received Miranda warnings, waived counsel, and made incriminating statements and drawings. HELD: The police had violated defendant's Fourth Amendment rights by taking him in for interrogation. Here, no intervening events had so attenuated the connection between the unlawful custody and defendant's confession that the exclusionary rule should no longer apply. The "causal connection" test in Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590 (1975) requires the following factors to be considered: (1) the temporal proximity of the arrest and the confession; (2) the presence of intervening circumstances; and (3) the purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct).

United States v. Ceccolini, 435 U.S. 268 (1978) (A police officer inadvertently found an envelope containing policy slips in defendant's store, and the store clerk said they belonged to defendant. The officer's reports resulted in a grand jury investigation six months later in which the store clerk testified against defendant. HELD: The clerk's testimony, although it was obtained as a result of an illegal search, should not have been excluded. Greater reluctance should be exercised in considering suppression of evidence where the constitutional violation leads to the discovery of a witness than when it leads to the discovery of inanimate documentary evidence. Here, the length of time between the illegal search and the testimony, the degree of free will exercised by the witness, and the fact that exclusion would permanently disable a witness from testifying about material facts requires the testimony be admissible). Compare People v. Albea, 2 Ill. 2d 317, 118 N.E.2d 277 (1954) (as a result of an illegal search of defendant's home, a witness was discovered who then testified against defendant. The rule for testimony obtained in an illegal search should be the same as the rule for records or documents obtained illegally. Here, the witness was found as a result of the illegal search, she was not competent to testify at trial even though this exclusion would bar her from testifying to events that took place before the police arrived and made the illegal search). [Note: This holding must be open to question, though, in light of Ceccolini].

Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590 (1975) (After being arrested without probable cause and without a warrant, defendant made two incriminating statements to police after Miranda warnings had been given. HELD: Miranda warnings alone do not break the connection between the illegality of an arrest and a confession. There are a series of factors, in addition to the giving of Miranda warnings, to be used in determining whether a confession is obtained by exploitation of an illegal arrest: (1) the temporal proximity of the arrest and the confession; (2) the presence of intervening circumstances; (3) the purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct; and (4) the voluntariness of the statement).

People v. Henderson, 2013 IL 114040, 989 N.E.2d 192 (An officer and his partner were on a routine patrol in a marked squad car, when an unidentified man flagged them down. The man told the officers that there was possibly a gun in a tan, four-door Lincoln. Shortly after the conversation with the unidentified man, the officer observed a tan, four-door Lincoln travelling on the road. Upon observing the vehicle, the officer activated his squad car lights and pulled the vehicle over. After coming to a stop, the driver of the Lincoln exited the vehicle and began walking towards the officer. The officer ordered the driver back into the vehicle, and subsequently placed the driver in handcuffs after he had done so. The officer then ordered the front seat passenger out of the car, conducted a pat down search of his person, and placed him in handcuffs. After having his partner secure the driver and the front seat passenger at the rear of the vehicle, the officer ordered the defendant out of the vehicle. After the defendant exited the vehicle, the officer walked him over to his partner at the rear of the vehicle. When the officer and the defendant reached the rear of the vehicle, the defendant took off running. As he began running, the defendant dropped a handgun. After the defendant was apprehended, he was arrested and charged with UUW. The defendant later appealed his conviction arguing that his trial counsel was ineffective because she failed to file a motion to suppress the gun. In his appeal, the defendant maintained that the officer's initial seizure of the Lincoln was illegal and the recovery of the handgun was the fruit of that illegal seizure. Agreeing that the initial seizure was illegal, the appellate court concluded that a motion to suppress would not have succeeded because the defendant was not seized within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment at the time he dropped the gun. In appealing to the Illinois Supreme Court, the defendant argued that the tip provided to the officer was not reliable enough to provide a reasonable suspicion or probable cause to support the vehicle stop. The defendant further argued that the gun was fruit of the initial illegal seizure and should have been suppressed. Specifically, the defendant argued that almost no time passed between his illegal seizure and the discovery of the gun; his flight and dropping of the gun were direct responses to the illegal seizure as the officer had physically led him for a period of time before he began running; and the officer's conduct was a flagrant violation of Fourth Amendment precedent. HELD: Although the officer's stop of the vehicle was an illegal seizure, the defendant failed to demonstrate that there was a "sufficiently close relationship" between the seizure and the discovery of the gun that would warrant its suppression. In determining whether suppression is called for, when faced with evidence derived from a Fourth Amendment violation, a court must ask if the police obtained the evidence by exploitation of the illegality or instead by means sufficiently distinguishable to be purged of the primary taint. Evidence which comes to light through a chain of causation that began with an illegal seizure is not per se inadmissible. A simple but-for causality, by itself, is not enough to warrant suppression. Instead, a "sufficiently close relationship" between the illegality and the discovered evidence must exist for suppression to be necessary. Factors relevant to the attenuation analysis are the amount of time elapsed between the initial illegality and the discovery of the evidence; the presence of intervening circumstances; and the purpose and flagrancy of the officer's misconduct. In the case at bar, even though the defendant's flight did not "wipe the slate clean, as if the illegal...