It must be nice to be part of the class of people whose behavior has to be flagrantly illegal for there to be repercussions, and not part of the class that they are allowed to punish for minor, not-flagrantly illegal transgressions.
It also suggests an obvious strategy to not fall prey, and it’s probably a good strategy in general. Don’t let a cop tail you for minutes. As far as I know, I’m not doing anything illegal, but if a cop is behind me for more than two blocks, I find somewhere else to be. You know, I just remembered I really wanted to respond to an email. Better pull over so I can safely and legally use my phone.
This is one of those posts that has a number of different errors that appear to arise from unstated assumptions, and makes it difficult to know where to begin.
There is no such class.
There are repercussions for an illegal stop. Those repercussions don’t include forbidding the police to execute a pre-existing arrest warrant.
Even if the Court had decided this case the other way, the “repercussions,” would simply be a dismissal of charges; the officer doesn’t get fined or demoted unless the motorist complains or sues.
The motorist is still free to complain or sue, so the “repercussions” are still equally available.
If you mean “punish,” to describe the arrest for a valid pre-existing warrant, I don’t agree that’s minor or particularly controversial.
If you mean “punish,” to describe the initial detention, then police are subject to complaint, lawsuit, and settlement from an aggrieved citizen, and would be no matter which way this case went.
The stop was ruled illegal because the officer did not see Strieff enter the house. He therefore did not know how long Strieff had been inside and could not articulate all the necessary facts to reasonably suspect Strieff.
They should have stopped a person who they saw fit the pattern from start to finish: enter, stay a short time, and leave.
The officer who made the stop believed he had reasonable suspicion – he did not make the stop thinking he was violating the law. The trial court found that the officer was mistaken in that conclusion, but that this was not a “flagrant violation of the Fourth Amendment,” but instead a “good faith mistake on the part of the officer as to the quantum of evidence needed to justify an investigatory detention.” Ultimately, the trial court said, “the search was conducted after discovering an outstanding warrant and arresting the Defendant on that warrant, an intervening circumstance that [the officer] did not cause and could not have anticipated.”
The class is law enforcement officers. It’s reasonable to argue below that they don’t receive special treatment, but this bullet point doesn’t add anything. If I disprove any of the points below, then there is a special class. If I can’t, then the below were sufficient.
The repercussions are not equal in law or in fact. A non-LEO conducting an illegal stop of someone could reasonably be charged with false arrest or kidnapping in many jurisdictions. Even if the victim had an outstanding arrest warrant.
And the vast majority of the time, the officer doesn’t get fined or demoted even if the motorist complains or sues.
Ah, yes. The law, in it’s majestic equality, allows LEOs and non-LEOs the equal freedom to complain about illegal actions of members of the other class.
I’d love a cite that shows that rates of prosecution and conviction are equal for the same alleged complaint made by non-LEOs against LEOs and made by LEOs against non-LEOs.
Or did you mean the repercussions ought to be equal? I think we can agree on that one.
I mean, in a general sense, that police officers are not punished for their transgressions nearly as harshly as non-police officers. Surely someone with as much experience with the law as you is aware of the tremendous bias in our criminal justice system and the blue wall of silence?
Possibly none of them? Quick, did anyone see where Bricker’s goalposts went?!
I don’t recall commenting on the court’s ruling except to point out that the distinction between illegal and flagrantly illegal conduct is one that seems much more likely to be made in favor of that special class which enforces the rules. The class you seemed not to be aware of. Have I convinced you that it exists?
As far as the ruling goes, extending the fruit of the poisoned tree to cover knowledge gained through illegal conduct regardless of its flagrancy would result in better incentives for the police. We little folk might worry less about the inequity of enforcement if there were no incentive for police to commit illegal acts in apparently “good faith”.
And also that outstanding warrants are so common in some areas and the over-application of police powers against certain demographic groups so intense that they give the police broad abilities to violate the 4th Amendment. But as long as they’re not flagrant about it…
This is the part of the opinion I have the most trouble with. Okay, so the officer, in good faith, made a mistake because thought he had enough evidence for reasonable suspicion. This bothers me for several reasons:
Hasn’t 4th amendment law for always and all time said over and over again that we do not care about the subjective intent of the officer, but only what an objectively reasonable police officer would do? The courts have excused bad faith on the part of police officers by pointing to this objective standard. See Whren v United States. Now when we try point to the objective standard, the court wants to bypass it by using good faith.
Even if we do look at subjective intent, this can hardly be called “good faith,” unless being woefully ignorant of forty years of case law can be called good faith. This officer ordered a man who was doing nothing but walking through a convenience store parking lot to stop and present identification. Yes, he had previously been inside what the officer believed was a drug house, but the officer did not know how long he had been there. He could have been a roommate, the yard boy, or the representative from the local Baptist Church asking them to mend their ways.
Restraining a person’s freedom of movement based upon evidence that is clearly not sufficient to do so is the anti-thesis of good faith. The police can simply be willfully ignorant of the law and according to the Court claim good faith.
The officer himself checked for the outstanding warrant. I haven’t seen this mentioned in either the majority or the dissent. Of course, he is permitted to do this in the course of a lawful detention, but the fact that this detention was unlawful made this step a part of the illegal search. Without the arrestee’s name, he could not have uncovered this information. The man had a right to keep his name secret from the officer and would have done so, but for the unlawful demand to produce identification.
Further, determining whether the suspect had any outstanding arrest warrants was unrelated to the reason behind the illegal detention. Whether he had any outstanding warrants does not shed any light on the purpose of his visit to the house that night. Even if he had prior convictions, or outstanding warrants, for drug related activity such information cannot a) justify the intrusion ex ante, or b) provide reasonable suspicion of what he was doing on that particular occasion. Otherwise anyone with a prior criminal history could be searched at will (there is a direct cite for this somewhere; I just used it in a brief).
In short, I agree with Sotomayor’s dissent. This will encourage police to be willfully ignorant of the law and stop people on no suspicion just to check for outstanding warrants. Terrible.
Yes. But US v. Leon is thirty years old. This dual standard is not new. The police can act in good faith and avoid the exclusionary rule, or they can act in bad faith but technical compliance and avoid it. That’s the long-standing contour of the exclusionary rule.
Well, I’d say it’s a closer question than that. To detain, he needed only reasonable suspicion, and they facts he can articulate come close. I don’t agree it’s correct to call his conduct a flagrant violation of constitutional guarantees; police officers are not lawyers.
There’s no showing that this was the case here. I’d say that most lawyers who don’t practice criminal law regularly would be unsure of the Terry line here.
Sure – he believed that his detention was legal, so he checked for warrants.
No. You conflate “outstanding warrant” and “prior convictions.” Anyone with an outstanding arrest warrant can indeed be searched at will, incident to the arrest that the warrant authorizes. It’s true that the man’s identity led to the discovery of the warrant, but the discovery of the identity of anyone detained – even if that identity does not directly confirm or dispel the reasonable suspicion that triggered the detention – is constitutionally permissible. Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District.
Net effect is cops can now stop you for any reason that they say is legal even if it is illegal, ask for ID and see if there are any warrants out for you and it is constitutional.
The reason has to fit in the narrow boundary that supports a determination of good faith. For example, an officer cannot stop you for wearing a Redskins hat, even if he says that he believed that the hat was hate speech.
No because this case sounds like even though the detention was illegal, the fact that the officer thought it was legal made everything subsequent to that legal. So if the officer honestly thought wearing “Redskins” around Native Americans were hate speech and ran my ID for warrants, got a positive and searched me how would that be different than this case.
If I, as the defendant, tell the court, “you know, I honestly didn’t know xxxx was illegal”, I’m going to walk with an apology from the court for my being inconvenienced?
Because the idea that wearing a Redskins hat is illegal would be so far off base, objectively, that the officer’s subjective belief could not save it. This is somewhat related to the word “flagrant,” discussed above.
Do you understand the difference that characterizing something as “flagrantly” illegal makes?
So what do you believe that question has to do with this situation?
Are you highlighting the different standard applied?
Are you aware that there are all sorts of different standards applied to evidence at different stages of a criminal arrest and prosecution? You would not, I assume, ask indignantly why the defendant is not convicted after the prosecution proved their case with probable cause, right? Even though probable cause is required for an arrest, you understand that evidence beyond a reasonable doubt is required for conviction. You might have heard that threshold determinations for admissibility of evidence are governed by “preponderance,” or require “clear and convincing,” showings.
So knowing that all sorts of different rules apply in different situations, why would you possibly ask a question that suggests you believe that the rules for prosecuting someone who is in ignorance of the law are identical to handing exclusion of evidence gained when a police officer is ignorant of the law?
As a peon I’m expected to know the law and follow it. That can get pretty tricky. I was fined by a PA Fish&Boat officer because my kayak lacked a permit required for a local lake, but I was kayaking a tributary where the permit was not required. It turns out there is a specific definition of where the lake begins, and it’s not the definition most would assume. I paid the ticket.
Why can’t we require those enforcing the law to follow the law regardless of how difficult that may be? Why can’t Law enforcers be assumed to be knowledgeable to the same degree I am?
This question implies that there is only one application of the concept of “know and follow the law.”
But there are many different ones. The law can impose civil penalties against you merely by showing you more likely than not were in violation of an ordinance. Typically, the government doesn’t need to show your violation was knowing or willful. But a criminal penalty almost always requires that you intended to do wrong, or that your conduct was criminally reckless.
Here, the officer was in error, and your question tries to draw some sort of equivalence between his error and his breaking a criminal law. But his error isn’t being punished by a criminal penalty against him: it’s being assessed for the question of whether it invalidates the use of the warrant he discovered.
So the answer to your question is: because the two cases are completely different. What conditions are necessary to charge you with a crime, or with a civil violation, are not relevant to what the result should be of a mistake an officer made in detaining a person.
I suppose it depended on what means the non-LEO used to effect the stop.
But in this case, the LEO did not illegally search anyone. He stopped Streiff and asked him for ID without having reasonable suspicion. The search came after Streiff was arrested, legally, pursuant to the warrant.
Well, realistically, a non-LEO would probably have to use some kind of force, since people aren’t going to bother responding to a request from some random person. Which obviously wasn’t the case with Streiff
Here’s the problem I have with this decision. It appears to me to set up a situation where the LEO has every incentive to make requests for ID without legal cause, and citizens are only legally protected if they refuse in all cases, which probably results in an escalation of force.
If an LEO asks for ID, either he has legal cause to do so or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, then apparently the proper thing to do is to refuse and let him escalate to obtaining it by force (I assume that an LEO who thinks he has legal cause to ask for ID is going to arrest if refused in his request). Because only then will the LEO have done something “flagrantly” illegal that could potentially get him disciplined and potentially get any evidence collected in the process thrown out. But of course there’s no way to know if he actually has legal cause.
A policy that results in a bad outcome for the citizen and no repercussions for the LEO when following his directions, but potentially a less bad outcome (legally) for the citizen and cause for repercussions by not following orders seems like a fundamentally flawed one, and one stacked against citizens