In 2006, police received an anonymous tip that drugs were being sold at a house in Salt Lake City, Utah. Officer Douglas Fackrell intermittently conducted surveillance for a week and observed a sufficient amount of visitors who stayed at the home for only a short time to become suspicious. After Edward Strieff, Jr. left the home, Officer Fackrell detained him. Officer Fackrell asked for Strieff’s identification, ran his Driver’s license and discovered an outstanding arrest warrant for a traffic ticket. Fackrell searched Strieff incident to arrest for the outstanding warrant and discovered methamphetamines and drug paraphernalia. Strieff was charged with two drug-related offenses.
In the trial court, Strieff sought to suppress the evidence because the officer lacked reasonable suspicion to detain him. Strieff argued that since the initial stop was unlawful, the exclusionary rule applied and the evidence must be suppressed.
The state argued that the exclusionary rule does not apply because the discovery of the traffic warrant was an intervening event that broke the chain of causation between the illegal stop and the discovery of evidence. The state urged the court to find that because the arrest was based upon the legal warrant, and not an illegal stop, the arrest warrant was the proximate cause of the discovery of the evidence thereby breaking the chain.
The Utah Supreme Court ordered the evidence suppressed. 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 Officer Fackrell’s discovery of a valid arrest warrant did not fit this description, the court found that this incident did not fall within the attenuation exception to the exclusionary rule and ordered the evidence suppressed.
The state sought a writ of certiorari. In a 5-3 decision, Justice Thomas wrote the decision reversing the Utah Supreme Court’s decision. The majority wrote that if an officer makes an illegal stop and then discovers an arrest warrant, the stop and its fruit will not be excluded in court. However, if “flagrant police misconduct” is shown, not merely negligence, as in this case, then the exclusionary rule would apply.
“Applying these factors, we hold that the evidence discovered on Strieff’s person was admissible because the unlawful stop was sufficiently attenuated by the pre-existing arrest warrant. Although the illegal stop was close in time to Strieff’s arrest, that consideration is outweighed by two factors supporting the State. The outstanding arrest warrant for Strieff’s arrest is a critical intervening circumstance that is wholly independent of the illegal stop. The discovery of that warrant broke the causal chain between the unconstitutional stop and the discovery of evidence by compelling Officer Fackrell to arrest Strieff. And, it is especially significant that there is no evidence that Officer Fackrell’s illegal stop reflected flagrantly unlawful police misconduct.”
The court noted an example of flagrant misconduct found in Kaupp v. Texas, 538 U. S. 626, 633 (2003) (flagrant misconduct found 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).
The court reasoned that Officer Fackrell was at most negligent because he made two good-faith mistakes. First, Fackrell had not observed what time Strieff entered the suspected drug house, so he did not know how long Strieff had been there; thus, he lacked a sufficient factual basis to conclude that Strieff was a short-term visitor who may have been involved in a drug transaction. Second, because there was no evidence Strieff was a short-term visitor, Officer Fackrell should have asked Strieff whether he would speak with him, instead of demanding that Strieff do so. But the court concluded that these errors in judgment do not rise to a purposeful or flagrant violation of Strieff ’s Fourth Amendment rights.
In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined in part by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writes: “The Court today holds that the discovery of a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket will forgive a police officer’s violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. Do not be soothed by the opinion’s technical language: This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants—even if you are doing nothing wrong. If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay, courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you after arresting you on the warrant. Because the Fourth Amendment should prohibit, not permit, such misconduct, I dissent.”
“For generations, black and brown parents have given their children “the talk”—instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger—all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them. See, e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); J. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963); T. Coates, Between the World and Me (2015).
“By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged. “
Justice Elena Kagan also wrote a dissent and was joined by Justice Ginsburg. Kagan writes,”
“The majority’s misapplication of Brown’s three-part inquiry creates unfortunate incentives for the police—indeed, practically invites them to do what Fackrell did here. Consider an officer who, like Fackrell, wishes to stop someone for investigative reasons, but does not have what a court would view as reasonable suspicion. If the officer believes that any evidence he discovers will be inadmissible, he is likely to think the unlawful stop not worth making—precisely the deterrence the exclusionary rule is meant to achieve. But when he is told of today’s decision? Now the officer knows that the stop may well yield admissible evidence: So long as the target is one of the many millions of people in this country with an outstanding arrest warrant, anything the officer finds in a search is fair game for use in a criminal prosecution. The officer’s incentive to violate the Constitution thus increases: From here on, he sees potential advantage in stopping individuals without reasonable suspicion—exactly the temptation the exclusionary rule is supposed to remove. Because the majority thus places Fourth Amendment protections at risk, I respectfully dissent. ”
Copyright @ 2016 Christine Esser
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