# United States v. Reginald James Causey

> Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit · December 17, 1987 · 834 F.2d 1179

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9477019

## Case

- **Full name:** UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Reginald James CAUSEY, Defendant-Appellant
- **Court:** Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
- **Decided:** December 17, 1987
- **Citations:** 834 F.2d 1179; 1987 U.S. App. LEXIS 17041; 1987 WL 23392
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Dissent by Rubin
- **Judges:** Clark, Goldberg, Gee, Rubin, Reavley, Politz, Randall, Johnson, Williams, Garwood, Jolly, Higginbotham, Davis, Jones
- **Cited by:** 193 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

## Citator (automated)

- No negative treatment found by the automated citator. That is not the same as a confirmation that the case is good law; read the citing cases.
- Full citator and citing cases: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9477019

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- stating that law enforcement "must ... be performed with due regard to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which affords citizen and alien alike protection against illegal stops, searches, and arrests”
- holding scope of search not necessarily limited to a pat-down search
- rejecting pretext challenge by noting that “so long as police do no more than they are objectively authorized and legally permitted to do, their motives in doing so are irrelevant and hence not subject to inquiry”
- holding that pretextual arrest did not violate Fourth Amendment where arrest was objectively supported by probable cause
- noting that "so long as police do no more than they are objectively authorized and legally permitted to do, their motives in doing so are irrelevant and hence not subject to inquiry"

## Opinion text

ALVIN B. RUBIN, Circuit Judge,
with whom GOLDBERG, POLITZ, RANDALL, JOHNSON, and WILLIAMS, Circuit Judges, joins dissenting:
The police suspected Reginald James Causey of bank robbery but lacked probable cause to arrest him. So they unearthed a seven-and-a-half-year-old bench warrant, long forgotten, for the sole purpose of questioning him about the bank robbery inside a police station where they could keep him in custody; force him to listen, if not to speak; and seek to elicit a confession to the bank robbery. The objective facts surrounding the arrest make it clear that the warrant was used only as a pretext. These same objective facts, without regard to the testimony of the arresting officers about their state of mind, mandate the conclusion that the arrest was but a means to take Causey into custody in order to question him about an offense other than the one for which he was arrested. The issue is not, therefore, as characterized by the majority opinion, whether “conduct otherwise lawful in every respect on the part of the police is rendered unconstitutional by their irregular subjective intent alone.” 1 The majority opinion fails adequately to consider the objective facts, hence misstates the issue and reaches an erroneous conclusion. I, therefore, respectfully dissent.
I.
The government does not even assert that the police had probable cause to arrest Causey. So what the majority opinion characterizes as their “belief” that they made an arrest without probable cause we may take to be well founded. Thus lacking a sufficient reason to make an arrest, yet desiring to take Causey into custody in order to question him under the coercive force that police-station interrogation would provide, they found a warrant seven and a half years old, issued for failure to appear in city court to answer to a charge that itself could no longer be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had run. Neither the city court judge nor anyone else had ever sought to enforce the warrant. The police never had a practice of following up on such warrants, and in foraging through old records in search of a *1187 warrant against Causey they were not following any established policy. Although the police did indeed testify that their only reason for arresting Causey on the warrant was “to take him downtown and continue [the] investigation of the bank robbery,” it is evident from the surrounding facts, even absent that admission, that the police used the warrant as a subterfuge: they arrested Causey to question him about bank robbery, not about his failure to appear in city court.
Causey’s arrest simply does not, therefore, present an instance of “otherwise lawful” conduct. Whether or not the police had a subjectively unacceptable intent, they did not have an objectively valid reason to make the arrest. That arrest was therefore an unreasonable seizure in violation of the fourth amendment.
The majority correctly quotes from Scott v. United States. 2 Like the majority, I take the words of the Court, reaffirmed in Maryland v. Macon, 3 as my beacon:
[A]lmost without exception in evaluating alleged violations of the Fourth Amendment the Court has first undertaken an objective assessment of an officer’s actions in light of the facts and circumstances then known to him. 4
From a completely objective viewpoint, it was unreasonable for the police officers to ferret out the warrant books, dig out this arrest warrant for an offense that had prescribed, and go out to arrest the person named in the warrant — police conduct that, so far as the record shows, was absolutely without precedent in the Baton Rouge police force.
The Eleventh Circuit has aptly characterized the Scott inquiry into objective reasonableness not as an examination of what an officer could do, but as an examination of what a reasonable officer would do. 5 When, as here, a reasonable officer would not have made the seizure of the suspect’s person absent an invalid purpose, the arrest must be condemned as pretextual. As a panel of this court aptly stated in United States v. Johnson, 6
When a defendant alleges that an arrest was pretext to conduct an otherwise impermissible search, the appropriate inquiry is whether a reasonable officer would have made the arrest absent an illegitimate motive to search. If a reasonable officer would not have made the arrest absent illegitimate motive, then the resulting search ... or inventory is unlawful.
The same principle applies to an arrest made absent legitimate motive, objectively determined.
In analyzing fourth amendment claims, the Court has repeatedly inquired whether standard police procedures were followed, and in addition, when it has upheld their action, it has stressed the absence of evidence of bad faith. 7 In an inventory search case decided only last term, Colorado v. Bertine, the Court again noted that the police were following standard procedures and that there was no evidence of bad faith. 8 The emphasis on following standard procedures accords with the principles set forth in Scott. When standard practices, not themselves unlawful, are followed, the police are acting in a fashion that is reasonable, objectively viewed, even if they have an ulterior motive. Here the police were clearly not following standard procedures. And they were not acting in good faith — objective or subjective.
An arrest is arbitrary, hence unconstitutional, if it is made in accordance with a potentially discriminatory plan, even when *1188 the same action, undertaken in accordance with neutral principles, would be permissible. 9 Stopping every tenth car at a fixed checkpoint for license checks is permissible; stopping only cars containing people who looked Hispanic would not be. Similarly, it would be reasonable, not arbitrary, hence unobjectionable, if a police department decided to work through its backlog of old warrants by executing them according to some nondiscriminatory scheme, even if, after such a warrant was executed, they interrogated the arrested person about other matters, but it is impermissible for a police department to decide which warrants to execute by looking for people they want to question but do not have sufficient grounds to arrest.
Three decades ago in Abel v. United States, 10 a case involving the arrest of a Russian spy on an alleged subterfuge, the Court refused to suppress evidence obtained thereby because the lower courts had found that the government officials had not acted in bad faith. The Court said, however, that “[w]ere this claim justified by the record, it would indeed reveal a serious misconduct by law-enforcing officers.” 11 As Professor LaFave points out, Abel represents a situation in which
‘the underlying intent or motivation of the officers involved’ — to utilize the Scott phrase once again — does not require suppression: where, even assuming that intent or motivation was the dominant one in the particular case, the Fourth Amendment activity undertaken is precisely the same as would have occurred had that intent or motivation been entirely absent from the case. 12
In Causey's case, the police activity would not have been undertaken but for the “underlying intent or motivation” which, standing alone, could not have supplied a lawful basis for the police conduct. In his case, the police engaged in misconduct even if we disregard their subjective “underlying intent or motivation.” Their deviation from their usual practice without just cause made their conduct arbitrary, thus constituting yet another reason why Causey’s arrest violated the fourth amendment. Using the rule of Scott, Causey’s arrest did not satisfy the “standard of objective reasonableness.” 13
The Supreme Court opinion in Villa- monte-Marquez, 14 on which the majority relies, does not support the validity of Cau-sey’s arrest. Villamonte-Marquez is chiefly concerned with the validity of a statute that authorized customs officers to board vessels anywhere within the United States or within the customs waters at any time for the purpose of document inspection. In a footnote, 15 the Court dismissed the argument that the customs officers should not be permitted to rely on the statute because doing so in this case was merely a ploy to allow them to follow up on an informant’s tip that a vessel in the area was transporting marijuana. The Court said that it had rejected such reasoning in Scott and rejected it again on the facts before it. The Court thus explicitly reaffirmed its commitment to the principle announced in Scott: if an arrest is objectively reasonable, then subjective intent alone does not make it unconstitutional. If, however, the arrest is not objectively reasonable, then it is unconstitutional. In Villamonte-Marquez the Court held that the customs officers’ action was reasonable, 16 whereas the policemen’s actions in Causey were not.
By holding the arrest in Causey constitutional, the majority opinion establishes a *1189 new rule that makes the whole more than the sum of its parts: the police can take two bases for arrest, each constitutionally insufficient — an unreasonable and arbitrary execution of a warrant and a suspicion amounting to less than probable cause —and add them together as a basis for a constitutionally acceptable arrest. This result flies in the face of the purposes of the fourth amendment and of established Supreme Court precedent.
II.
If the arrest was illegal, then we must decide whether to exclude Causey’s confession as the fruit of that illegality. Under the analysis directed by the Court’s decision in Brown v. Illinois, we consider the temporal proximity of arrest and confession, the presence of intervening circumstances, and the purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct to see whether the interests and policies served by the fourth amendment will be furthered by exclusion. 17
The deterrence objectives of the exclusionary rule can be served only if we exclude Causey’s confession. The police conduct here was calculated to abuse an individual who was suspected of a crime but whose sole known fault was his past record. The police set out, by means of the arrest, to harass the suspect into a confession, a plan in which they succeeded despite their Miranda warnings.
None of the attenuating factors discussed in Brown is present here to a significant degree. Causey was interrogated continuously in the coercive environment of the police station, and he confessed within four hours of the arrest. The Miranda warnings cannot, by themselves, purge the taint of the illegality. 18 Nor are there significant attenuating intervening circumstances.
III.
In the kind of society in which we live, few persons have a life so blameless that some reason to arrest them cannot be found, whether it be for entering an intersection when the light is on caution, or for violating a zoning regulation, or for having an expired brake tag. The fourth amendment protection against arrests without probable cause is designed to protect citizens against being arrested for such a matter when there is no objective justification for the arrest save the police’s desire to question the person in custody about a matter for which they lack the authority to make an arrest.
Untold thousands of Americans are subject to arrest for failing to pay parking tickets, failure to respond to summonses for traffic violations, and similar minor offenses. Even though the charges themselves and the warrants based on them are not stored or “warehoused” for a use other than to support an arrest for the offense charged, the result reached in the majority opinion makes the earlier charges readily available for later use. Police who desire to arrest an individual without probable cause may merely leaf through the files or turn to the computer to determine whether they can find some reasons to arrest a suspect for whose arrest they otherwise lack probable cause, just as the police did when they set out to find some pretext to arrest Causey. While I do not condone the possible law violations that led to the imposition of the earlier charges, I do not think such prior derelictions strip the alleged lawbreakers of fourth amendment protection if they should later be suspected of other offenses.
News reports indicate how many millions will be exposed to pretextual arrest by virtue of the majority opinion either because a warrant to arrest them for some offense has already been issued or because they have been charged with an offense for which a warrant might be obtained. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been testing a system that permits inquiries about criminal suspects from every state to *1190 be compared with names registered in a computer. “The primary purpose of the project is to devise a national communications system through which a policeman in New York, a prosecutor in Chicago or a judge in Los Angeles will be able to determine swiftly whether the suspects they are holding have ever been arrested in any other state.” 19 Five years ago policemen were routinely using the system more than 300,000 times a day to answer such questions as whether a car is stolen. 20
Syracuse, New York, has 20,000 delinquent parking tickets. 21 In Toledo, Ohio, 31,890 parking tickets were reported delinquent, and, after intensified police efforts, only slightly more than half were paid. 22 In Indianapolis, Indiana, “[t]he computer told police they could find 5,800 defendants at 2,700 companies. It also showed there were 28,000 outstanding warrants for traffic offenses, 9,000 for misdemeanors and 1,500 for felonies.” 23 Indianapolis police reported an estimated 27,000 such lawbreakers. 24
Washington, D.C. has records of 500,000 residents of Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia who have failed to pay parking tickets. 25 Los Angeles has considered an amnesty program in which 810,-000 traffic offenses carried on the court’s computer docket might be settled by payment “while having arrest warrants dismissed.” 26
These are but examples. Current technology has made it possible for every police system in the nation to record in a computer the name of every traffic offender and every other person wanted for any offense, however trivial, and for a national system to collate all of these records. The majority opinion permits any police officer who suspects anyone of any crime to turn to the computer, determine whether the suspect is listed as subject to an outstanding charge of running a red light or some other misdemeanor, obtain a warrant if none has previously been issued, and arrest the suspect without probable cause to detain him for the offense being investigated, then interrogate him at the jail.
As judges, it is our duty under article III of the Constitution to uphold the guarantees of the Bill of Rights that assure the public protection from the unconstitutional acts of the other branches. The Constitution protects all individuals, even the unworthy, from governmental invasion of their protected rights. The due process clauses, the fourth amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches, and the sixth amendment safeguards are all designed to protect persons suspected of crime against unconstitutional actions by the government and its agents, whether those agents be police or prosecutors.
To uphold the Constitution is not “to punish the public for naughty intent on the part of the police,” as the majority chooses to characterize it. The public is not punished but served when the constitutional rights of the nation’s citizens are safeguarded. When other branches of the government fail in their duty, it is our responsibility in the cases that come before us to call the foul. The police conduct in arresting Causey was just such a foul, and I condemn it not because it was motivated by naughty intent but because it violated the fourth amendment.
. Majority opinion, page 1149, page 1180. The emphasis on "unconstitutional” is in the original. The emphasis on "otherwise lawful” is mine.
. 436 U.S. 128 , 98 S.Ct. 1717 , 56 L.Ed.2d 168 (1978).
. 472 U.S. 463, 470-71 , 105 S.Ct. 2778, 2783 , 86 L.Ed.2d 370 (1985).
. Scott, 436 U.S. at 137 , 98 S.Ct. at 1723 .
. United States v. Smith, 799 F.2d 704, 709, 711 (11th Cir.1986).
. 815 F.2d 309, 315 (5th Cir.1987) (citation omitted).
. South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U.S. 364, 376 , 96 S.Ct. 3092, 3100 , 49 L.Ed.2d 1000 (1976); Cady v. Dombrowski, 413 U.S. 433, 447 , 93 S.Ct. 2523, 2531 , 37 L.Ed.2d 706 (1973).
. Colorado v. Bertine, — U.S. —, 107 S.Ct. 738, 742 , 93 L.Ed.2d 739 (1987).
. See Delaware v. Prouse, 440 U.S. 648, 661-62 , 99 S.Ct. 1391, 1400-01 , 59 L.Ed.2d 660 (1979).
. 362 U.S. 217 , 80 S.Ct. 683 , 4 L.Ed.2d 668 (1960).
. Id. at 226 , 80 S.Ct. at 690 .
. 1 W. LaFave, Search & Seizure: A Treatise on the Fourth Amendment, 1.4(e), at 92 (2d ed.1970).
. Id., 1.4(e), at 94.
. 462 U.S. 579 , 103 S.Ct. 2573 , 77 L.Ed.2d 22 (1983).
. Id. at 584 n. 3, 103 S.Ct. at 2577 n. 3.
. Id. at 593 , 103 S.Ct. at 2582 .
. 422 U.S. 590, 603-04 , 95 S.Ct. 2254, 2261-62 , 45 L.Ed.2d 416 (1975).
. Dunaway v. New York, 442 U.S. 200 , 99 S.Ct. 2248 , 60 L.Ed.2d 824 (1979); Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. at 603 , 95 S.Ct. at 2261 (1975).
. N.Y. Times, Dec. 12, 1982, at 120, col. 4.
. Id.
. United Press International Report, Nov. 1, 1987.
. UPI Report, July 19, 1986.
. Associated Press Report, Feb. 1, 1984.
. UPI Report, Feb. 1, 1984.
. Wash. Post, Nov. 27, 1980, District Weekly.
. L.A. Times, July 30, 1985, Metro section, Part 2 at 1, col. 1.

---

Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9477019. Public record. Not legal advice.