# United States v. Six Hundred Thirty-Nine Thousand Five Hundred and Fifty-Eight Dollars ($639,558) in United States Currency

> Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit · February 7, 1992 · 955 F.2d 712

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9482562

## Case

- **Full name:** UNITED STATES of America, Appellant, v. SIX HUNDRED THIRTY-NINE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-EIGHT DOLLARS ($639,558) IN UNITED STATES CURRENCY
- **Court:** Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
- **Decided:** February 7, 1992
- **Citations:** 955 F.2d 712; 293 U.S. App. D.C. 384; 1992 U.S. App. LEXIS 1433; 1992 WL 18289
- **Precedential status:** Published
- **Opinion:** Concurrence by Silberman
- **Judges:** Mikva, Silberman, Randolph
- **Cited by:** 78 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/9482562

## How later opinions describe it (automated extraction)

- stating that “Dr. Woodford testified that, as a result, bills may contain as little as a millionth of a gram of cocaine, but that is many times more cocaine than is needed for a dog to alert. Officer Beard related that 10 percent of the alerts he had witnessed were to cash alo…
- stating that if the stories on contamination proved accurate, “a court considering whether a dog sniff provides probable cause may have to take into account the possibility that the dog signalled only the presence of money, not drugs.” (citation omitted)
- holding that a thirty to forty-five minute delay rendered search too "remote in time" to sustain as incident to an arrest

## Opinion text

SILBERMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and concurring in the judgment:
I concur fully in the majority’s opinion with the exception of its lengthy detour (Maj.Op. at 718-21) to address a question which was, to say the least, “not fully argued” — whether the inevitable discovery exception to the exclusionary rule applies to primary as well as derivative evidence. Not only is discussion of this issue in no way necessary to our decision, since we assume that the exception would apply to the evidence here and determine that the discovery would not have been inevitable (Maj.Op. at 721), but, more important, the issue was, in fact, never raised in any intelligible form in this case. Nor, for that *722 matter, was the issue ever presented to the panel in United States v. Gale, 952 F.2d 1412, 1414 (D.C.Cir.1992), our recent inevitable discovery opinion, or, apparently, to the Seventh and Ninth Circuits — which the majority indelicately chides for “ig-nor[ing]” the distinction (Maj.Op. at 720)— in United States v. Mancera-Londono, 912 F.2d 373, 375-76 (9th Cir.1990), and United States v. Arango, 879 F.2d 1501 , 1507 n. 2 (7th Cir.1989), cert. denied, 493 U.S. 1069 , 110 S.Ct. 1111 , 107 L.Ed.2d 1019 (1990). 1
Where the issue was argued, in United States v. Pimentel, 810 F.2d 366, 368-69 (2d Cir.1987), the Second Circuit flatly and persuasively rejected the distinction. See also United States v. Whitehorn, 829 F.2d 1225, 1232 (2d Cir.1987), cert. denied, 487 U.S. 1237 , 108 S.Ct. 2907 , 101 L.Ed.2d 939 (1988). Moreover, if the distinction ever was important, it may well have been undermined by the Supreme Court’s decision in Murray v. United States, 487 U.S. 533, 540-41 , 108 S.Ct. 2529, 2535 , 101 L.Ed.2d 472 (1988) — a point the the majority acknowledges (Maj.Op. at 720) but then brushes aside so as not to diminish its discourse.
Wholly apart, however, from this concern that my colleagues are muddying rather than elucidating the law in this area, striking out very much on their own where no circuit has gone before, my fundamental objection is to the interjection into the opinion of an issue not raised or argued by the parties. The majority’s justification for its lengthy discussion of the issue is labored and unconvincing (Maj.Op. at 718). It cannot be that the mere citation of a case by a party opens the door for Article III judges to propound their views on the relevance of any and all conceivable implications of the cited opinion to the case at hand. (Appellant cited Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431 , 104 S.Ct. 2501 , 81 L.Ed.2d 377 (1984), only to acknowledge the inevitable discovery rule.) Under the majority’s approach, a party’s citation of a multi-issue case for a single one of its propositions would serve as a justification for virtually unlimited judicial exposition regarding propositions not at issue in the case.
I suppose, now that many of our law reviews are dominated by rather exotic offerings of increasingly out-of-touch faculty members, the temptation for judges to write about issues that interest them— whether or not raised by the parties or constituting part of the logic of the decision — is even greater. But I wish we would resist the temptation and decide one case at a time.
. The Eighth Circuit somehow avoided a scolding despite its holding (without any dicta expressing "doubts”) that the inevitable discovery rule applied to primary evidence in the unlawful search incident to arrest context. United States v. McConnell, 903 F.2d 566, 570 (8th Cir.1990), cert. denied, - U.S. -, 111 S.Ct. 1011 , 112 L.Ed.2d 1093 & — U.S. -, 111 S.Ct. 1393 , 113 L.Ed.2d 449 (1991); see also United States v. Andrade, 784 F.2d 1431, 1433 (9th Cir.1986).

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/9482562. Public record. Not legal advice.