UT: Attenuation doctrine must ultimately bottom on inevitable discovery

Under the attenuation doctrine, incorporating a proximate cause analysis, inevitable discovery must ultimately control where there is both lawful and unlawful police action. State v. Strieff, 2015 UT 2, 2015 Utah LEXIS 4 (January 16, 2015):

¶1 In this case we are asked to determine the applicability of the “attenuation” exception to the exclusionary rule to a fact pattern addressed in a broad range of lower-court opinions but not by the United States Supreme Court. The essential fact pattern involves an unlawful detention leading to the discovery of an arrest warrant followed by a search incident to arrest. The attenuation inquiry is essentially a proximate cause analysis. It asks whether the fruit of the search is tainted by the initial, unlawful detention, or whether the taint is dissipated by an intervening circumstance. As applied to the outstanding warrant scenario, the question presented is whether and how to apply the attenuation doctrine in this circumstance.

¶2 The lower courts are in disarray in their application of the attenuation doctrine to the outstanding warrant scenario. In some courts the discovery of an outstanding warrant is deemed a “compelling” or dispositive “intervening circumstance,” purging the taint of an initially unlawful detention upon a showing that the detention was not a “purposeful” or “flagrant” violation of the Fourth Amendment. In other courts, by contrast, the outstanding warrant is a matter of “‘minimal importance,'” and the doctrine’s applicability is strictly curtailed.

¶3 We adopt a third approach. We conclude that the attenuation exception is limited to the general fact pattern that gave rise to its adoption in the United States Supreme Court–of a voluntary act of a defendant’s free will (as in a confession or consent to search). For cases arising in the context of two parallel acts of police work–one unlawful and the other lawful–we interpret the Supreme Court’s precedents to dictate the applicability of a different exception (inevitable discovery).

¶4 Our holding is rooted in our attempt to credit the terms of the attenuation doctrine as prescribed in the Supreme Court’s opinions, while also respecting the parallel doctrine of inevitable discovery. Thus, we read the Court’s attenuation cases to define the conditions for severing the proximate causal connection between a threshold act of police illegality and a subsequent, intervening act of a defendant’s free will. And in the distinct setting of both unlawful and then lawful police activity, we deem the inevitable discovery doctrine to control. Because this case involves no independent act of a defendant’s free will and only two parallel lines of police work, we hold that the attenuation doctrine is not implicated, and thus reverse the lower court’s invocation of that doctrine in this case.