CA11: Identity would not be suppressed from an illegal arrest

Under Hudson and Herring, defendant’s identity would not be suppressed from an illegal arrest. United States v. Farias-Gonzalez, 556 F.3d 1181 (11th Cir. 2009):

Additionally, allowing a criminal defendant to use the exclusionary rule to exclude evidence of his identity achieves the same result as would allowing him to suppress the court’s jurisdiction over him. While Farias-Gonzalez does not seek to prevent the court from summoning him before it, he does seek to prevent the Government from showing who he is when he appears before it. If Farias-Gonzalez can suppress the Government’s evidence of who he is, then he has accomplished the same thing he would have accomplished had he suppressed the ability of the court to exercise jurisdiction over him. But, the Supreme Court forbade the use of the exclusionary rule to challenge jurisdiction in Lopez-Mendoza. To allow the use of the exclusionary rule to exclude evidence of who the defendant is would be a significant social cost.

We turn now to the deterrence benefits in applying the exclusionary rule to identity-related evidence. Like in Hudson, there is no evidence at issue here which could not be otherwise obtained without violating the Fourth Amendment. The Constitution does not prohibit the Government from requiring a person to identity himself to a police officer. Hiibel, 542 U.S. at 188, 124 S. Ct. at 2459 (“A state law requiring a suspect to disclose his name in the course of a valid Terry stop is consistent with Fourth Amendment prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures.”). The police can obtain both photographs and fingerprints without conducting a search under the Fourth Amendment. United States v. Dionisio, 410 U.S. 1, 14-15, 93 S. Ct. 764, 771-72, 35 L. Ed. 2d 67 (1973) (holding that voice and facial characteristics are exposed to public, and thus not protected by the Fourth Amendment, and that fingerprinting likewise does not constitute a search since it “involves none of the probing in to an individual’s private life and thoughts that marks an interrogation or search.” (quoting Davis, 394 U.S. at 727, 89 S. Ct. at 1398)). Thus, it is not the acquisition of the evidence at issue here, but rather an earlier unconstitutional search and seizure that caused what the district court found to be a constitutional violation and triggered the potential application of the exclusionary rule. This case is similar to Hudson in that there was no incentive to violate the Fourth Amendment, as the evidence was freely obtainable without implicating the Fourth Amendment.