CA10: State troopers’ crossing state line was not a Fourth Amendment violation

The Missouri Highway Patrol followed defendant from Kansas City MO to Kansas City KS, and their actions in Kansas allegedly in violation of Kansas law are not pertinent to the Fourth Amendment reasonableness inquiry. “In sum, for all of the foregoing reasons, we reject Mr. Jones’s argument that the Missouri officers’ seizure of him in Kansas effected a Fourth Amendment violation simply because they were acting outside of their jurisdiction and without authority under Kansas law.” United States v. Jones, 701 F.3d 1300 (10th Cir. 2012):

It is “well established in this circuit that in federal prosecutions the test of reasonableness in relation to the Fourth Amendment protected rights must be determined by Federal law even though the police actions are those of state police officers.” United States v. Green, 178 F.3d 1099, 1105 (10th Cir. 1999) (emphasis added) (quoting United States v. Le, 173 F.3d 1258, 1264 (10th Cir. 1999)) (internal quotation marks omitted); …; see also Virginia v. Moore, 553 U.S. 164, 176, 128 S. Ct. 1598, 170 L. Ed. 2d 559 (2008) (holding that “warrantless arrests for crimes committed in the presence of an arresting officer are reasonable under the Constitution, and that while States are free to regulate such arrests however they desire, state restrictions do not alter the Fourth Amendment’s protections”); California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35, 43, 108 S. Ct. 1625, 100 L. Ed. 2d 30 (1988) (“We have never intimated, however, that whether or not a search is reasonable within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment depends on the law of the particular State in which the search occurs.”); … More specifically, “officers’ violation of state law is not, without more, necessarily a federal constitutional violation.” United States v. Mikulski, 317 F.3d 1228, 1232 (10th Cir. 2003); accord Pasiewicz v. Lake Cnty. Forest Pres. Dist., 270 F.3d 520, 526 (7th Cir. 2001) (“A violation of a state statute is not a per se violation of the federal Constitution. The federal government is not the enforcer of state law.”); …. Accordingly, Mr. Jones’s argument that the Missouri officers’ actions effected a Fourth Amendment violation simply because they were acting outside of their jurisdiction and without authority under Kansas law is mistaken.

. . .

While “compliance with state law may be relevant to our Fourth Amendment reasonableness analysis” in some circumstances, “we have never held it to be determinative of the constitutionality of police conduct.” Gonzales, 535 F.3d at 1182; see Sawyer, 441 F.3d at 899 (“State law is not determinative of the federal question, but rather may or may not be relevant to the determination of the federal question.”). In Gonzales, we explained that “compliance with state law is ‘highly determinative’ only when the constitutional test requires an examination of the relevant state law or interests.” 535 F.3d at 1182 (quoting Sawyer, 441 F.3d at 896-97). No such examination was required in Gonzales:

[W]e need not examine state law or interests. The federal test for determining the validity of a traffic stop simply requires us to determine whether a traffic violation has occurred …. It does not require an examination of a state’s law or interests, but focuses instead on whether the stop was reasonable under the circumstances.

Id. at 1183 (citation omitted). We do not perceive such an examination of state-law interests to be required here either. The Missouri officers’ encounter with Mr. Jones principally implicates federal legal standards related to the reasonableness of a Fourth Amendment seizure and, at least under the circumstances of this case, we see no need to assess state-law interests.

Written 12/20, and set to post at 6:11 am EST, 11:11 UTC, the time the “world is supposed to end.”