{"id":9531,"date":"2013-11-12T07:38:46","date_gmt":"2013-10-01T10:25:05","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-01T10:25:05","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=9531","title":{"rendered":"CA1: Lack of federal statutory authority for officer\u2019s action does not make it a violation of the Fourth Amendment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lack of federal statutory authority for officer\u2019s action does not make it a violation of the Fourth Amendment, applying Virginia v. Moore. United States v. Ryan<\/a>, 731 F.3d 66 (1st Cir. 2013):<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We ourselves have “not resolved whether an arresting officer’s lack of authority under … federal law to conduct an otherwise constitutionally valid arrest constitutes an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment.” Santoni v. Potter, 369 F.3d 594, 598 (1st Cir. 2004). Nevertheless, our precedent, like Moore, suggests that such an arrest does not warrant the exclusion of evidence. In United States v. Hensel, 699 F.2d 18 (1st Cir. 1983), officers of the United States Coast Guard, along with Canadian law enforcement officers, searched a vessel off the coast of Canada and discovered several tons of marijuana. The defendant argued that evidence gathered during the search should have been suppressed because the Coast Guard officers exceeded their statutory authority to conduct searches. Id. at 26. We assumed without deciding that the officers exceeded their authority, but we stated that “[t]he exclusionary rule was not fashioned to vindicate a broad, general right to be free of agency action not ‘authorized’ by law, but rather to protect certain specific, constitutionally protected rights of individuals.” Id. at 29. As the Supreme Court would later do in Moore, we emphasized that “the search did not invade [the defendant’s] Fourth Amendment privacy interests, for the search was supported by ‘probable cause.'” Id. at 30. Therefore, we “reject[ed] the argument that the Coast Guard’s violation of the statute … in [that] case require[d] us to apply the exclusionary rule.” Id. The same is true here: Because Ryan’s arrest was supported by probable cause, it did not violate his Fourth Amendment privacy interests, and the district court was not required to exclude the evidence obtained following the arrest.<\/p>\n

As to the territorial limit on LaMere’s jurisdiction, Moore again implies that an extraterritorial arrest is not a per se violation of the Fourth Amendment. In Moore, the Supreme Court stated without qualification that an arrest supported by probable cause is constitutionally reasonable. To be sure, the Court has clarified that a balancing of interests is appropriate for “searches or seizures conducted in an extraordinary manner, unusually harmful to an individual’s privacy or even physical interests–such as, for example, seizure by means of deadly force, unannounced entry into a home, entry into a home without a warrant, or physical penetration of the body.” Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 818 (1996) (citations omitted). But in Whren, the Court held that a traffic stop by plainclothes officers “does not remotely qualify as such an extreme practice.” Id. Likewise, for an officer to arrest an obviously intoxicated driver just outside that officer’s territorial jurisdiction, after a lawful traffic stop, is “not remotely” akin to the invasions of privacy that might call for the exclusion of evidence.<\/p>\n

The weight of authority from other courts of appeals supports our conclusion. Although we observed in Santoni that the courts are divided on “whether an arresting officer’s lack of authority under state or federal law to conduct an otherwise constitutionally valid arrest constitutes an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment,” 369 F.3d at 598, subsequent decisions have rejected the proposition that this lack of authority makes an arrest per se unreasonable. The Tenth Circuit’s decision in Ross v. Neff, 905 F.2d 1349 (10th Cir. 1990), which we cited in Santoni, has since been limited to cases involving warrantless arrests by state police on federal tribal land. United States v. Jones, 701 F.3d 1300, 1312 (10th Cir. 2012) (holding that an arrest in Kansas by Missouri police officers did not violate the Fourth Amendment). And the Second Circuit’s decision in Malone v. County of Suffolk, 968 F.2d 1480 (2d Cir. 1992), which we also cited in Santoni, must be read in light of United States v. Wilson, 699 F.3d 235 (2d Cir. 2012), in which that court found no violation of the Fourth Amendment when an extraterritorial arrest violated New York law and federal policy. Other courts of appeals have agreed that an extraterritorial arrest may comply with the Fourth Amendment. United States v. Sed, 601 F.3d 224 (3d Cir. 2010); United States v. Goings, 573 F.3d 1141 (11th Cir. 2009); Engleman v. Deputy Murray, 546 F.3d 944 (8th Cir. 2008); Pasiewicz v. Lake Cnty. Forest Preserve Dist., 270 F.3d 520 (7th Cir. 2001).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}