United States v. Rembert

284 F. 996, 1922 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1266
CourtDistrict Court, S.D. Texas
DecidedNovember 8, 1922
DocketNo. 1367
StatusPublished
Cited by70 cases

This text of 284 F. 996 (United States v. Rembert) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, S.D. Texas primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Rembert, 284 F. 996, 1922 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1266 (S.D. Tex. 1922).

Opinion

HUTCHESON, District Judge.

In this case the defendant, Tom Rembert, has filed a motion to quash the information filed against him, and suppress the evidence which will be offered in .support of the information. The evidence establishes that the officers had no warrant, either of arrest or for search of the defendant or his car, and that the search was made without his consent, and that in and by the search alone the evidence was obtained upon which they seek to convict him. The motion of the defendant must be sustained, unless the circum[998]*998stances détailed by them gave the officers the right to arrest and search the defendant and the automobile without warrant.

The circumstances as testified to by the officers on the hearing of the motion, which I find to be true, are these: About midnight on a moonlight night on a country road on the outskirts of Houston prohibition officers saw approaching them a Ford car driven by the defendant. The progress of the vehicle, as testified to by the officer, was marked by such a zigzagging course that he concluded the driver was intoxicated, and the vehicle being used to transport liquor. On that belief he- arrested the vehicle, and on search of it discovered the bottle of liquor in question and that the defendant had been drinking.

The principle invoked by the defendant is so fundamental, and the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures is so clearly guaranteed by the Constitution (amendment 4), that it would seem that the limits of the rights of an officer in the enforcement of law, and of a citizen in the enjoyment of his liberties, ought to be as well understood and as well observed as copybook maxims, fqr there can be no liberty except where there is a just and proper law enforcement, and there can be no proper law enforcement where liberty is unlawfully infringed.

The fact, which is all too evident, on the one hand, that overzealous officers are not nice to find these limits and live within them, and, on the other hand, that the peaceable and law-abiding citizen is loth to enter upon a dispute with officers of the law when his guaranteed rights are infringed, makes it not only permissible, but desirable, that the court now briefly state the legal principles which control the matter of arrest and searches in such clear and definite form as that no federal officer can hereafter claim the excuse of ignorance when he violates a fundamental law, in order to secure evidence of the violation of some other law, and that well-disposed and law-abiding citizens may be advised of their obligations in the premises.

It must be first premised that, where an officer politely and decently, and without physical threat has assumed to act in his official capacity, he is. acting de facto, if not de jure, and a peaceful citizen should not forcibly resent the action, even though he knows the officer is, as to the act, greatly exceeding his authority, resting confidently upon the belief that this submission will not impair any of his constitutional rights; for, as the courts have repeatedly held, such action will not be taken to be a, consent to an unlawful search or arrest, but merely a peaceful submission to officers of the law. United States v. Slusser (D. C.) 270 Fed. 819; Youman v. Commonwealth, 189 Ky. 152, 224 S. W. 864, 13 A. L. R. 1303; Amos v. United States, 255 U. S. 317, 41 Sup. Ct. 266, 65 L. Ed. 654.

Any other course on the part of the citizen would place him in the difficult and dangerous position of undertaking to protect by. force the rights which in his opinion the officers are seeking to impair, when it may turn out that the officer in fact has the authority, and his action may, in fact, be legal. This principle, that the courts of the United! States will not put the citizen to the alternative of contesting by force with officers, or waiving his constitutional rights, runs throughout the federal decisions, and gives character and meaning to their emphatic [999]*999holding that evidence illegally obtained cannot be used, and that the submission of a citizen to the officer cannot deprive him of his constitutional rights, unless the evidence clearly shows that the submission was really voluntary and with a desire to invite search, and not done merely to avoid resistance.

In this case, therefore, the defendant, Rembert, has lost no right by his failure to, forcibly resist the officers, and, if the action of the officers was illegal, the fact that intoxicating liquor was found in his car does not in any manner prejudice him on this motion. United States v. Slusser (D. C.) 270 Fed. 819, puts the matter very well thus:

“An unlawful search cannot he justified by what is found. A search that is unlawful when it begins is not made lawful when it ends by the discovery and seizure of liquor. It was against such prying, on the chance of discovery, that the constitutional amendment was intended to protect the people.”

The decision of the motion, then, depends entirely upon whether the officers, under the circumstances testified to by them, needed a search warrant or a warrant of arrest in order to justify what they did. The defendant invokes the constitutional protection against search and seizure, asserting that no search and seizure could be made of his person, his house, his papers, or his effects without a warrant authorizing such search.

In tills broad statement the defendant errs. If this were a question of the search of a private residence without warrant, the motion should be sustained. On the other hand, it is equally well settled that the provision invoked is not against reasonable searches and seizures, but against unreasonable searches and seizures, and as the author of Ruling Case Raw well puts.it:

“Tbe framers of the Constitutions of the United States and of the states merely sought to provide against any attempt by tbe Legislature or otherwise, to authorize any unreasonable search and seizure. This restriction was intended to operate on. legislative bodies, so as to render ineffectual any effort to legalize by statute what the people expressly stipulated could in no event be made lawful; upon executives, so that no law violative of this constitutional inhibition should ever be enforced; and upon the judiciary, so as to render it the duty of the courts to denounce as unlawful any unreasonable search and seizure, where without color of authority, or where sought to be justified under legislative sanction.”

And it results that in each case where an arrest has been made, or a search or seizure effected, it is the duty of the court to determine whether, if it was made under any particular law, the law was itself constitutional, or, if not made under the authority of a statute, whether in the particular case the method employed by the officers was reasonable or unreasonable.

So profound has been the influence upon English and American law of the conception that the privacy of one’s home is essential to the maintenance of one’s manhood and self-respect, that,' in short, an Englishman’s home is his castle, that practically ho American legislation has been found which has not declared in terms against the search of a private dwelling without a warrant, and so profound is the judicial conception of the necessity for the maintenance of that right in its Anglo-Saxon vigor and strength, that the courts have held that a stat

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Bluebook (online)
284 F. 996, 1922 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1266, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-rembert-txsd-1922.