State v. Jackson
No. PD-0823-14
Case Summary written by Jonae Chavez, Staff Member.
JUDGE YEARY, delivered the opinion of the court in which PRESIDING JUDGE KELLER and JUDGES KEASLER, HERVEY, ALCALA, RICHARDSON and NEWELL joined.
Initially, law enforcement officers suspected that John Jackson was trafficking drugs. They sought a court order to place a GPS tracking device on his vehicle to determine when and where he was getting his supply. Once the GPS was installed, the police officer, Sides, programmed the device to alert him when Mr. Jackson moved the vehicle. The police officer watched the vehicle move toward the Dallas/Fort Worth area where he had been told was the location of the source of the methamphetamine.
During this time, Sides was able to tell from the GPS device that Mr. Jackson was speeding. Sides had contacted another police officer that had been involved in the narcotics investigation and asked him to pull Mr. Jackson over for speeding. Mr. Jackson allowed the police officer to search his car and the police officer discovered methamphetamine. Mr. Jackson confessed that it was his and was taken to the police station. At the police station, Mr. Jackson admitted that he consented to the search of the vehicle and that he had purchased the methamphetamine in Dallas for resale.
Mr. Jackson filed a motion to suppress, arguing that the warrantless search was unconstitutional. The state argued that any taint from the illegal use of the GPS tracking device was attenuated by the officers’ verification that Mr. Jackson was speeding before pulling him over. However, the trial court suppressed all evidence gathered by the police officers.
On appeal, the state argued that Mr. Jackson’s consent to search the vehicle and the verification of him speeding were intervening causes for an attenuation-of-taint analysis. However, the court of appeals affirmed the trial court’s holding. The court found no intervening cause and used the “temporal proximity factor from the Brown v. Illinois attenuation-of-taint analysis to prove that the discovery of methamphetamine and [Mr. Jackson’s] statements were not attenuated from the input of the GPS.” Moreover, the search violated the Fourth Amendment for two reasons: (1) it occurred in the absence of a warrant and (2) it was based on a finding of reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause.
The state challenged the court of appeals’ decision, arguing that the court of appeals should have focused on the third attenuation-of-taint factor which is whether the “conduct of the officers was purposeful or in flagrant disregard of the law.” There is no disagreement that the police officers did not intend to conduct an illegal search.
The Court of Criminal Appeals stated that the police officers would not have found the methamphetamine but for the initial illegal installation of the GPS. However, neither the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule nor the state’s statutory exclusionary rule requires suppression of evidence “that was not obtained as a result of illegality.” Therefore, the issue becomes “whether the verification by police of Mr. Jackson’s speeding through ‘pacing’ and radar constituted a ‘means’ of obtaining the contraband that was ‘sufficiently distinguishable’ from the installation of the GPS to be purged of the primary taint.”
The court of criminal appeals applied the following three factors from Brown to determine the attenuation of taint: (1) the temporal proximity of the arrest and confession, (2) the purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct, and (3) the presence of intervening circumstances. The Court of Criminal Appeals has previously held that an arrest warrant could not alone attenuate the taint of the illegal initial detention, and it stood by this holding here. Therefore, the Court of Criminal Appeals analyzed the remaining two factors.
First, the Court agreed with the court of appeals that the police did not purposefully and flagrantly disregard Mr. Jackson’s Fourth Amendment rights. When Sides received the court order to install the GPS, the Supreme Court had not decided that it would constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment. Although Sides purposely installed the GPS to obtain evidence, there was no evidence that Sides intended the search to violate Mr. Jackson’s rights.
Second, this court determined whether the officers’ verification of Mr. Jackson’s speeding was an intervening circumstance or the tainted product of the primary illegality. If the verification of Mr. Jackson’s speeding was an intervening cause, then the second Brown factor weighed in favor of attenuation. However, if the latter was decided, then the court of appeal’s holding was correct.
Here, the court found that the independent verification of Mr. Jackson’s speeding was an “intervening circumstance,” even though the illegal installation and tracking of the GPS took place at the same time. As long as the circumstance intervenes sometime between the inception of the illegal conduct and the discovery of evidence, the circumstance can be regarded as the “intervening circumstance” factor from Brown.
Therefore, once Mr. Jackson was stopped, he voluntarily consented and confessed. These actions did not result from any illegality besides the initial non-flagrant installation of the GPS. Moreover, the analysis of the facts under the remaining two Brown factors reveal that by the time Mr. Jackson consented to the search and confessed that the methamphetamine was his, the taint of the installation of the GPS had dissipated.
The judgment of the court of appeals was reversed and remanded to trial for further proceedings.
JUDGE HERVEY filed a concurring opinion in which JUDGES KEASLER, RICHARDSON, and NEWELL joined.
Judge Hervey agreed with the court but wrote separately to emphasis that the exclusionary rule mainly serves an underlying policy. Judge Hervey added that the purpose of the exclusionary rule is to deter police misconduct and should only be used as a last resort. In this case, Judge Hervey agreed that Mr. Jackson’s speeding was an intervening circumstance and if the evidence against Mr. Jackson were to have been suppressed, it would not have deterred future police misconduct since the police believed they were acting lawfully.
JUDGE MEYERS, dissenting.
Judge Meyer’s dissent agued that the search of Mr. Jackson’s vehicle was a direct result of the unconstitutional installation of the GPS. Judge Meyers stated that there was no other reason for the police officer to search the vehicle besides the use of the GPS. The fact that Mr. Jackson was speeding was not enough to constitute an “intervening circumstance.” Judge Meyers would have affirmed the court of appeals decision.