In People v. McWilliams, the Supreme Court today holds evidence discovered during an otherwise permissible search of a parolee could not be used against the defendant because the search followed an unlawful detention that was not sufficiently attenuated from the discovery.
The court’s opinion by Justice Leondra Kruger distinguishes cases allowing use of evidence seized after an unlawful detention but incident to an arrest based on a warrant. “As judicial mandates to take a suspect into custody, [arrest] warrants not only authorize[ ], but compel[ ], further action by the officer,” but “a parole search condition merely authorizes a suspicionless search of the parolee . . . [and] is not a judicial mandate, nor does it compel further action of any sort.” Although declining to adopt a categorical rule that a parole search can never “sufficiently dissipate the taint from an initial unlawful detention,” the court concludes in this case that “the officer’s discretionary decision to conduct the parole search did not sufficiently attenuate the connection between the officer’s initial unlawful decision to detain [the defendant] and the discovery of contraband.”
The opinion also finds support for suppressing the evidence in the officer’s “purposeful” conduct: he “offered no basis — rooted in experience or otherwise — for believing [the defendant] was involved in the suspicious . . . activity he had set out to investigate.”
The Attorney General changed his position from that taken in the Court of Appeal, conceding in the Supreme Court that the defendant’s “parole status did not sufficiently attenuate the taint from the officer’s unlawful detention.” The district attorney who prosecuted the case in the superior court filed an amicus curiae brief defending the legality of the evidence discovery.
Justice Goodwin Liu signs the court’s opinion, but writes separately to note that an officer’s decision whether to conduct a parole search “may be vulnerable to implicit biases that result in a heightened risk of exploitation of the unlawful detention.” He says, “Where a discretionary search is preceded by an unlawful detention, the very impulses that may have given rise to the initial detention may also contribute to an officer’s decision to conduct the search. Such impulses may include the well-documented unconscious ‘stereotype of Black Americans as violent and criminal.’ ”
The court reverses the Sixth District Court of Appeal’s divided unpublished opinion. It also disapproves the First District, Division Five, opinion in People v. Durant (2012) 205 Cal.App.4th 57.
