Dunaway v. New York

Mr. Justice BRENNAN delivered the opinion of the Court.


We decide in this case the question reserved 10 years ago in Morales v. New York, . . . namely, “the question of the legality of custodial questioning on less than probable cause for a full-fledged arrest.” . . .


I

On March 26, 1971, the proprietor of a pizza parlor in Rochester, N.Y., was killed during an attempted robbery. On August 10, 1971, Detective Anthony Fantigrossi of the Rochester Police was told by another officer that an informant had supplied a possible lead implicating petitioner in the crime. Fantigrossi questioned the supposed source of the lead-a jail inmate awaiting trial for burglary-but learned nothing that supplied “enough information to get a warrant” for petitioner's arrest. . . . Nevertheless, Fantigrossi ordered other detectives to “pick up” petitioner and “bring him in.” . . . Three detectives located petitioner at a neighbor's house on the morning of August 11. Petitioner was taken into custody; although he was not told he was under arrest, he would have been physically restrained if he had attempted to leave. . . . He was driven to police headquarters in a police car and placed in an interrogation room, where he was questioned by officers after being given the warnings required by Miranda v. Arizona, . . . Petitioner waived counsel and eventually made statements and drew sketches that incriminated him in the crime.

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II

We first consider whether the Rochester police violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments when, without probable cause to arrest, they took petitioner into custody, transported him to the police station, and detained him there for interrogation.

The Fourth Amendment, applicable to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, . . . provides: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause . . . .” There can be little doubt that petitioner was “seized” in the Fourth Amendment sense when he was taken involuntarily to the police station. And respondent State concedes that the police lacked probable cause to arrest petitioner before his incriminating statement during interrogation. Nevertheless respondent contends that the seizure of petitioner did not amount to an arrest and was therefore permissible under the Fourth Amendment because the police had a “reasonable suspicion” that petitioner possessed “intimate knowledge about a serious and unsolved crime.” . . . We disagree.

Before Terry v. Ohio, . . . the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable seizures of persons was analyzed in terms of arrest, probable cause for arrest, and warrants based on such probable cause. The basic principles were relatively simple and straightforward: The term “arrest” was synonymous with those seizures governed by the Fourth Amendment. While warrants were not required in all circumstances, the requirement of probable cause, as elaborated in numerous precedents, was treated as absolute. The “long-prevailing standards” of probable cause embodied “the best compromise that has been found for accommodating [the] often opposing interests” in “safeguard[ing] citizens from rash and unreasonable interferences with privacy” and in “seek [ing] to give fair leeway for enforcing the law in the community's protection.” . . . The standard of probable cause thus represented the accumulated wisdom of precedent and experience as to the minimum justification necessary to make the kind of intrusion involved in an arrest “reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment. The standard applied to all arrests, without the need to “balance” the interests and circumstances involved in particular situations. . . .

Terry for the first time recognized an exception to the requirement that Fourth Amendment seizures of persons must be based on probable cause. That case involved a brief, on-the-spot stop on the street and a frisk for weapons, a situation that did not fit comfortably within the traditional concept of an “arrest.” Nevertheless, the Court held that even this type of “necessarily swift action predicated upon the on-the-spot observations of the officer on the beat” constituted a “serious intrusion upon the sanctity of the person, which may inflict great indignity and arouse strong resentment,” . . . and therefore “must be tested by the Fourth Amendment's general proscription against unreasonable searches and seizures.” . . . However, since the intrusion involved in a “stop and frisk” was so much less severe than that involved in traditional “arrests,” the Court declined to stretch the concept of “arrest”-and the general rule requiring probable cause to make arrests “reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment-to cover such intrusions. Instead, the Court treated the stop-and-frisk intrusion as a sui generis “rubric of police conduct,” . . . And to determine the justification necessary to make this specially limited intrusion “reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment, the Court balanced the limited violation of individual privacy involved against the opposing interests in crime prevention and detection and in the police officer's safety. . . . As a consequence, the Court established “a narrowly drawn authority to permit a reasonable search for weapons for the protection of the police officer, where he has reason to believe that he is dealing with an armed and dangerous individual, regardless of whether he has probable cause to arrest the individual for a crime.” . . . Thus, Terry departed from traditional Fourth Amendment analysis in two respects. First, it defined a special category of Fourth Amendment “seizures” so substantially less intrusive than arrests that the general rule requiring probable cause to make Fourth Amendment “seizures” reasonable could be replaced by a balancing test. Second, the application of this balancing test led the Court to approve this narrowly defined less intrusive seizure on grounds less rigorous than probable cause, but only for the purpose of a pat-down for weapons.

Because Terry involved an exception to the general rule requiring probable cause, this Court has been careful to maintain its narrow scope. Terry itself involved a limited, on-the-street frisk for weapons. Two subsequent cases which applied Terry also involved limited weapons frisks. . . . United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, . . . applied Terry in the special context of roving border patrols stopping automobiles to check for illegal immigrants. The investigative stops usually consumed less than a minute and involved “a brief question or two.” . . . The Court stated that “[b]ecause of the limited nature of the intrusion, stops of this sort may be justified on facts that do not amount to the probable cause required for an arrest.” . . .

Respondent State now urges the Court to apply a balancing test, rather than the general rule, to custodial interrogations, and to hold that “seizures” such as that in this case may be justified by mere “reasonable suspicion.” Terry and its progeny clearly do not support such a result. The narrow intrusions involved in those cases were judged by a balancing test rather than by the general principle that Fourth Amendment seizures must be supported by the “long-prevailing standards” of probable cause, . . . only because these intrusions fell far short of the kind of intrusion associated with an arrest. Indeed, Brignoni-Ponce expressly refused to extend Terry in the manner respondent now urges. The Court there stated: “The officer may question the driver and passengers about their citizenship and immigration status, and he may ask them to explain suspicious circumstances, but any further detention or search must be based on consent or probable cause.” . . .

In contrast to the brief and narrowly circumscribed intrusions involved in those cases, the detention of petitioner was in important respects indistinguishable from a traditional arrest. Petitioner was not questioned briefly where he was found. Instead, he was taken from a neighbor's home to a police car, transported to a police station, and placed in an interrogation room. He was never informed that he was “free to go”; indeed, he would have been physically restrained if he had refused to accompany the officers or had tried to escape their custody. The application of the Fourth Amendment's requirement of probable cause does not depend on whether an intrusion of this magnitude is termed an “arrest” under state law. The mere facts that petitioner was not told he was under arrest, was not “booked,” and would not have had an arrest record if the interrogation had proved fruitless, while not insignificant for all purposes, . . . obviously do not make petitioner's seizure even roughly analogous to the narrowly defined intrusions involved in Terry and its progeny. Indeed, any “exception” that could cover a seizure as intrusive as that in this case would threaten to swallow the general rule that Fourth Amendment seizures are “reasonable” only if based on probable cause.

The central importance of the probable-cause requirement to the protection of a citizen's privacy afforded by the Fourth Amendment's guarantees cannot be compromised in this fashion. . . .

In effect, respondent urges us to adopt a multifactor balancing test of “reasonable police conduct under the circumstances” to cover all seizures that do not amount to technical arrests. But the protections intended by the Framers could all too easily disappear in the consideration and balancing of the multifarious circumstances presented by different cases, especially when that balancing may be done in the first instance by police officers engaged in the “often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime.” . . . A single, familiar standard is essential to guide police officers, who have only limited time and expertise to reflect on and balance the social and individual interests involved in the specific circumstances they confront. Indeed, our recognition of these dangers, and our consequent reluctance to depart from the proved protections afforded by the general rule, are reflected in the narrow limitations emphasized in the cases employing the balancing test. For all but those narrowly defined intrusions, the requisite “balancing” has been performed in centuries of precedent and is embodied in the principle that seizures are “reasonable” only if supported by probable cause.

Moreover, two important decisions since Terry confirm the conclusion that the treatment of petitioner, whether or not it is technically characterized as an arrest, must be supported by probable cause. Davis v. Mississippi, . . . decided the Term after Terry, considered whether fingerprints taken from a suspect detained without probable cause must be excluded from evidence. The State argued that the detention “was of a type which does not require probable cause,” . . . because it occurred during an investigative, rather than accusatory, stage, and because it was for the sole purpose of taking fingerprints. Rejecting the State's first argument, the Court warned:

“[T]o argue that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to the investigatory stage is fundamentally to misconceive the purposes of the Fourth Amendment. Investigatory seizures would subject unlimited numbers of innocent persons to the harassment and ignominy incident to involuntary detention. Nothing is more clear than that the Fourth Amendment was meant to prevent wholesale intrusions upon the personal security of our citizenry, whether these intrusions be termed ‘arrests' or ‘investigatory detentions.’ ” . . .

The State's second argument in Davis was more substantial, largely because of the distinctions between taking fingerprints and interrogation:

“Fingerprinting involves none of the probing into an individual's private life and thoughts that marks an interrogation or search. Nor can fingerprint detention be employed repeatedly to harass any individual, since the police need only one set of each person's prints. Furthermore, fingerprinting is an inherently more reliable and effective crime-solving tool than eye witness identifications or confessions and is not subject to such abuses as the improper line-up and the ‘third degree.’ Finally, because there is no danger of destruction of fingerprints, the limited detention need not come unexpectedly or at an inconvenient time.” . . .

In Davis, however, the Court found it unnecessary to decide the validity of a “narrowly circumscribed procedure for obtaining” the fingerprints of suspects without probable cause-in part because, as the Court emphasized, “petitioner was not merely fingerprinted during the . . . detention but also subjected to interrogation.” . . . The detention therefore violated the Fourth Amendment.

Brown v. Illinois, . .. similarly disapproved arrests made for “investigatory” purposes on less than probable cause. Although Brown's arrest had more of the trappings of a technical formal arrest than petitioner's, such differences in form must not be exalted over substance. Once in the police station, Brown was taken to an interrogation room, and his experience was indistinguishable from petitioner's. Our condemnation of the police conduct in Brown fits equally the police conduct in this case:

“The impropriety of the arrest was obvious; awareness of the fact was virtually conceded by the two detectives when they repeatedly acknowledged, in their testimony, that the purpose of their action was ‘for investigation’ or for ‘questioning.’ . . . The arrest, both in design and in execution, was investigatory. The detectives embarked upon this expedition for evidence in the hope that something might turn up.” . . .

These passages from Davis and Brown reflect the conclusion that detention for custodial interrogation-regardless of its label-intrudes so severely on interests protected by the Fourth Amendment as necessarily to trigger the traditional safeguards against illegal arrest. We accordingly hold that the Rochester police violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments when, without probable cause, they seized petitioner and transported him to the police station for interrogation.

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Mr. Justice POWELL took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.


Mr. Justice WHITE, concurring.


The opinion of the Court might be read to indicate that Terry v. Ohio, . . . is an almost unique exception to a hard-and-fast standard of probable cause. As our prior cases hold, however, the key principle of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness-the balancing of competing interests. . . . But if courts and law enforcement officials are to have workable rules, . . . this balancing must in large part be done on a categorical basis-not in an ad hoc, case-by-case fashion by individual police officers. . . . On the other hand, the need for rules of general applicability precludes neither the recognition in particular cases of extraordinary private or public interests, . . . nor the generic recognition of certain exceptions to the normal rule of probable cause where more flexibility is essential. . . . It is enough, for me, that the police conduct here is similar enough to an arrest that the normal level of probable cause is necessary before the interests of privacy and personal security must give way.

Mr. Justice STEVENS, concurring.

Although I join the Court's opinion, I add this comment on the significance of two factors that may be considered when determining whether a confession has been obtained by exploitation of an illegal arrest.

The temporal relationship between the arrest and the confession may be an ambiguous factor. If there are no relevant intervening circumstances, a prolonged detention may well be a more serious exploitation of an illegal arrest than a short one. Conversely, even an immediate confession may have been motivated by a prearrest event such as a visit with a minister.

The flagrancy of the official misconduct is relevant, in my judgment, only insofar as it has a tendency to motivate the defendant. A midnight arrest with drawn guns will be equally frightening whether the police acted recklessly or in good faith. Conversely, a courteous command has the same effect on the arrestee whether the officer thinks he has probable cause or knows that he does not. In either event, if the Fourth Amendment is violated, the admissibility question will turn on the causal relationship between that violation and the defendant's subsequent confession.

I recognize that the deterrence rationale for the exclusionary rule is sometimes interpreted quite differently. Under that interpretation, exclusion is applied as a substitute for punishment of the offending officer; if he acted recklessly or flagrantly, punishment is appropriate, but if he acted in good faith, it is not. But when evidence is excluded at a criminal trial, it is the broad societal interest in effective law enforcement that suffers. The justification for the exclusion of evidence obtained by improper methods is to motivate the law enforcement profession as a whole-not the aberrant individual officer-to adopt and enforce regular procedures that will avoid the future invasion of the citizen's constitutional rights. For that reason, exclusionary rules should embody objective criteria rather than subjective considerations.


Mr. Justice REHNQUIST, with whom THE CHIEF JUSTICE joins, dissenting.


If the Court did no more in this case than it announced in the opening sentence of its opinion-“decide . . . the question reserved 10 years ago in Morales v. New York, . . . namely, ‘the question of the legality of custodial questioning on less than probable cause for a full-fledged arrest’ ”-I would have little difficulty joining its opinion. The decision of this question, however, does not, contrary to the implication in the Court's opening sentence, decide this case. For the Court goes on to conclude that petitioner Dunaway was in fact “seized” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and that the connection between Dunaway's purported detention and the evidence obtained therefrom was not sufficiently attenuated as to dissipate the taint of the alleged unlawful police conduct. . . . I cannot agree with either conclusion, and accordingly, I dissent.


I

. . . In my view, this is a case where the defendant voluntarily accompanied the police to the station to answer their questions.

In Terry v. Ohio, the Court set out the test for determining whether a person has been “seized” for Fourth Amendment purposes. “Only when the officer, by means of physical force or show of authority, has in some way restrained the liberty of a citizen may we conclude that a ‘seizure’ has occurred.” . . . In this case, three police officers were dispatched to petitioner's house to question him about his participation in a robbery. According to the testimony of the police officers, one officer approached a house where petitioner was thought to be located and knocked on the door. When a person answered the door, the officer identified himself and asked the individual his name. . . . After learning that the person who answered the door was petitioner, the officer asked him if he would accompany the officers to police headquarters for questioning, and petitioner responded that he would. . . . Petitioner was not told that he was under arrest or in custody and was not warned not to resist or flee. No weapons were displayed and petitioner was not handcuffed. Each officer testified that petitioner was not touched or held during the trip downtown; his freedom of action was not in any way restrained by the police. . . . In short, the police behavior in this case was entirely free of “physical force or show of authority.”

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. . . I do not dispute the fact that a police request to come to the station may indeed be an “awesome experience.” But I do not think that that fact alone means that in every instance where a person assents to a police request to come to headquarters, there has been a “seizure” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The question turns on whether the officer's conduct is objectively coercive or physically threatening, not on the mere fact that a person might in some measure feel cowed by the fact that a request is made by a police officer. . . .

Therefore, although I agree that the police officers in this case did not have that degree of suspicion or probable cause that would have justified them in physically compelling petitioner to accompany them to the police station for questioning, I do not believe that the record demonstrates as a fact that this is what happened. No involuntary detention for questioning was shown to have taken place. The Fourth Amendment, accordingly, does not require suppression of petitioner's statements.

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