People v. Seats, 5-83-0176

• Decision Date: 09 February 1984
• Docket Number: No. 5-83-0176,5-83-0176
• Citation: 77 Ill.Dec. 251,460 N.E.2d 110,121 Ill.App.3d 637
• Parties: , 77 Ill.Dec. 251 PEOPLE of the State of Illinois, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Mark A. SEATS and Tammie Seats, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: United States Appellate Court of Illinois

Page 110

460 N.E.2d 110

121 Ill.App.3d 637, 77 Ill.Dec. 251

PEOPLE of the State of Illinois, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Mark A. SEATS and Tammie Seats, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 5-83-0176.

Appellate Court of Illinois Fifth District.

Feb. 9, 1984.

Robert W. Matoush, State's Atty., Salem, Stephen E. Norris, Deputy Director, Raymond F. Buckley, Jr., Staff Atty., State's Attorneys Appellate Service Commission, Mount Vernon, for plaintiff-appellant.

Paul D. Giamanco, Giamanco & Wexstten, Mount Vernon, for defendants-appellees.

WELCH, Presiding Justice:

The State appeals from an order of the circuit court of Marion County suppressing certain evidence seized from the home of defendants Mark Seats and Tammy Seats during a search conducted pursuant to a search warrant. (87 Ill.2d R. 604(a).) Three questions are presented by this appeal: (1) Should Illinois v. Gates (1983), 462 U.S. 213, 103 S.Ct. 2317, 76 L.Ed.2d 527 be applied retroactively? (2) If so, is the complaint for the search warrant in this case sufficient under Gates? (3) Does a "good faith exception" to the Fourth Amendment apply here? We answer the first two questions affirmatively and need not address the third.

The Sandoval, Illinois office of registered nurse Eva E. Schuler was burglarized on November 1, 1982. Taken from the office were a black medical bag, a calculator, and assorted medical instruments such as forceps, stethoscopes and a blood pressure kit. On November 10, 1982, Ray Lee Jones, the assistant chief of police in Sandoval, appeared before a judge of the Fourth Judicial Circuit with a verified complaint for a search warrant. In that complaint, Jones stated that he had received an anonymous phone call from a woman who informed him that the items taken in the burglary of Schuler's office were at 407 N.W. 2nd Street in Sandoval. She told Jones that she had seen the defendants carry a black medical bag into the trailer at that location. Jones further averred in the complaint that he had verified that the defendants lived at that address. He also stated that he knew the defendants and neither of them was engaged in any type of medical practice.

As Jones later testified during the defendants' preliminary hearing and the hearing on their suppression motion, no evidence outside the complaint was presented to the judge on November 10. The requested warrant was issued, and certain items were seized from the defendants' trailer. The defendants filed a motion to suppress use of those items at trial. A brief evidentiary hearing was held on March 3, 1983, at which the sole witness was officer Jones. At the conclusion of the hearing, the court granted defendants' motion. In a written order memorializing its oral pronouncement, the court noted that it had relied upon, inter alia, Aguilar v. Texas (1964), 378 U.S. 108, 84 S.Ct. 1509, 12 L.Ed.2d 723, Spinelli v. United States (1969), 393 U.S. 410, 89 S.Ct. 584, 21 L.Ed.2d 637, and People v. Greer (1981), 87 Ill.2d 89, 57 Ill.Dec. 607, 429 N.E.2d 505.

Before deciding whether that order was correct, we must determine whether the Fourth Amendment analysis set forth in Illinois v. Gates (1983), 462 U.S. 213, 103 S.Ct. 2317, 76 L.Ed.2d 527, decided June 8, 1983, should be applied to this case. In United States v. Johnson (1982), 457 U.S. 537, 102 S.Ct. 2579, 73 L.Ed.2d 202, the Supreme Court undertook an extensive review and clarification of its precedents on whether Fourth Amendment decisions should be retrospectively invoked. Justice Blackmun, in his majority opinion, concluded that, as a general rule, a Supreme Court decision construing the Fourth Amendment should govern all cases not yet final at the time the decision was rendered.

An exception to this rule occurs when the court expressly declares its decision to be "a clear break with the past." (Desist v. United States (1969), 394 U.S. 244, 248, 89 S.Ct. 1030, 1033, 22 L.Ed.2d 248, 254.) Such a newly announced principle will not be found to be retroactive. Examples of this type of ruling are when the court explicitly overrules its own past precedent, disapproves a practice it had previously sanctioned, or overturns a well-established body of lower court authority. The defendants assert that Gates falls into this category of Fourth Amendment decisions.

Following Aguilar and Spinelli, many authorities derived a "two-prong" test for assessing the sufficiency of a complaint for a search warrant based on information from a confidential source. First, the magistrate must be presented with facts to show how the informant obtained his information. Second, he must be given some of the underlying circumstances from which the complainant concluded that the informant was credible or his information reliable. In the phraseology of the post-Aguilar and Spinelli decisions, the first of these requirements was referred to as the "basis of knowledge prong," while the second was labeled the "veracity prong." According to cases such as People v. Gates (1981), 85 Ill.2d 376, 53 Ill.Dec. 218, 423 N.E.2d 887, each test must be satisfied independently before a complaint for a search warrant would be approved.

In Gates, the Supreme Court disagreed with that interpretation of Aguilar and Spinelli. Justice Rehnquist explained in his majority opinion that while questions of the informant's credibility, reliability and the basis of his knowledge are "all highly relevant in determining the value of his report", those questions are not "entirely separate and independent requirements to be rigidly exacted in every case * * *." (--- U.S. ----, ----, 103 S.Ct. 2317, 2328, 76 L.Ed.2d 527, 543.) The significant issue in determining the applicability of Gates to this case is thus whether that reasoning signaled a clean break with past precedent. We do not believe that it did.

First, the court in Gates did not explicitly overrule any of its own prior decisions. Indeed, Justice Rehnquist maintained that the analysis employed in Gates "is far more consistent with our prior treatment of probable cause than is any rigid demand that specific 'tests' be satisfied by every informant's tip." (--- U.S. ----, ----, 103 S.Ct. 2317, 2328, 76 L.Ed.2d 527, 543-44.) In a footnote to this statement, he observed that as the language of Aguilar indicates, "we intended neither a rigid compartmentalization of the inquiries into an informant's 'veracity,' 'reliability' and 'basis of knowledge,' nor that these inquiries be elaborate exegeses of an informant's tip. Rather, we required only that some facts bearing on two particular issues be provided to the magistrate." (--- U.S. ----, ---- n. 6, 76 L.Ed.2d 527, 543 n. 6, 103 S.Ct. 2317, 2328 n. 6 (emphasis in original).) Far from abandoning Aguilar and Spinelli, the Gates decision evinces an intent to return to the original propositions contained in those opinions.

Second, the court in Gates did not disapprove a practice which it had arguably sanctioned in the past. The majority opinion, in detailing the history of its post-Aguilar and Spinelli decisions, made plain that the court never adopted the conjunctive "two-prong test" fashioned by other courts and commentators. Nor, in those decisions, did it specifically reject such an approach. However, the absence of any language approving of that test in the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment jurisprudence shows that Gates did not mark a departure from a practice accepted by the court.

Third, Gates was not a major break from a nearly unanimous body of lower court authority. Such a break occurs when a decision overrules clear past precedent or disrupts a practice long accepted and widely relied upon. (United States v. Johnson (1982), 457 U.S. 537, 551, 102 S.Ct. 2579, 2588, 73 L.Ed.2d 202, 215, quoting Milton v. Wainwright (1972), 407 U.S. 371, 381 n. 2, 92 S.Ct. 2174, 2180 n. 2, 33 L.Ed.2d 1, 9 n. 2 (Stewart, J., dissenting).) In addition to not discarding any of its own precedent, the court in Gates did not expressly overrule lower court authority which applied the "two-prong test." It is also difficult to characterize Gates as disrupting practices widely relied upon, because it did not invalidate previously common police activity. Put another way, any reliance upon pre-Gates lower court law could only have been by violators of the law, and that reliance interest is not legitimate. See People v. Smith (1983), 95 Ill.2d 412, 422, 69 Ill.Dec. 374, 447 N.E.2d 809, 813 (applying United States v. Ross (1982), 456 U.S. 798, 102 S.Ct. 2157, 72 L.Ed.2d 572, retroactively).

The Supreme Court's decision in Gates, while articulating a method of analysis somewhat different from that used by some courts, set forth a standard ascertainable from its past precedents. Its ruling was based on long-recognized, if occasionally rigidly interpreted, principles of Fourth Amendment law. Nothing in that decision suggests that it should be treated as an exception to the general rule of retroactivity stated in Johnson, and therefore we conclude that Gates should be applied here.

The court held in Gates that "[t]he task of the issuing magistrate is simply to make a practical, common-sense decision whether, given all the circumstances set forth in the affidavit before him, including the 'veracity' and 'basis of knowledge' of persons supplying hearsay information, there is a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place." (--- U.S. ----, ----, 103 S.Ct. 2317, 2332, 76 L.Ed.2d 527, 548.) The magistrate's determination of probable cause must be accorded great deference. (Spinelli v. United States (1969), 393 U.S. 410, 419, 89 S.Ct. 584, 591, 21 L.Ed.2d 637, 645.) And, in order to effectuate the preference for police action taken pursuant to a warrant (United States v. Ventresca (1965), 380 U.S. 102, 85 S.Ct. 741, 13 L.Ed.2d 684), our task as a reviewing court is limited to determining whether there was a substantial basis for concluding that probable cause existed. (Illinois v....