In United States v. Gonzalez, No. 23-10578 (July 19, 2024) (Wilson, Luck, Lagoa), the Court affirmed Mr. Gonzalez’s conviction, in accordance with his guilty plea, for possessing stolen mail in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1708.
Mr. Gonzalez, based on a 911 complainant’s report and Miami-Dade
police officers’ subsequent observations, was arrested for loitering and
prowling—a misdemeanor under Florida law. The officers searched Mr. Gonzalez’s
backpack incident to the arrest and found sealed mail that Mr. Gonzalez had
removed from neighborhood mailboxes.
On appeal, Mr. Gonzalez argued that the officers lacked
probable cause for the arrest because the Fourth Amendment does not permit a warrantless
misdemeanor arrest for a misdemeanor committed outside an officer’s presence.
The Court disagreed. It instead held that while an officer’s presence for a warrantless
misdemeanor arrest would be consistent with the Fourth Amendment, it is not
necessarily a constitutional prerequisite. This is so for three reasons. First,
the Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment need only guarantee at least as
much protection against unreasonable searches and seizures as the common law had provided
when the Amendment was adopted. The common law, however, had no "per se rule" that
a misdemeanor arrest was unjustifiable unless the misdemeanor occurred in
an officer’s presence. Second, rejection of that rule accords with the
need for administrability of the Fourth Amendment. And third, the probable
cause doctrine provides an acceptable avenue for challenging an arrest’s constitutionality.
Judge Luck concurred in judgment. Mr. Gonzalez's position, in his opinion, failed because common law had no "clear-cut rule" that an officer could not arrest a person for a misdemeanor committed outside the officer's presence. And besides, Mr. Gonzalez had partially committed his loitering-and-prowling misdemeanor in Miami-Dade police officers' presence. So any such rule, had it existed, would not have applied to his case.
