By: dmc-admin//January 21, 2002//
“By asking one question about marijuana, officer Chiola did not make the custody of Childs an ‘unreasonable’ seizure. What happened here must occur thousands of times daily across the nation: Officers ask persons stopped for traffic offenses whether they are committing any other crimes. That is not an unreasonable law- enforcement strategy, either in a given case or in gross; persons who do not like the question can decline to answer. Unlike many other methods of enforcing the criminal law, this respects everyone’s privacy. There is therefore no reason to doubt the validity of Childs’s consent, which the district judge already found to be voluntary in the course of denying Childs’s motion to suppress.”
Affirmed.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Central District of Illinois, Mihm, J., Easterbrook, J. (en banc decision, reversing three-judge panel in U.S. v. Childs, 256 F.3d 559 (7th Cir. 2001)).