Title: State of New Jersey v. Gino A. DeLuca
Citation: N/A
Docket Number: a-82-99
State: new-jersey
Issuer: new-jersey Supreme Court
Date: July 10, 2001

(This syllabus is not part of the opinion of the Court. It has been prepared by the Office of the Clerk for the convenience of the reader. It has been neither reviewed nor approved by the Supreme Court. Please note that, in the interests of brevity, portions of any opinion may not have been summarized). VERNIERO, J., writing for a Unanimous Court. On an evening in December 1995, Paul Palazzo drove Gino DeLuca to a food mart in Millstone (Monmouth County). Wearing a blue ski mask and armed with a pistol, DeLuca entered the food mart and demanded money from a worker. When the worker did not immediately comply, DeLuca struck his head repeatedly with the pistol. The worker escaped, running out the front door of the store. DeLuca chased the worker, firing a shot in his direction. An attendant at a local gas station called the police, and Officer Steven Gonzalez of Hillsborough Township responded. A passerby informed the officer that a man was on Hamilton Road attempting to flag down passing cars. Officer Gonzalez did not find the man but he did see a set of footprints that led him and another officer to DeLuca, who trying to hide by covering himself with snow. The officers arrested DeLuca, searched him, and seized his pager. After a brief stop at the police station where DeLuca complained of frostbite, the police had an ambulance take DeLuca to St. Peter's Hospital. Officer Gonzalez rode with DeLuca and carried DeLuca's pager. A State Police Detective, Robert Roseman, followed in a separate vehicle. On the way to the hospital, DeLuca's pager registered the receipt of a page. At the hospital, Gonzalez gave the pager to Roseman. The detective confirmed that the pager was activated and that it had recently received a page. Roseman scrolled through the pager, retrieving three telephone numbers as well as the times at which those numbers were received. The numbers later helped the State prove that Palazzo was DeLuca's accomplice. Through DNA evidence, DeLuca was linked to a blue ski mask that was found near the scene of the crime. DeLuca and Palazzo were indicted for armed robbery and related weapons offenses. Prior to trial, DeLuca moved to suppress the evidence obtained from the pager. At the suppression hearing, Detective Roseman testified that he was familiar with the kind of pager seized from DeLuca. Roseman inferred that the numbers could lead to DeLuca's accomplice. He also testified that he assumed that DeLuca's pager could hold only a finite number of pages in its memory and that as a new page was received, the oldest page would be deleted. The trial court denied the motion, holding that the seizure of the pager was valid as an incident to DeLuca's arrest. Thereafter, a jury convicted DeLuca on all counts. He then pled guilty to an unrelated indictment and received an aggregate prison term of twenty-five years with a parole ineligibility term of nine and one-half years. DeLuca appealed, raising several arguments. In affirming the convictions and sentence, the Appellate Division rejected the trial court's conclusion that the search of the pager was performed incident to DeLuca's arrest. It went on, however, to conclude that the search was justified by exigent circumstances that faced the police on the night of the robbery. The Court granted DeLuca's petition for certification, primarily to address the issues related to the search of the pager. HELD: Under the facts and circumstances of this case, the warrantless search of defendant's pager was permissible under the federal and State constitutions due to exigent circumstances. 1. Because the Court agrees that the search was valid due to exigent circumstances, it does not need to address whether the retrieval of information by the police was also valid as incident to a lawful arrest. (p. 2) 2. The State does not dispute that the retrieval of data from the pager constituted a search under the federal and State constitutions. Exigent circumstances may excuse the need for the police to obtain a warrant. Exigent circumstances take on form and shape depending on the facts of any given case. Application of the doctrine of exigent circumstances therefore demands a fact-sensitive, objective analysis that includes many factors. In this case the factors would include the degree of urgency and the amount of time necessary to obtain a warrant; the reasonable belief that evidence was about to be lost, destroyed, or removed from the scene; the seriousness of the offenses involved; the possibility that the suspect was armed or dangerous; and the strength or weakness of the underlying probable cause determination. (pp. 6-8) 3. Under the totality of the circumstances, the State sustained its burden of justifying the search as being objectively reasonable. When the search occurred, DeLuca's accomplice was still at large. The police knew that a weapon had been fired, so they had reason to assume that the accomplice was armed and dangerous. Moreover, the police appropriately inferred that the pager had information that related to the robbery and that the information could be lost if additional pages were received. (pp. 8-10) As MODIFIED, the judgment of the Appellate Division is AFFIRMED. CHIEF JUSTICE PORITZ and JUSTICES STEIN, COLEMAN, LONG, LaVECCHIA, and ZAZZALI join in JUSTICE VERNIERO's opinion. Plaintiff-Respondent, v. GINO A. DeLUCA, Defendant-Appellant. Argued January 30, 2001 -- Decided July 10, 2001 On certification to the Superior Court, Appellate Division, whose opinion is reported at 325 N.J. Super. 376 (1999). Philip V. Lago, Designated Counsel, argued the cause for appellant (Peter A. Garcia, Acting Public Defender, attorney). Michael J. Williams, Deputy Attorney General, argued the cause for respondent (John J. Farmer, Jr., Attorney General of New Jersey, attorney). Gino A. DeLuca submitted a supplemental brief pro se. The opinion of the Court was delivered by VERNIERO, J. The principal issue in this appeal is whether exigent circumstances or some other exception to the warrant requirement justified the warrantless search of defendant's electronic pager device. The trial court concluded that the police had been justified in retrieving the information from the pager as a search incident to defendant's lawful arrest. The Appellate Division disagreed, finding that the search of the pager was not reasonably contemporaneous with the arrest. State v. DeLuca, 325 N.J. Super. 376, 388 (App. Div. 1999). The panel, however, sustained the search on an alternative basis proffered by the State. Given the possibility that the information stored in defendant's pager could have been erased easily or deleted by additional incoming calls, the court concluded that the warrantless search was valid on the ground of exigent circumstances. Id. at 389-92. We agree with the Appellate Division in respect of exigent circumstances. In view of that conclusion, we need not address whether the retrieval of information by the police also was valid as an incident to a lawful arrest. With that modification, we affirm the judgment of the Appellate Division. NO. A-82 STATE OF NEW JERSEY, Plaintiff-Respondent, v. GINO A. DeLUCA, Defendant-Appellant. DECIDED July 10, 2001 Chief Justice Poritz