Opinion ID: 689991
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The helicopter.

Text: 7 Van Damme argues that the helicopter flight was below FAA minimums, the finding of fact to the contrary was clearly erroneous, and he had an expectation of privacy from such searches. 8 Judge Lovell, in his careful and precise findings of fact, found that the helicopter flew above FAA minimum heights, always above 500 feet, and that [a]t no time did the helicopter fly directly above the Van Damme residence. He found that the front doors of all three greenhouses were open, so the police officer looking out of the helicopter was able to identify marijuana growing in them through the viewfinder of his camera, on which he had a 600 mm lens. The exhibits, which we have examined, confirm that the large doors, when open, allow an easy and full view of the interiors of the greenhouses. 9 We do not have to reach the question of whether a view from the air into Van Damme's home or curtilage would have violated his Fourth Amendment right to privacy. The district court found, correctly as we explain below, that the marijuana greenhouses were not within the curtilage, and it is unchallenged that the helicopter did not fly over Van Damme's home, 823 F.Supp. 1552. The permissibility of this search necessarily follows from United States v. Broadhurst, 805 F.2d 849 (9th Cir.1986). The only distinction we can see is that in Broadhurst, the police view was unenhanced by any equipment, id. at 855, but in the case at bar, the view was enhanced by a 600 mm telephoto lens on the police officer's camera. Dow Chemical Co. v. United States, 476 U.S. 227, 238, 106 S.Ct. 1819, 1826-27, 90 L.Ed.2d 226 (1986), establishes the relevant distinction as being between conventional equipment commonly available to the public and without the ability to penetrate walls or windows, and highly sophisticated surveillance equipment not generally available to the public. A 35 mm camera with a 600 mm lens is a kind of vision enhancer commonly available to the public and used typically for telephoto landscape photography. Such helicopter surveillance as occurred here, not of an area immediately adjacent to a private home, see id. at 237 n. 4, 106 S.Ct. at 1826 n. 4, does not amount to a search prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. 10 Van Damme argues that the district court should have found that the helicopter flew below 500', evidently the FAA minimum. Van Damme so testified, and presented testimony that the distance was 210' to 310'. His argument is that because no expert testified to the contrary, and his expert's testimony was admissible under Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., --- U.S. ----, 113 S.Ct. 2786, 125 L.Ed.2d 469 (1993), the judge's inquiry had to be limited to what experts deemed reliable, not what the judge thought. 11 The judge heard testimony by one of the detectives that they flew above 500'. He listened to the cross examination of Van Damme's expert witness, who testified to the contrary based on calculations from the photographs. The critical question was how the expert computed the angle which yielded his 210' computation. Here is the witness's response: 12 A. Computer does it, I don't. 13 Q. You don't know how the computer does it?A. Oh, yes. Using various things, like the law of cosines and stuff, and subtracting your differences in x, your differences in y, and differences in z, you can get all those--compute all those angles. It's like--it's the Pythagorean theorem with three dimensional data, x 2 + y 2 + z 2 , that thing, the square root of that gives you the distance, and then the angle is computed by the sine of the angle. 14 While Van Damme characterizes this answer as perhaps exhibiting a lack of pedagogical skills, Judge Lovell properly exercised his own judgment on what he called the purported expertise of the witness, and found that the witness' computation was not sufficiently established. We call testimony expert testimony as a short way to refer to the body of law allowing some witnesses to testify to opinion as well as fact. Much expert testimony is admissible but not persuasive, and some is admissible but not believable. A judge finding the facts properly exercises independent judgment, as Judge Lovell did here. 15