Opinion ID: 403620
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Warrantless Entry of Fleming's House

Text: 23 Fleming had new counsel after the district court denied his motion to suppress based on the contentions in Parts A and B supra, and the second attorney renewed the motion to suppress on a completely different theory. The police, so the argument went, did not have flimsy evidence of Fleming's possible involvement in drug trafficking. Rather, they had so much evidence that they should have obtained an arrest warrant for him and a search warrant for his house before August 8, 1980. Their failure to do so, Fleming argued, negated any exigency that might otherwise take the arrest and seizure of the cocaine out of the rule of Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 63 L.Ed.2d 639. 17 Judge Shadur's rejection of this alternate theory is another ground of appeal (Br. 42-45). 24 Payton is, as Judge Shadur recognized, 18 a red herring. The officers here did not make a routine felony arrest of Fleming, without a warrant, in his home. They followed him into his home after they saw him standing with his front door ajar, engaging in what they reasonably believed to be a drug sale. They followed him into the house only after he attempted to shut the door and flee. The police conduct is governed, not by Payton, but by United States v. Santana, 427 U.S. 38, 96 S.Ct. 2406, 49 L.Ed.2d 300, which Fleming neither cites nor distinguishes. In Santana the drug sale had been completed and the seller was standing in the doorway of her house, paper bag in hand, when the police announced themselves and moved to arrest her. She retreated inside. The Supreme Court held that Mrs. Santana was in a public place when the police sought to arrest her, and that a suspect may not defeat an arrest which has been set in motion in a public place    by the expedient of escaping to a private place. 427 U.S. at 43, 96 S.Ct. at 2409. 25 Absent any constitutional defect in what the authorities did, we have no reason to second-guess their investigative strategy. It is uniquely within their competence to decide whether it will make a stronger case for the prosecutors to seek warrants for the arrest of Fleming and the search of his house, or to continue their stakeout in the hopes of catching Fleming and one of his customers redhanded. As the district judge observed, It was certainly permissible for officers to elect to go for bigger-and what they hoped would be surer-game. 19 26