Opinion ID: 6356486
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Payton and Steagald

Text: To resolve the question at bar, we must analyze the legal principles that the Supreme Court of the United States expounded in both Payton and Steagald . Although we also examine how other courts have applied these cases, we note that we are bound only by the United States Supreme Court's pronouncements upon this issue of interpretation of the United States Constitution. See Commonwealth v. Cross , 555 Pa. 603 , 726 A.2d 333 , 338 n.4 (1999) (This court is not bound by a lower federal court's interpretation of United States Supreme Court decisions, but is bound only by the United States Supreme Court.). Further, because neither this Court nor the Supreme Court of the United States has applied these principles directly to the circumstance at issue, we write upon a blank slate in this Commonwealth. 6  Payton addressed two consolidated appeals challenging the constitutionality of New York statutes that purported to authorize police officers to enter a private residence without a warrant in order to make a routine felony arrest. Payton , 445 U.S. at 574 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 . The first case concerned Theodore Payton, a suspect in a murder investigation. After developing sufficient probable cause to arrest Payton, but without obtaining an arrest warrant, police officers went to Payton's apartment to take him into custody. Music could be heard coming from within the apartment, and lights were on inside, but there was no response to the officers' knock on the door. Ultimately, the officers forced the door and entered the apartment. They did not locate Payton, but they discovered and seized an ammunition shell casing, which was later admitted as evidence in Payton's murder trial. In the second case, police officers sought to arrest Obie Riddick for armed robbery. Without obtaining an arrest warrant, the officers went to Riddick's house in an effort to apprehend him. The officers knocked, and Riddick's young son opened the door. Riddick was seated on a bed within the officers' field of view. The officers entered the house and arrested Riddick, and subsequently discovered narcotics and related paraphernalia in a nearby chest. Riddick was charged with narcotics offenses. Both Payton and Riddick sought suppression of the evidence derivative of the police entries into their residences. Each was unsuccessful, and each was convicted. Ultimately, in a single opinion, the New York Court of Appeals affirmed both Payton's and Riddick's convictions. As the Supreme Court of the United States previously had left open the question of the lawfulness of warrantless home entries to conduct arrests, and because many state and federal courts were divided on the issue, the Supreme Court granted certiorari to address the constitutionality of New York's statutes that purported to authorize such warrantless entries. See Payton , 445 U.S. at 574-75 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 . The Payton Court began by outlining the scope of its reasoning, expressly declining to address other related problems that are not presented by the cases at issue. Id. at 582-83 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 (emphasis in original). The Court noted that neither case raised any question regarding exigent circumstances or consent to enter the home. Further, neither petitioner contended that the police lacked probable cause to believe that the suspect was at home when they entered. Id. at 583 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 . Finally, and importantly herein, the Court observed that the cases did not raise any question concerning the authority of the police, without either a search or arrest warrant, to enter a third party's home to arrest a suspect. Id. (emphasis added). Rather, the sole question at issue was the constitutionality of warrantless entries into a suspect's home in order to effectuate his arrest. To resolve the narrow constitutional question presented, the Payton Court examined the foundational principles underlying the Fourth Amendment, its history and purpose, and its plain language. The Court reviewed the familiar history that indiscriminate searches and seizures conducted under the authority of 'general warrants' were the immediate evils that  motivated the framing and adoption of the Fourth Amendment. Id. 7 To limit the government's authority to deprive individuals of their security and privacy, the Fourth Amendment contained two separate clauses, the first protecting the basic right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and the second requiring that warrants be particular and supported by probable cause. Id. at 584 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 . However, the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment, the Court observed, extended farther than a mere prohibition of general warrants. Indeed, the Payton Court thought it perfectly clear that the evil the Amendment was designed to prevent was broader than the abuse of a general warrant. Id. at 585 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 . By the Amendment's very wording, [u]nreasonable searches or seizures conducted without any warrant at all are condemned by the plain language of the first clause of the Amendment. Id. This prohibition, the Court explained, applies equally to seizures of persons and to seizures of property. Id. After reviewing the general nature of the Fourth Amendment's protections, the Payton Court turned to the status that the home enjoys thereunder. The significant fact at issue in both cases was the physical intrusion into a home, and the Court underscored that the physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed. Id. (quoting United States v. United States Dist. Court , 407 U.S. 297 , 313, 92 S.Ct. 2125 , 32 L.Ed.2d 752 (1972) ). Due to their inherent invasiveness, law enforcement entries into homes demand justification, and the Court noted that it has long adhered to the view that the warrant procedure minimizes the danger of needless intrusions of that sort. Id. at 586, 100 S.Ct. 1371 . The Court emphasized the cardinal principle that warrantless searches and seizures inside a home are presumptively unreasonable. Id. For the Payton Court, the boundary delineated around private property rendered searches or seizures conducted therein different in kind from other actions that implicate the Fourth Amendment. For instance, contraband found in a public place may be seized without a warrant. Similarly, the seizure of contraband discovered in plain view violates no privacy interest and is presumptively reasonable. However, [i]t is one thing to seize without a warrant property resting in an open area or seizable by levy without an intrusion into privacy, and it is quite another thing to effect a warrantless seizure of property ... situated on private premises to which access is not otherwise available for the seizing officer. Id. at 587 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 (quoting G.M. Leasing Corp. v. United States , 429 U.S. 338 , 352, 97 S.Ct. 619 , 50 L.Ed.2d 530 (1977) ). The Payton Court approvingly quoted Judge Harold Leventhal's opinion in  Dorman v. United States , 435 F.2d 385 (D.C. Cir. 1970), which stated that, while warrantless arrests in public places are valid, [a] greater burden is placed ... on officials who enter a home or dwelling without consent. Freedom from intrusion into the home or dwelling is the archetype of the privacy protection secured by the Fourth Amendment. Payton , 445 U.S. at 587 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 (quoting Dorman , 435 F.2d at 389 ). 8 The Payton Court reviewed the New York Court of Appeals' reasoning in the cases at bar, noting that the state high court had concluded that there is a substantial difference in the relative intrusiveness of entering a home to search for property and entering a home to search for a person, as the search for property may require a more extensive examination of the relevant space. The Payton Court dismissed the purported distinction as more theoretical than real, both because police officers may need to search the entire premises to locate a person, and because sometimes they ignore the restrictions on searches incident to arrest. Id. at 589, 100 S.Ct. 1371 . The Court's rejection of the distinction between persons and property, and between entries to search and entries to seize, was pivotal to its decision: [T]he critical point is that any differences in the intrusiveness of entries to search and entries to arrest are merely ones of degree rather than kind. The two intrusions share this fundamental characteristic: the breach of the entrance to an individual's home. The Fourth Amendment protects the individual's privacy in a variety of settings. In none is the zone of privacy more clearly defined than when bounded by the unambiguous physical dimensions of an individual's home-a zone that finds its roots in clear and specific constitutional terms: The right of the people to be secure in their ... houses ... shall not be violated. That language unequivocally establishes the proposition that [a]t the very core [of the Fourth Amendment] stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion. Silverman v. United States , 365 U.S. 505 , 511 [ 81 S.Ct. 679 , 5 L.Ed.2d 734 ] (1961). In terms that apply equally to seizures of property and seizures of persons, the Fourth Amendment has drawn a firm line at the entrance to the house. Absent exigent circumstances, that threshold may not reasonably be crossed without a warrant. Id. at 589-90 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 (citation modified) (alterations in original). Guided by these bedrock principles, the Payton Court held that the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution ... prohibits the police from making a warrantless and nonconsensual entry into a suspect's home in order to make a routine felony arrest. Id. at 576 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 . The Court considered and rejected each of the government's arguments to the  contrary, concluding that historical common-law principles did not command a different result, that widespread approval of warrantless entries among the states did not control the constitutional analysis, and that its holding was not inconsistent with any legislative determination of policy. Id. at 591-602 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 . The Court concluded that neither history nor this Nation's experience requires us to disregard the overriding respect for the sanctity of the home that has been embedded in our traditions since the origins of the Republic. Id. at 601 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 . Finally, the Payton Court addressed the practical consequences of a warrant requirement as a precondition to a felony arrest in the home. Id. at 602 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 . The government contended that it would be unduly burdensome to require that police officers obtain a warrant before entering a residence. The Court disagreed: In the absence of any evidence that effective law enforcement has suffered in those States that already have such a requirement, we are inclined to view such arguments with skepticism. More fundamentally, however, such arguments of policy must give way to a constitutional command that we consider to be unequivocal. Id. (citation omitted). Notwithstanding its conclusion that the absence of a warrant was dispositive in the cases at bar, the Court went on to suggest a caveat. Specifically, and of significant importance to the cases that would follow, the Court proceeded to comment upon the authority that an arrest warrant would have provided, had one been obtained: Finally, we note the State's suggestion that only a search warrant based on probable cause to believe the suspect is home at a given time can adequately protect the privacy interests at stake, and since such a warrant requirement is manifestly impractical, there need be no warrant of any kind. We find this ingenious argument unpersuasive. It is true that an arrest warrant requirement may afford less protection than a search warrant requirement, but it will suffice to interpose the magistrate's determination of probable cause between the zealous officer and the citizen. If there is sufficient evidence of a citizen's participation in a felony to persuade a judicial officer that his arrest is justified, it is constitutionally reasonable to require him to open his doors to the officers of the law. Thus, for Fourth Amendment purposes, an arrest warrant founded on probable cause implicitly carries with it the limited authority to enter a dwelling in which the suspect lives when there is reason to believe the suspect is within. Id. at 602-03 , 100 S.Ct. 1371 . Given that Payton 's ruling addressed the absence of any warrant, its discussion concerning the derivative authority of arrest warrants was dictum . However, in several subsequent decisions, the United States Supreme Court has referenced the Payton dictum in resolving related Fourth Amendment questions regarding the lawfulness of certain law enforcement activities in homes. See supra n.1. The year after the Payton decision, in Michigan v. Summers , 452 U.S. 692 , 101 S.Ct. 2587 , 69 L.Ed.2d 340 (1981), the High Court addressed and upheld the temporary detention of an individual descending the steps of a house in which police officers were seeking to execute a search warrant. The Court relied upon the reasoning of its Payton dictum , noting that Payton rejected the suggestion that only a search warrant could adequately protect the privacy interests at stake, because the distinction between a search warrant and an arrest warrant was far less significant than the interposition of the magistrate's  determination of probable cause between the zealous officer and the citizen. Id. at 704 , 101 S.Ct. 2587 . The Court reasoned that Payton 's discussion of the derivative authority provided by an arrest warrant to search for an arrestee was relevant to an analysis of the derivative authority provided by a search warrant to seize an occupant of the searched premises. As such, the Summers Court held that a warrant to search for contraband founded on probable cause implicitly carries with it the limited authority to detain the occupants of the premises while a proper search is conducted. Id. at 705 , 101 S.Ct. 2587 (footnote omitted). Justice Potter Stewart disagreed with the Summers Majority, reasoning that the Majority's holding countenanced seizures of persons unsupported by probable cause and posed a threat to the protections guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. Justice Stewart found the Majority's invocation of Payton to be perplexing, and observed that the very point of Payton 's dictum was that the police would be justified in arresting a person in his own home because they had a warrant for his arrest based upon probable cause to believe that he had violated the criminal law. Id. at 710 n.2, 101 S.Ct. 2587 (Stewart, J., dissenting). Because it was the absence of such probable cause that was at issue in Summers , Justice Stewart fail[ed] to understand Payton 's 'relevance.'  Id. Almost a decade later, the Supreme Court again referenced the Payton dictum in addressing a question relating to law enforcement conduct inside a home. In Maryland v. Buie , 494 U.S. 325 , 110 S.Ct. 1093 , 108 L.Ed.2d 276 (1990), the Court held that, when police officers are executing an arrest inside a home, they may perform a protective sweep of the premises to ensure the absence of any individuals hidden therein that may pose a threat to their safety, so long as the officers possess a reasonable belief based on specific and articulable facts that the area to be swept harbors an individual posing a danger to those on the arrest scene. Id. at 337 , 110 S.Ct. 1093 . The issue in Buie arose from police officers' entry into an arrestee's home to execute an arrest warrant. Notably, the lawfulness of that entry was not challenged. Citing the Payton dictum , the Buie Court noted that it was not disputed that until the point of Buie's arrest the police had a right, based on the authority of the arrest warrant, to search anywhere in the house that Buie might have been found .... Id. at 330 , 110 S.Ct. 1093 . The Court did not speak further to this point, as the sole issue before the Court was the validity of the subsequent protective sweep. The Court revisited the Payton dictum once again in Wilson v. Layne , 526 U.S. 603 , 119 S.Ct. 1692 , 143 L.Ed.2d 818 (1999). There, the Court considered the presence of members of the media while police officers executed an arrest warrant inside a home. The Court ultimately held that the presence of a reporter and photographer was unlawful, and that it is a violation of the Fourth Amendment for police to bring members of the media or other third parties into a home during the execution of a warrant when the presence of the third parties in the home was not in aid of the execution of the warrant. Id. at 614 , 119 S.Ct. 1692 . In arriving at this conclusion, the Court recited the Payton dictum and noted that the officers possessed an arrest warrant and thus were undoubtedly entitled to enter the arrestee's home, but concluded that it does not necessarily follow that they were entitled to bring a newspaper reporter and a photographer with them. Id. at 610-11 , 119 S.Ct. 1692 .  In Summers , Buie , and Wilson , the Supreme Court referenced or in some manner relied upon the Payton dictum in resolving questions relating to the scope of law enforcement officers' authority to conduct certain actions inside a home. Although none of these decisions involved challenges to the initial entries at issue, and although none required the Court to assess the validity of the Payton dictum , the cited passages certainly suggest that the Supreme Court came to view its discussion in Payton as a binding rule of law. Importantly, however, like Payton , none of these three decisions implicated or considered any authority to enter a third party's residence to execute an arrest warrant. Following Payton , it was abundantly clear that warrantless entries into a home to effectuate an arrest were unlawful. Granting that Payton 's dictum conferred upon law enforcement the authority to enter an arrestee's home to execute an arrest warrant, a significant question-one that Payton expressly identified as lying outside the scope of its decision-remained unresolved: the authority attending an arrest warrant to enter the home of a third party not identified in the warrant. Lower courts began to grapple with this issue immediately after the Payton decision was announced. In Wallace v. King , 626 F.2d 1157 (4th Cir. 1980), considering two civil rights actions pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 based upon allegedly unlawful home entries and searches for the subject of an arrest warrant, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that, the Payton dictum notwithstanding, [r]easonable or probable cause to believe that a person for whom an arrest warrant has been issued is on the premises, standing alone, is not sufficient to enter a third party's home, and that such entries require a search warrant supported by probable cause or a valid exception to the search warrant requirement. Id. at 1161 . Similarly confronting an entry into a third party's home, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit concluded in United States v. Adams , 621 F.2d 41 , 44-45 (1st Cir. 1980), that such an entry required either a warrant or exigent circumstances. The year following Payton , in Steagald , the Supreme Court resolved the third-party residence question. The issue in Steagald arose from an effort by agents of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to apprehend a fugitive, Ricky Lyons. In January 1978, a confidential informant contacted a DEA agent in Detroit, Michigan, and suggested that he might be able to locate Lyons. During a second communication, the informant provided the agent with a telephone number in the Atlanta, Georgia area where Lyons purportedly could be reached during the next twenty-four hours. The agent relayed this information to Agent Kelly Goodowens in Atlanta. Agent Goodowens identified the address associated with the telephone number, and also discovered that Lyons was the subject of a six-month-old arrest warrant. Two days later, Agent Goodowens and eleven other law enforcement officers drove to the address, seeking to apprehend Lyons. Outside the residence, the officers encountered two men, one of whom was later identified as Gary Steagald. After detaining and frisking both men, the officers determined that neither of them was Lyons. The officers approached the residence and a woman answered the door. She informed the officers that she was alone in the house. The officers detained her as well, and an officer searched the residence for Lyons. The officer did not find Lyons, but did observe what the officer believed to be cocaine. Agent Goodowens sent the officer to obtain a search warrant for the residence, but proceeded  to conduct a second search in the meantime. Once the search warrant was obtained, a third search of the residence was conducted, yielding forty-three pounds of cocaine. The residence having been determined to be Steagald's, he was arrested and charged with federal drug offenses. Steagald sought suppression of all evidence recovered from the search of his residence, contending that the officers' entry was unlawful because it was conducted in the absence of a search warrant. At the suppression hearing, Agent Goodowens conceded that he could have obtained a search warrant before entering Steagald's residence, but stated that he deemed a search warrant unnecessary because the arrest warrant for Lyons sufficed to justify the entry and subsequent search. The United States District Court agreed with Agent Goodowens, and denied Steagald's suppression motion. Steagald was convicted, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in order to resolve the question left unanswered in Payton . See Steagald , 451 U.S. at 207 , 101 S.Ct. 1642 . The Steagald Court began by acknowledging its holding in Payton that the entry into a home to conduct a search or make an arrest is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment unless done pursuant to a warrant. Steagald , 451 U.S. at 211 , 101 S.Ct. 1642 . The Court acknowledged that the officers possessed a warrant-one that authorized the arrest of Lyons. However, the interest that purportedly was violated was not Lyons' interest in freedom from an unreasonable seizure. Instead, it was Steagald who asserted that the entry and search had violated his interest in the privacy of his home. Thus, the narrow issue before the Steagald Court was whether an arrest warrant-as opposed to a search warrant-is adequate to protect the Fourth Amendment interests of persons not named in the warrant, when their homes are searched without their consent and in the absence of exigent circumstances. Id. at 212 , 101 S.Ct. 1642 . The Steagald Court focused upon the central purpose of the warrant requirement, which serves as a checkpoint between the Government and the citizen, because a zealous officer investigating a crime may lack sufficient objectivity to weigh correctly the strength of the evidence supporting the contemplated action against the individual's interests in protecting his own liberty and the privacy of his home. Id. (citing Coolidge v. New Hampshire , 403 U.S. 443 , 449-51, 91 S.Ct. 2022 , 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971) ; McDonald v. United States , 335 U.S. 451 , 455-56, 69 S.Ct. 191 , 93 L.Ed. 153 (1948) ; Johnson v. United States , 333 U.S. 10 , 14, 68 S.Ct. 367 , 92 L.Ed. 436 (1948) ). The warrant requirement applies equally to searches of places and seizures of persons, but those different actions implicate distinct Fourth Amendment interests: [W]hile an arrest warrant and a search warrant both serve to subject the probable-cause determination of the police to judicial review, the interests protected by the two warrants differ. An arrest warrant is issued by a magistrate upon a showing that probable cause exists to believe that the subject of the warrant has committed an offense and thus the warrant primarily serves to protect an individual from an unreasonable seizure. A search warrant, in contrast is issued upon a showing of probable cause to believe that the legitimate object of a search is located in a particular place, and therefore safeguards an individual's interest in the privacy of his home and possessions against the unjustified intrusion of the police.  Id. at 212-13, 101 S.Ct. 1642 . Thus, the Court observed, whether a warrant adequately protects Fourth Amendment interests depends upon what actions the warrant authorizes. See id. at 213 , 101 S.Ct. 1642 . The arrest warrant for Lyons unequivocally reflected a judicial determination that there was probable cause to arrest Lyons. However, the agents sought to do more than use the warrant to arrest Lyons in a public place or in his home; instead, they relied on the warrant as legal authority to enter the home of a third person based on their belief that Ricky Lyons might be a guest there. Id. at 213 , 101 S.Ct. 1642 . Regardless of whether the officers' belief was reasonable, it was never subjected to the detached scrutiny of a judicial officer. Id. With that observation, the Steagald Court identified the critical distinction between the authority attending the arrest warrant and the authority that a search warrant would have provided, had one been obtained: Thus, while the warrant in this case may have protected Lyons from an unreasonable seizure, it did absolutely nothing to protect [Steagald's] privacy interest in being free from an unreasonable invasion and search of his home. Instead, [Steagald's] only protection from an illegal entry and search was the agent's personal determination of probable cause. In the absence of exigent circumstances, we have consistently held that such judicially untested determinations are not reliable enough to justify an entry into a person's home to arrest him without a warrant, or a search of a home for objects in the absence of a search warrant. Payton v. New York , supra ; Johnson v. United States , supra . We see no reason to depart from this settled course when the search of a home is for a person rather than an object. Id. at 213-14, 101 S.Ct. 1642 . 9 In a footnote, the Steagald Court further observed that the language of the Fourth Amendment makes no distinction between searches for persons and searches for objects, and that the warrant requirement applies without regard to the intended target of a search. Specifically, absent exigent circumstances the magistrate, rather than the police officer, must make the decision that probable cause exists to believe that the person or object to be seized is within a particular place. Steagald , 451 U.S. at 214 n.7, 101 S.Ct. 1642 . The Court recognized the apparent tension between the well-established purpose of the warrant requirement and the Payton dictum , but distinguished Payton based upon the primacy of third parties' privacy interests in their homes: In Payton , of course, we recognized that an arrest warrant alone was sufficient to authorize the entry into a person's home to effect his arrest.... Because an arrest warrant authorizes the police to deprive a person of his liberty, it necessarily also authorizes a limited invasion of that person's privacy interest when it is necessary to arrest him in his home. This analysis, however, is plainly inapplicable when the police seek to use an arrest warrant as legal authority to enter  the home of a third party to conduct a search. Such a warrant embodies no judicial determination whatsoever regarding the person whose home is to be searched. Because it does not authorize the police to deprive the third person of his liberty, it cannot embody any derivative authority to deprive this person of his interest in the privacy of his home. Such a deprivation must instead be based on an independent showing that a legitimate object of a search is located in the third party's home. We have consistently held, however, that such a determination is the province of the magistrate, and not that of the police officer. Id. For the Steagald Court, the absence of any judicial determination of probable cause as to Steagald's residence was dispositive. Two distinct Fourth Amendment interests were at stake: Lyons' interest in freedom from an unreasonable seizure of his person; and Steagald's interest in freedom from an unreasonable search of his home. Because the arrest warrant for Lyons addressed only the former interest, the search of [Steagald's] home was no more reasonable from [Steagald's] perspective than it would have been if conducted in the absence of any warrant. Id. at 216 , 101 S.Ct. 1642 . As such, the entry into and search of Steagald's residence was equivalent to a warrantless search. Because no exception to the warrant requirement was applicable, the search violated the Fourth Amendment. To rule otherwise, the Court cautioned, would be to confer upon law enforcement officers a sweeping authority that the Fourth Amendment does not tolerate. The Court emphasized the grave consequences that would follow if authorities were excused from satisfying the search warrant requirement before entering a third party's home: A contrary conclusion-that the police, acting alone and in the absence of exigent circumstances, may decide when there is sufficient justification for searching the home of a third party for the subject of an arrest warrant-would create a significant potential for abuse. Armed solely with an arrest warrant for a single person, the police could search all the homes of that individual's friends and acquaintances. Moreover, an arrest warrant may serve as the pretext for entering a home in which the police have a suspicion, but not probable cause to believe, that illegal activity is taking place. Id. at 215 , 101 S.Ct. 1642 (citation omitted). The government acknowledged the potential for problems of this sort, but contended that existing remedies, such as suppression motions and actions for damages, were sufficient to redress any such wrongs. The Steagald Court disagreed, stressing that the Fourth Amendment is designed to prevent, not simply to redress, unlawful police action. Id. (quoting Chimel v. California , 395 U.S. 752 , 766 n.12, 89 S.Ct. 2034 , 23 L.Ed.2d 685 (1969) ). Finally, the Steagald Court rejected the government's contention that it was impractical to require police officers to obtain a search warrant before entering a residence to effectuate an arrest. The government argued that, because people are inherently mobile, officers may be forced to return to a magistrate several times if the subject of the arrest warrant moves from place to place, and a requirement of this sort would be impractical. The Court disagreed, concluding that a search warrant requirement will not significantly impede effective law enforcement efforts. Id. at 221, 101 S.Ct. 1642 . First, the Court noted that numerous circumstances will excuse the failure to obtain a search warrant. The Court reiterated the Payton dictum that  an arrest warrant alone will suffice to enter a suspect's own residence to effect his arrest. Id. The Court noted that no warrant is required to apprehend a suspected felon in a public place. Further, a search warrant will not be required where police officers are confronted with a true exigency. For example, a warrantless entry of a home would be justified if the police were in 'hot pursuit' of a fugitive. Id. (citing United States v. Santana , 427 U.S. 38 , 42-43, 96 S.Ct. 2406 , 49 L.Ed.2d 300 (1976) ; Warden v. Hayden , 387 U.S. 294 , 87 S.Ct. 1642 , 18 L.Ed.2d 782 (1967) ). Thus, in circumstances where apprehending an individual presents a particularly time-sensitive difficulty, the Court was confident that the exigent-circumstances doctrine is adequate to accommodate legitimate law enforcement needs. Id. at 222, 101 S.Ct. 1642 . Even if no exception to the warrant requirement applies, the Steagald Court was unpersuaded that the additional procedural step of obtaining a search warrant would substantially burden law enforcement efforts. The Court continued: Moreover, in those situations in which a search warrant is necessary, the inconvenience incurred by the police is simply not that significant. First, if the police know of the location of the felon when they obtain an arrest warrant, the additional burden of obtaining a search warrant at the same time is miniscule. The inconvenience of obtaining such a warrant does not increase significantly when an outstanding arrest warrant already exists. In this case, for example, Agent Goodowens knew the address of the house to be searched two days in advance, and planned the raid from the federal courthouse in Atlanta where, we are informed, three full-time magistrates were on duty. In routine search cases such as this, the short time required to obtain a search warrant from a magistrate will seldom hinder efforts to apprehend a felon. Finally, if a magistrate is not nearby, a telephonic search warrant can usually be obtained. See Fed.Rule Crim.Proc. 41(c)(1), (2). Whatever practical problems remain, however, cannot outweigh the constitutional interests at stake. Any warrant requirement impedes to some extent the vigor with which the Government can seek to enforce its laws, yet the Fourth Amendment recognizes that this restraint is necessary in some cases to protect against unreasonable searches and seizures. We conclude that this is such a case. The additional burden imposed on the police by a warrant requirement is minimal. In contrast, the right protected-that of presumptively innocent people to be secure in their homes from unjustified, forcible intrusions by the Government-is weighty. Thus, in order to render the instant search reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, a search warrant was required. Id.