Opinion ID: 2600016
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the officers reasonably relied on state v. belton and its progeny when they improperly extended the duration of the stop

Text: ¶ 35 The United States Supreme Court has adopted a good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule in some situations when application of the rule would not serve a deterrent effect. [2] Herring v. United States, ___ U.S. ___, ___, 129 S.Ct. 695, 700, 172 L.Ed.2d 496 (2009); Illinois v. Krull, 480 U.S. 340, 352-53, 107 S.Ct. 1160, 94 L.Ed.2d 364 (1987); United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 905-06, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984). The fact that a Fourth Amendment violation occurred ... does not necessarily mean that the exclusionary rule applies. Herring, 129 S.Ct. at 700. Evidence should not be excluded when the application of the exclusionary rule does not deter improper police conduct or when the benefits of deterrence do not outweigh the cost. Id. `[E]vidence should be suppressed only if it can be said that the law enforcement officer had knowledge, or may properly be charged with knowledge, that the search was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.' Id. at 701 (quoting Krull, 480 U.S. at 348-49, 107 S.Ct. 1160). ¶ 36 A good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule exists when an officer acts in reasonable reliance on a warrant, Leon, 468 U.S. at 920, 104 S.Ct. 3405, in reasonable reliance on a statute later declared unconstitutional, Krull, 480 U.S. at 349, 107 S.Ct. 1160, or in objectively reasonable reliance on a subsequently recalled warrant. Herring, 129 S.Ct. at 703. On the other hand, no good-faith exception applies when a police officer reasonably relies on an illegal subpoena issued by the state attorney general because application of the rule in such a case has a deterrent effect on the issuance of illegal subpoenas by the state's highest law enforcement official. State v. Thompson, 810 P.2d 415, 420 (Utah 1991) (interpreting the federal good faith exception to the exclusionary rule). ¶ 37 The officers in the case at hand reasonably relied on settled judicial precedent when they conducted the search incident to arrest. As recently as 2004, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the holding in New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454, 101 S.Ct. 2860, 69 L.Ed.2d 768 (1981) meant that when a police officer has made a lawful custodial arrest of an occupant of an automobile, the Fourth Amendment allows the officer to search the passenger compartment of that vehicle as a contemporaneous incident of arrest. Thornton v. United States, 541 U.S. 615, 617, 124 S.Ct. 2127, 158 L.Ed.2d 905 (2004) (allowing a search of a vehicle incident to the arrest of a recent occupant of that vehicle). Our court also has held that [t]he fact of a lawful arrest, standing alone, authorizes a search. State v. Trane, 2002 UT 97, ¶ 23, 57 P.3d 1052 (internal quotation marks omitted) (emphasis omitted); see also State v. Kent, 665 P.2d 1317, 1319 (Utah 1983) (upholding search conducted incident to the arrest of a driver). ¶ 38 The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth and the Tenth Circuits have come to opposite conclusions about whether the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule should apply to evidence found in searches conducted in violation of Gant. Compare United States v. Gonzalez, 578 F.3d 1130 (9th Cir.2009), with United States v. McCane, 573 F.3d 1037 (10th Cir. 2009). The Ninth Circuit held that applying the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule would amount to denying defendants retroactive application of the rule in Gant. Gonzalez, 578 F.3d at 1132-33. The parties in the Tenth Circuit case stipulated to retroactive application, but the court decline[d] to apply the exclusionary rule when law enforcement officers act in objectively reasonable reliance upon the settled case law of [the jurisdiction]. McCane, 573 F.3d at 1045. We find the Tenth Circuit's approach more persuasive and hold that evidence obtained in objective reasonable reliance on settled judicial precedent that is later overturned should not be excluded. ¶ 39 In this case, the officers relied on a practice deemed constitutional by both the Supreme Court and this court in order to conduct their search. Thus, admitting the evidence police found during the time when the officers reasonably believed they had not completed the lawful purpose of their stop would not serve to deter officers from unconstitutionally detaining vehicle passengers. We note that this is not a case where police interpreted an ambiguous law in their own favor. See State v. Shoulderblade, 905 P.2d 289, 294 (Utah 1995) (declining to apply a good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule to evidence discovered during a suspicionless, investigatory roadblock, even though such a roadblock was not clearly unconstitutional at the time it was implemented because it would create an incentive to violate constitutional guarantees by seizing upon an ambiguity). If the case law had been ambiguous prior to the time the officers conducted a search later definitively declared unconstitutional, the good-faith exception would not apply and the evidence would be excluded. ¶ 40 Having declined to apply the exclusionary rule to evidence gathered during the unconstitutional detention of Mr. Baker, we now turn to the question of whether officers could frisk him after the drug dog alerted to the presence of drugs in the vehicle, either because they believed he was armed or dangerous or because the dog sniff gave rise to probable cause that Mr. Baker was in possession of illegal drugs. We hold that the officers did not have an objectively reasonable belief that Mr. Baker may be armed and dangerous sufficient to justify a protective frisk. [3] And because the State did not argue, either on appeal or in the district court, that the evidence obtained during the dog sniff gave rise to probable cause justifying a warrantless search for illegal drugs, we do not consider that argument.