Opinion ID: 2122224
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Admission of Photographs of Truck

Text: Appellant argues the trial court erred when it admitted the three photographs of the red pickup truck. One of the pictures shows a full view of the truck. A second photograph is of the side of the truck without the gas cap. The last one pictures the truck with the gas cap found at the gas station. Appellant asserts the photographs are the products of an unreasonable search without a search warrant and therefore the trial court should have granted his motion to suppress. The first two photographs are indubitably not products of an unreasonable search. What a person knowingly exposes to the public ... is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351, 88 S.Ct. 507, 511, 19 L.Ed.2d 576, 582 (1967). When a vehicle is parked at some location where it is readily subject to observation by the public, police do not search it when they take photographs of the vehicle. Fisher v. State (1973), 259 Ind. 633, 641, 291 N.E.2d 76, 80. Although Fisher dealt with a vehicle in a vacant lot, we find no meaningful distinction when a vehicle is in a private driveway and the police are properly on the property pursuant to an arrest warrant. The more intriguing question concerns the third picture. Appellant claims that when Detective Barnes tried the gas cap on the truck the Fourth Amendment was violated and the photograph should have been suppressed as the product of an unreasonable search. The search was not incident to arrest, appellant notes, and the warrant for the arrest did not include the making of any experiments. Appellant suggests that the truck could have been watched until the police obtained a search warrant to try the gas cap on the pickup. We start by determining whether the experiment was a search. The most helpful analogy appears in Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U.S. 583, 94 S.Ct. 2464, 41 L.Ed.2d 325 (1974). In Cardwell the police were investigating a homicide. The victim had died of gunshot wounds, and his body was found near his car on the banks of a river. The car had gone over an embankment and had come to rest in brush. Foreign paint scrapings were removed from the right rear fender of the victim's car. The police requested the defendant to appear for questioning in connection with the investigation. After questioning, the police placed the defendant under arrest and had his car towed to the police impoundment lot. The next day a technician took a small paint sample from the car and determined it matched paint on the fender of the victim's car. Speaking for a plurality of the court, Justice Blackmun concluded the procedure was not a search. [1] In the present case, nothing from the interior of the car and no personal effects, which the Fourth Amendment traditionally has been deemed to protect, were searched or seized and introduced in evidence. With the search limited to ... the taking of paint scrapings from the exterior of the vehicle . .. we fail to comprehend what expectation of privacy was infringed. Id. at 591, 94 S.Ct. at 2470, 41 L.Ed.2d at 335 (footnote omitted). Another analogy is the identification of a car through the use of a key. In United States v. DeBardeleben, 740 F.2d 440 (6th Cir.), cert. denied, 469 U.S. 1028, 105 S.Ct. 448, 83 L.Ed.2d 373 (1984), a Secret Service agent unlocked a car door with a key taken from the suspect. The agent relocked the door without opening it. The agent ... did not search the Chrysler but merely identified it as belonging to defendant. Id. at 445 (emphasis in original). We conclude that Detective Barnes did not search appellant's truck. Barnes merely identified the gas cap as belonging to the truck. It is hard to identify any expectation of privacy which was infringed. The police were legally on the property, they obtained the gas cap legally, and then they photographed the gas cap in the truck. The experiment with the gas cap was even less intrusive than the removal of paint allowed in Cardwell. The trial court properly admitted the picture of the red truck with the gas cap.