Opinion ID: 2630679
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Summitt's Fourth Amendment Rights

Text: The court of appeals held that admission of the evidence surrounding Summitt's arrest place[d] the defendant on the horns of a dilemma: either abandon his right to privacy by leaving a constitutionally protected area and surrendering to what may be an unlawful arrest or refuse to surrender and thereby create evidence of self-accusation. Summitt, 104 P.3d at 236. The court of appeals reasoned that Summitt was not avoiding detection and arrest because he provided his license to the police and did not attempt to surreptitiously leave the house after the police arrived. While we agree with the court of appeals on this point, we disagree that the trial court's evidentiary ruling violated Summitt's Fourth Amendment rights. Contrary to the analysis of the court of appeals and the arguments of the defendant, this case does not raise a Fourth Amendment issue because (1) the police never entered Summitt's home and (2) the record does not show that he was standing on his right to have the police obtain an arrest warrant. To the contrary, the evidence shows that Summitt voluntarily exited his home after the police told his mother they were in the process of obtaining an arrest warrant. Summitt analogizes his constitutional claim to the United States Supreme Court's analysis in Griffin v. California, 380 U.S. 609, 85 S.Ct. 1229, 14 L.Ed.2d 106 (1965), and Doyle v. Ohio, 426 U.S. 610, 96 S.Ct. 2240, 49 L.Ed.2d 91 (1976). In Griffin, the Court held that a state could not make adverse inferences on the defendant's refusal to testify under the Fifth Amendment's prohibition on requiring a defendant to incriminate himself. 380 U.S. at 614-15, 85 S.Ct. 1229. The state's negative comments on the defendant's failure to testify in that case violated the Fifth Amendment. Id. at 615, 85 S.Ct. 1229. Expanding on this, in Doyle, the United States Supreme Court held that using a defendant's silence for impeachment purposes after he received the Miranda warnings violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. 426 U.S. at 619, 96 S.Ct. 2240. The Court reasoned that an accused's silence after receiving Miranda warnings could mean nothing more than the individual's decision to exercise those rights. Id. at 617, 96 S.Ct. 2240. The Court also noted that, while Miranda warnings contain no express assurance that an accused's choice to remain silent will not carry a penalty, this promise is implicit in those warnings; thus, using defendant's silence to impeach at trial his or her explanation of the events was fundamentally unfair. Id. at 618, 96 S.Ct. 2240. From this precedent, Summitt argues that Griffin and Doyle prohibit the prosecution from using evidence surrounding a defendant's exercise of a constitutional right as evidence of guilt because it would penalize exercise of that rightin this case, Summitt's Fourth Amendment right to insist on an arrest warrant while in the privacy of his own home. See McCall v. People, 623 P.2d 397, 401 (Colo.1981) (citing Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 589, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980)). But, to raise such a claim, Summitt would have to show that he was insisting on the police obtaining an arrest warrant and remained in his home until they had one. To the contrary, the evidence in this case was that he voluntarily exited the house when the police told his mother that they would wait there until they obtained an arrest warrant. Thus, the record here is devoid of police non-consensual entry into Summitt's home, or that his remaining in the home for a time while the police were negotiating for entry, or for him to come out, was in any way connected to his interest in requiring the police to obtain an arrest warrant. In light of the record, the court of appeals erred in finding a violation of Summitt's Fourth Amendment rights.