Opinion ID: 3064918
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Emergency Exception

Text: [3] This court has clearly held that a police officer may not enter a home to investigate a medical emergency or other immediate risk to life or limb unless he has “reasonable grounds” to believe an emergency is at hand and that his immediate attention is required. Cervantes, 219 F.3d at 888. Although the test we announced in United States v. Cervantes, 219 F.3d 882 (9th Cir. 2000), was altered by the Supreme Court in Brigham City v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398 (2006), the reasonable grounds prong “survives Brigham City, and indeed remains the core of the . . . analysis.” United States v. Snipe, 515 F.3d 947, 951 (9th Cir. 2008).5 Under this prong, “law enforcement must have an objectively reasonable basis for concluding that there is an immediate need to protect others 5 In Cervantes, we adopted a three part test for analyzing whether a warrantless entry is valid under the emergency exception. We held: (1) The police must have reasonable grounds to believe that there is an emergency at hand and an immediate need for their assistance for the protection of life or property. (2) The search must not be primarily motivated by intent to arrest and seize evidence. (3) There must be some reasonable basis, approximating probable cause, to associate the emergency with the area or place to be searched. 219 F.3d at 888. In Brigham, the Supreme Court intervened and altered the analysis by abrogating the second prong of the Cervantes test. The Court held that “[a]n action is ‘reasonable’ under the Fourth Amendment, regardless of the individual officer’s state of mind, ‘as long as the circumstances, viewed objectively, justify [the] action.’ ” Brigham City, 547 U.S. at 404 (emphasis and second alteration in original) (quoting Scott v. United States, 436 U.S. 128, 138 (1978)). We then construed Brigham as requiring that officers executing a warrantless entry of a home “ha[ve] an objectively reasonable basis for concluding that there [i]s an immediate need to protect others or themselves from serious harm; and [that] the search’s scope and manner [a]re reasonable to meet the need.” Snipe, 515 F.3d at 952. This formulation, when combined with the third prong of Cervantes, which was unaffected by either Brigham or Snipe, states our circuit’s current law governing the emergency exception. HOPKINS v. BONVICINO 9037 or themselves from serious harm.” Id. at 951-52 (emphasis added). This “reasonable basis” requirement, clearly established by Cervantes in 2000 and reaffirmed by Snipe in 2008, is the core principle governing the officers’ conduct in the present appeal. We must “judge whether or not the emergency exception applies in any given situation based on the totality of the circumstances, and, as with other exceptions to the warrant requirement, the Government bears the burden of demonstrating that the search at issue meets these parameters.” United States v. Stafford, 416 F.3d 1068, 1074 (9th Cir. 2005). Here, the defendant-officers contend that two possible medical emergencies justified their warrantless entry. [4] The officers’ first argument is that because they were responding to a reported automobile accident they were authorized to enter Hopkins’ home to see if he was injured as a result of that incident. However, taking the alleged facts in the light most favorable to Hopkins, the police officers were aware that the purported accident did not cause so much as a scratch to either of the cars involved, as is confirmed by the photographs of the vehicles taken that evening by Officer Nguyen. Furthermore, after speaking with Talib — the woman who called the police and spoke with them before they entered Hopkins’ home, who was involved in the socalled “accident,” and who observed Hopkins exit his car both at the scene of the incident and back at his home — the officers, in their own words, learned “nothing” regarding the nature of the accident that “caused [them] to be concerned for Mr. Hopkins’ medical condition.” In short, there was absolutely no indication that the minor bump between the two cars was at all serious or that it had caused any type of medical emergency. Accordingly, the mere fact that the officers were responding to a minor “hit-and-run” cannot justify their warrantless entry into Hopkins’ home. 9038 HOPKINS v. BONVICINO [5] Perhaps aware of the tenuous nature of this first argument, the officers put greater weight on their second purported medical emergency: the argument that they had reason to believe that Hopkins was suffering from or on the brink of a diabetic coma. This claim, however, is equally baseless, and, if permitted to serve as the basis for the warrantless home intrusion, would allow police officers to ignore the Fourth Amendment almost at will. No one disputes that a diabetic coma is a medical emergency, which it clearly is. Rather, the question before us is whether Officers Bonvicino and Buelow had an “objectively reasonable basis” to suspect that Hopkins was in fact suffering from a diabetic coma. Snipe, 515 F.3d at 951. Taking the facts in the light most favorable to Hopkins, the only information the officers possessed that would support such a conclusion is as follows: (1) Talib said she smelled alcohol on Hopkins’ breath; (2) Talib described Hopkins as appearing slightly intoxicated; and (3) Hopkins did not respond when the officers knocked on his door. The officers argue that, because an individual suffering from the initial phases of a diabetic coma can, to an untrained observer, appear intoxicated and can have a “sickly sweet” or “fruity” odor on his breath that a layperson might confuse with the smell of alcohol, their fear of a diabetic emergency was reasonable. This contention is unsupportable: the mere suggestion that someone has a smell resembling alcohol on his breath and appears slightly intoxicated does not create “reasonable grounds” to suspect a diabetic emergency sufficient to justify warrantless entry into a home. If it did, then, as the officers acknowledged at oral argument, any time the police receive information from a layperson that someone inside a home has the appearance of a person who has consumed alcohol the police will be authorized to enter that home without a warrant. This result would expand the “narrow[,] . . . rigorously guarded exception[ ] to th[e] warrant requirement” beyond all recognition, and simply cannot be the law. Stafford, 416 F.3d at 1073.6 6 The officers’ contention is especially troubling in light of the large percentage of police activity that involves some report of alcohol consumpHOPKINS v. BONVICINO 9039 [6] As this court has made clear, “if [police officers] otherwise lack reasonable grounds to believe there is an emergency,” they must “take additional steps to determine whether there [i]s an emergency that justifie[s] entry in the first place.” United States v. Russell, 436 F.3d 1086, 1092 (9th Cir. 2006). Here, the officers did not take any such additional steps. They did not, as in Martin v. City of Oceanside, 360 F.3d 1078, 1080 (9th Cir. 2004), attempt to reach Hopkins by telephone in order to check on his welfare. They did not ask Talib for more information, such as whether she observed Hopkins wearing a medical alert bracelet or whether the odor she smelled on his breath was “fruity,” “sickly sweet,” or otherwise distinguishable from the typical smell of alcohol on a person’s breath. The mere fact that Hopkins did not answer the door cannot tip the balance in the officers’ favor, since nothing requires an individual to answer the door in response to a police officer’s knocking. United States v. Washington, 387 F.3d 1060, 1070-71 (9th Cir. 2004). We do not dispute that the police officers in this case had reasonable grounds to believe that Hopkins had been drinking, but, without obtaining more information, they could not reasonably have believed that he needed immediate medical attention due to a diabetic emergency.7 [7] Every case in this circuit that has upheld a warrantless search of a home under the emergency exception has involved tion. See generally BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, ALCOHOL AND CRIME (1998) (reporting high correlation between alcohol involvement and suspected or actual criminal conduct), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ bjs/pub/pdf/ac.pdf. 7 We also note that under United States v. Snipe, see supra note 5, we “must consider the officers’ manner of entry.” 515 F.3d at 952. Here, the officers entered the house with their guns drawn, a tactic that hardly seems consistent with a response to a medical emergency where the victim is expected to be comatose or quasi-comatose. Surely paramedics or emergency medical technicians responding to diabetic emergencies do not do so with guns drawn. 9040 HOPKINS v. BONVICINO significantly more evidence of an emergency than is present here. In Cervantes itself, the searching officer, who had been trained to recognize the smell of highly combustible fumes associated with methamphetamine production, personally smelled those fumes emanating from an apartment after responding to a call from the fire department. 219 F.3d at 885-86. In United States v. Bradley, a mother who had just been arrested for possessing methamphetamine told the police that her nine-year old son was home alone in the middle of the night, a situation that we held “requir[ed] immediate police assistance.” 321 F.3d 1212, 1215 (9th Cir. 2003). In Martin v. City of Oceanside, officers entered a house in response to a phone call from a father who called the police “with an urgent request to check on the safety of his daughter . . . [whom he] had been unable to reach . . . for several days.” 360 F.3d at 1080. In United States v. Martinez, officers responding to a domestic violence call found a woman crying on the front lawn of a house and heard a man shouting from inside; in the unique context of “a domestic abuse call, [in which] ‘violence may be lurking and explode with little warning,’ ” we upheld the officers’ warrantless entry to speak to the screaming and potentially injured male resident. 406 F.3d at 1162-64 (quoting Fletcher v. Clinton, 196 F.3d 41, 50 (1st Cir. 1999)). In United States v. Stafford, we upheld a warrantless entry after a building maintenance man reported to police that the walls of an apartment were covered in blood and feces and that he smelled what he thought was a dead body. 416 F.3d 1068, 1071-73 (9th Cir. 2005). In United States v. Russell, we upheld a warrantless entry where a series of confused 911 calls suggested that one individual had shot another inside a house and that the shooter was still inside when the officers arrived. 436 F.3d 1086, 1090 (9th Cir. 2006). Finally, in United States v. Snipe, the police entered a home in response to a 911 call in which a “very hysterical sounding” caller “screamed . . . [g]et the cops here now.” 515 F.3d at 949 (alteration in original). [8] A statement that someone’s breath smelled like alcohol is not even remotely comparable to the information we have HOPKINS v. BONVICINO 9041 previously deemed to constitute “reasonable grounds” for suspecting a medical or other life-threatening emergency. It is simply inconceivable that a “reasonable officer” presented with the information that Talib conveyed to Officers Bonvicino and Buelow could conclude, on the basis of that information alone, that he had “an objectively reasonable basis” to suspect a medical emergency was at hand. Yet, as Officer Buelow acknowledged in his deposition, he believed that, hypothetically, any time an officer receives a report of alcohol consumption, that officer would, in his discretion, have reasonable grounds to enter a home without a warrant in order to investigate a diabetic emergency. Whatever this understanding of the Fourth Amendment might be called, it cannot be called “objectively reasonable.” Thus, the emergency exception cannot justify the warrantless entry into Hopkins’ home.