Court Opinion

ID: 9455336
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 19:19:08.479445+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:33.509017
License: Public Domain

BLACKMUN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent.
It seems to me that the key facts, all undisputed, which bear upon the defendant’s arrest and the attendant search, are (1) that Mrs. Bonds was shot; (2) that she was shot by her husband; (3) that this information was conveyed immediately to the police by both the defendant and by her; (4) that she was in pain and distress and her left hand was seriously injured from the shooting; (5) that when she arrived by cab at the fire station and was first seen by officer Dominick, she was hysterical; and (6) that she then made repeated references to her three-year-old child and the child's being at home with her husband, and, in her screaming, said, “My baby is there. They are there.”
In the face of these facts and the obvious urgency of the moment, what would one expect the police to do? Certainly, they must immediately investigate. Certainly, they must be wary of that weapon. Certainly, they must promptly check the child’s need for protection. They may do no less despite the well-known risks of interfering in what may prove to be only a domestic quarrel.
It follows that what the police did was entirely reasonable and appropriate for a day, as this was, prior to the decision in Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 89 S.Ct. 2034, 23 L.Ed.2d 685 (1969). Although the offense for which the defendant eventually was booked was a misdemeanor, the actual arrest of Bonds at the door of his house, and upon his denial of any knowledge of any shotgun, all the testimony indicates, was for assault, presumably in violation of Mo. Rev.Stat. § 559.180 or § 559.190, a crime which, in either case, is clearly a felony under Missouri law. Mo.Rev.Stat. § 556.-020 and § 556.040; State v. Garner, 360 Mo. 50, 226 S.W.2d 604, 606 (1950). Thus the test is whether the arresting officers had probable cause to believe that a felony had been committed by Bonds and whether the search at the time of the arrest was reasonable.
For me, the answer to this question is definitely in the affirmative. The victim’s information as to the identity of the assailant and the infliction of her injury by gunshot, her bleeding, her seriously injured left hand, her hysteria, and her expressed and anxious motherly concern for a small child left in the house with the armed assailant-husband add up to probable cause for the arrest and to reasonableness of the search. The situation gave every appearance of assault with a dangerous weapon.
Perhaps a comment or two as to the testimony is in order:
1. Both Bonds and the victim at the hearing on the motion to suppress, and she at the trial, testified that the shooting was “accidental” and that it was so described to the police. As the majority point out, arresting officer Dominick in his after-the-event official report also *667used that description. But Dominick in his testimony at the trial very specifically does not go that far. He acknowledges only, “She said her husband shot her with a shotgun.” He stated, in explanation of the report, that at the hospital and in the ambulance she described the shooting as accidental; that, however, he did not hear her so describe it; and that what he put in the report is what someone else told him. In view of this testimony, I cannot conclude that the district court was unjustified in accepting Dominick’s version as to the victim’s utterances to him in the immediate hysteria of the incident, rather than the testimony of the defendant and the victim.
2. I find nothing in the record which is convincingly to the effect that the victim was herself handing the gun to the defendant when she was injured. At the hearing on the motion she positively testified:
“He had the gun, and I was telling him to put it in a bag, and he was going to put it away, and I told him to put it in a bag, and I was reaching in the bag with the left hand, and the gun, just that instant, went off.”
At the trial on cross-examination of Mrs. Bonds the following took place:
“Q * * * All right. Tell us how you were accidentally shot in the hand.
“A We was upstairs in the bedroom, and he was upstairs with the gun.
“Q Your husband?
“A Eight. And there was a bag on the television, and I just reached the bag to tell him to put the gun-
“Q In the bag?
“A Eight.' And it accidentally went off.
“Q Was he putting the gun away?
“A I don’t know. I was just telling him to put it in the bag. I didn’t want to see it. I said, Tut the gun in the bag,’ a brown paper bag. This is what I was telling him to do. I was reaching it to him to put it in the bag.
* * -x- * *
“The Court: What preceded your asking him to give you the gun?
“The Witness: I didn’t ask him to give me the gun. I told him to put it in a bag.”
As I read this testimony in the aggregate, the victim was insisting, or surely urging, that the defendant put the gun out of sight and in the paper bag. She obviously feared the weapon. I interpret her testimony as saying that she was holding the bag, not the gun, and that she placed her hand in the bag to hold it open as a proffered receptacle for the weapon. This coupled with her knowledge, and the defendant’s concession, that he had been drinking that afternoon, demonstrates her obvious deep concern and dread. In one sense, any adverse incident can always be described, and frequently is so described, as an “accident.” The victim’s concern about the gun and her desire to get it out of her husband’s grasp negate, in my view, any then conviction on her part that the incident was an accidental happenstance. Certainly, it did not require officer Dominick at that time to relegate it to the category of an unfortunate misadventure and it does not compel us to hold, as a matter of law, that the police had received notification only of an accident and not of anything which could rise to the level of a felonious assault.
Of course, having come this far, I must face the Chimel issue. But, in doing so, I find myself in agreement with the Fifth Circuit that Chimel is not to be retrospectively applied. Lyon v. United States, 416 F.2d 91, 93 (5 Cir. 1969). Under the law as it stood and had been enunciated in the days prior to the Chimel decision on June 23, 1969, the search was reasonable. United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 70 S.Ct. 430, 94 L.Ed. 653 (1950); Harris v. United States, 331 U.S. 145, 67 S.Ct. 1098, 91 L.Ed. 1399 (1947).
I would affirm.