Court Opinion

ID: 9450111
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:35:36.458132+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:09.306629
License: Public Domain

MADDEN, Judge
(dissenting).
Our question is whether the officers’ search of the apartment, in which they found Exhibit C, the bottle of milk sugar, and Exhibit D, the eyedropper and hypodermic needle, was a reasonable search. They made the search with the consent of Dolores Jean Wright, the tenant of the two-bedroom apartment. There was contradictory evidence about the fact, and the voluntariness, of her consent. The trial judge found that she had consented to the search, and that her consent was voluntary. We would have no possible reason to hold that that finding was clearly erroneous.
Our situation is, then, that the tenant of a small apartment is accused by the police of some violation of law with regard to narcotics. She denies the accusation. The officers ask whether they may search her apartment. She says that they may, that she has nothing to hide. They enter and search, and, in the one bathroom, the only one in the apartment, they find Exhibits C and D, articles frequently used in the preparation and use of narcotics. They take those articles and scientific examination of them shows a fingerprint of the defendant on Exhibit C and traces of heroin in the two items which are Exhibit D.
This court holds that, in the defendant’s trial for violation of the narcotics laws, after the prosecution had shown that the defendant, as a guest of Dolores Jean Wright, had been using her bathroom during the days preceding the search, it could not introduce in evidence the items found in the search. Obviously the items did not prove much, since the defendant might well have picked up numerous articles in the bathroom and thus left his fingerprints on them, quite innocently, and the two items in Exhibit D, with traces of heroin in them, could have belonged to Dolores Jean Wright or to other acquaintances of hers. The con*220viction of the defendant, by the jury, of the violation of the narcotics law must have been induced, at least in the main, by the other evidence in the case, which, as the court says, was sufficient and persuasive.
The importance to the court of the seemingly rather trifling items Exhibits C and D is that they, in the court’s opinion, inject into the case a problem of the highest importance, a problem of Constitutional law. With deference, I think they do nothing of the kind. I think the search was reasonable and lawful, though not much was found.
If a tenant of a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment rents one of her bedrooms to another person, and if the narcotics squad picks up a narcotics victim and asks him where he got the narcotics, and he says he got them in that apartment, and the officers go to the apartment and tell the tenant what they have heard and she indignantly denies the possibility of such an occurrence and the officers ask if they may look through the apartment and she says they may but they will not find anything, and they do look and they find narcotics in the bathroom, may they not seize them? Does the Constitution say that this lady may lawfully consent to the entrance into her bathroom of any person in the whole wide world except officers of the Government whose duty it is to enforce that Government’s laws? Does it say that the officers, having entered and seen objects whose only use is to violate the laws, have somehow blundered, so that the conclusive evidence which they have thus discovered cannot thereafter be used by their Government to convict the guilty person ?
In the situation just recited, should the officers, in order to be faithful to the Constitution, have had to ask the landlady if she had a guest or a lodger, because if she did they must not enter until they have hunted up the guest or lodger and obtained his consent? And if they had told the landlady that, would not her sensible reply have been, “If it is suspected that I have a lodger or a guest who is using my hospitality as a base for dealing in narcotics, I am insisting that you come in immediately and search at least the parts of my premises which both I and my guest or lodger use” ?
Who could say that the lady’s expression was merely a throwback to some anachronistic conception of real property law derived from some social situation of the Middle Ages now discoverable only by historical research? I would say that her expression made just as good sense- and good law in 1964 as it would have made in 1564. If one, by inviting a guest or taking a lodger in his spare bedroom, so ceases to be the master of his own front hall or bathroom that he cannot police them or invite his Government to-poliee them against their use as depositories of narcotics, his status has been degraded. I think the Constitution is-degraded by attributing to it such an-effect.
The court relies heavily upon the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Jones v. United States, 362 U.S. 257, 80 S.Ct. 725, 4 L.Ed.2d 697. In that case the United States District Court, and the Court of Appeals, had held that the defendant, because he denied that the seized narcotics were owned or possessed by him,, and because he was only a guest in the-house where they were seized, had no standing to object to their admission in evidence. In the Supreme Court, the Government sought to sustain the position of the lower courts on these points. On the first point, that the defendant’s-denial of an interest in the seized narcotics left him without standing to complain of their seizure, the court, of course, held that since the defendant and the-Government each were impaled on the-horns of a dilemma in such situations, the defendant should be the one who could’ escape the dilemma without damage. In the instant case the Government does not urge that the defendant lacks standing on that ground, and if it did urge it,, we would reject the contention.
As to the guest status of the defendant as a ground for lack of standing, the *221Government does present that argument in this case. The District Court did not hold that the defendant lacked standing to raise the question of unreasonable search of the Wright apartment. It gave full consideration to the defendant’s objection to the items discovered in the search. It conducted, in the absence of the jury, a hearing regarding the circumstances of the search, taking the testimony of Dolores Jean Wright and of the police officers. In the court’s denial of the defendant’s motion for judgment of acquittal notwithstanding the verdict, or, in the alternative, for a new trial, the court made careful findings as to the circumstances of the search, and held that Wright had voluntarily consented to the search and that no error had been committed in admitting Exhibit C, which had the defendant’s fingerprint on it. It will be remembered that the court had, at the trial, reconsidered its admission of Exhibit D, and had excluded it, apparently on the ground of relevancy, since those items did not have fingerprints or other indicia of ownership or use by the defendant. The court had admonished the jury not to consider Exhibit D in its deliberations.
The question which the District Court had to answer and the question which faces this court is the naked question of whether or not the search by the narcotics officers of the bathroom in the Wright apartment was, in the circumstances, an “unreasonable search.” That is what the Constitution forbids, and that is all that the Constitution forbids. The Constitution says nothing about joint tenants, lodgers, paying guests, non-paying guests. The status of such persons may, along with the other circumstances, have a bearing upon the question whether the search was unreasonable.
The crucial circumstance in the Jones case which distinguishes it from our case is that in the Jones case the tenant of the apartment, Evans, had not consented to the entry and search. In fact, in the Jones case, the entry was with a search warrant, which the court held to have been validly issued. It also held that the search, after entry, was properly conducted. The court remanded the case to the District Court solely for the purpose of having that court pass upon the question whether the manner of entry into the house complied with 18 U.S.C. § 3109. The Jones case did not involve the question with which this opinion is concerned.
The fact that the entry and search, in the instant case, were made with the consent of Dolores Jean Wright, the tenant of the premises, is to me conclusive on the question of the reasonableness of the search. When the time comes that my guest, whether he has accompanied me to my front door to answer the bell or is lodged in the jailhouse for the time being, may forbid the entry into my house of any person to whose entry I choose to give my consent, I don’t want to be charged with having had a part in making that law and of having laid the blame for it upon the Constitution. The instant decision goes beyond any precedent, and I must dissent from it.