Court Opinion

ID: 9545265
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:09:10.064683+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:14:24.757077
License: Public Domain

*424Hicks, J.
(dissenting)—I do not agree that this case should have been accepted for review on the single issue of whether a trial court should enter findings of fact and conclusions of law after a suppression of evidence hearing under CrR 4.5. In my view, the Court of Appeals was in error when it reversed the trial court for suppressing certain evidence.
For at least half a century, it has been the policy in Washington "that it is beneath the dignity of the state, and contrary to public policy, for the state to use for its own profit evidence that has been obtained in violation of law." State v. Buckley, 145 Wash. 87, 89, 258 P. 1030 (1927). In this case the State obtained its evidence in violation of law. The trial court suppressed the evidence thus obtained and said in relation thereto:
Although time was short under these facts and circumstances, there was time to give an oral, telephonic, or recorded affidavit and obtain a search warrant, or at least to make an attempt to do so. No such warrant was obtained or attempt made, though the same was required by law.
State v. Agee, 15 Wn. App. 709, 715, 552 P.2d 1084 (1976).
The Court of Appeals reversed on two grounds: (1) the police were not required to ask the informant if he was lawfully in the house he called from, and (2) there were exigent circumstances excusing the necessity of obtaining a search warrant.
Perhaps the police were not required to ask their informant if he was lawfully in the house, but in their failure to do so they took the risk that he was not legally there. The informant, in fact, was unlawfully in the house and as a consequence of that condition the police officers were equally unlawfully there.
United States v. Luciow, 518 F.2d 298 (8th Cir. 1975) cited by the Court of Appeals in Agee, at page 714, is distinguishable from this case. There, the trespassing informant's information was used to obtain a search warrant. There, the officer at least had color of authority to go upon *425the premises. Here, they had none and they had made no attempt to utilize the means authorized by CrR 2.3(c)2 to obtain authority. Absent such an attempt, I am unwilling to find the trial court erred in determining that insufficient exigent circumstances existed to excuse the warrantless entry of the house concerned. It is for such a situation as this case that CrR 2.3(c) was designed.
The trial court's suppression of evidence should have been sustained.
Rosellini, J., concurs with Hicks, J.

CrR 2.3(c) reads in part as follows:
"A warrant shall issue only on an affidavit or affidavits establishing the grounds for issuing the warrant. Such affidavit or affidavits may consist of an officer's sworn telephonic statement to the judge; provided, however, such sworn telephonic testimony must be electronically recorded by the judge on a recording device in the custody of the judge at the time transmitted and the recording shall be retained in the court records and reduced to writing as soon as possible thereafter."