Court Opinion

ID: 9498664
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:24:29.073955+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:59.511881
License: Public Domain

THOMAS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I agree that an Ameline remand is appropriate in this case. However, I respectfully disagree that the emergency doctrine justified a warrantless search.
The emergency doctrine is a very limited and specific exception to the require*1094ment that a search warrant be obtained before searching a private residence. “[Pjhysical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.” Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 585, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980) (quoting United States v. U.S. District Court, 407 U.S. 297, 313, 92 S.Ct. 2125, 32 L.Ed.2d 752 (1972)). For that reason, “searches and seizures inside a home without a warrant are presumptively unreasonable.” Id. at 586, 100 S.Ct. 1371. As the Supreme Court noted in Mincey v. Arizona, 437 U.S. 385, 98 S.Ct. 2408, 57 L.Ed.2d 290 (1978):
The Fourth Amendment proscribes all unreasonable searches and seizures, and it is a cardinal principle that “searches conducted outside the judicial process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment — subject to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions.”
Id. at 390, 98 S.Ct. 2408(quoting Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 357, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967)).
We have defined two “specifically established and well-delineated exceptions” to the warrant requirement: exigency and emergency. United States v. Martinez, 406 F.3d 1160, 1164 (9th Cir.2005). The exigency exception, which is not at issue in this case, permits a warrantless search “if there is probable cause to believe that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found at the premises and that exigent circumstances exist.” Id. (citing United States v. Lai, 944 F.2d 1434, 1441 (9th Cir.1991)).
At issue in this case is the emergency exception to the warrant requirement, which permits a warrantless search when officers “reasonably believe that a person within is in need of immediate aid.” Id. at 392. “The emergency doctrine is based on and justified by the fact that, in addition to their role as criminal investigators and law enforcers, the police also function as community caretakers.” United States v. Stafford, 416 F.3d 1068, 1073 (9th Cir.2005).
However, “[t]he police’s authority to search and seize property when acting in its role as ‘community caretaker’ has a different source than its authority to search and seize property to investigate criminal activity.” Miranda v. City of Cornelius, 429 F.3d 858, 863 (9th Cir.2005). Because there are sharp distinctions between the community caretaking and law enforcement roles of the police, the analysis under the emergency “community caretaker” doctrine differs significantly from the analysis we undertake when police are performing law enforcement functions. Id.
Under the emergency community caretaker doctrine, the reasonable suspicion must be of need, not criminal activity. When law enforcement officers are rendering emergency aid, they are performing a community caretaker function; when they are investigating the cause of an emergency, they are performing a law enforcement function.
To justify application of the emergency doctrine, three circumstances must exist:
(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.
United States v. Cervantes, 219 F.3d 882, 888 (9th Cir.2000) (quoting People v. Mitchell, 39 N.Y.2d 173, 383 N.Y.S.2d 246, 347 N.E.2d 607, 609 (1976)). We analyze *1095the “reasonable grounds to believe that there is an emergency at hand,” on an objective basis, taking into consideration the collective knowledge of the officers at the time. United States v. Sutton, 794 F.2d 1415, 1426(9th Cir.1986).
In this case, dispatchers received two almost identical calls from the same household indicating that a man had accidentally shot himself in the foot. The dispatchers were uncertain from the first call as to the source of the shooting, but they never communicated that to the officers proceeding to the scene. That uncertainty was cleared up in the second call, in which Russell described what had happened in detail. He verified that he was alone in the house. He also answered the dispatcher’s multiple questions about the location of the firearm, culminating in this exchange:
Russell: Oh my goodness people — Oh, no. Please. Please don’t let me die. Hello.
Dispatcher: I’m still here, Willie.
Russell: Why they not here, Ma’am?
Dispatcher: They’re on their way there. Okay?
Russell: (Moaning) Oh, my God. Oh, please tell those people to hurry up.
Dispatcher: They’re on their way. I need you to think about this. What happened to the gun?
Russell: I left it upstairs somewhere. I dropped it on top of stuff on the floor.
Dispatcher: Okay. You left it upstairs. Are you ...
Russell: Why do you keep asking me that?
Dispatcher: Because I want my officers to know where that weapon is before they come in that residence.
Russell: I’m at the front door. I don’t have the gun.
Dispatcher: You’re at the front door.
Russell: Yes, I crawled to the front door.
Dispatcher: Okay, is the door unlocked?
Russell: Yes, I opened the door for them.
Dispatcher: Okay, is the door open.
Russell: Please don’t make me suffer.
Dispatcher: The front door is open or it’s unlocked?
Russell: This door is open.
Dispatcher: Okay.
At that point, the owner of the house and Russell’s mother arrived. The dispatcher overheard the exchange in which Russell told them that he shot himself in the foot.
After the initial communications, the officers sent to the scene were informed by the dispatcher that Russell said he was home alone and was moving a gun from the bedroom to a closet when it went off. The officers were informed by the dispatcher that Russell had crawled to the front door and opened it for the officers.
When the first officer arrived, she waited outside the entrance to the cul-de-sac for four minutes until the other units reached the scene. As she pulled up, she saw Russell hopping out to a car parked in the driveway with a towel wrapped around his leg, accompanied by the two women. Russell entered the back seat of the car, and one woman entered the front of the vehicle. The officer ordered the driver out of the car. The women were not questioned. Two other officers arrived at the scene and saw the first officer talking with Russell.
At that point there was no objective evidence that any victim was in the house in need of immediate aid. The officers made no attempt at the scene to ascertain whether there was anyone in the house. The women were not questioned, nor did the officers question Russell. The objective evidence at hand, from Russell’s firsthand accounts, was that he had shot himself accidentally in the foot in an upstairs *1096bedroom and had dropped the firearm. No evidence at the scene contradicted this report.
However, rather than taking steps to ascertain the situation, the arriving officers immediately proceeded to enter and search the house with guns drawn. They methodically searched the house and found the firearm in an upstairs bedroom on the floor of a closet. Upon finding the gun, the officers remained in the room until other officers arrived. Then, the officers continued their general search. As one of the officers testified at the suppression hearing:
Q. At some point Sergeant Dillon found a firearm?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Correct? Then you continued to search after that, right?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Right? And you were searching for other ammunition and firearms?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Okay. And during the course of that, you found a pill bottle in a drawer?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And you seized that?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Correct? And you also claimed that you — that you saw several narcotics smoking pipes located in an open drawer in plain view; is that correct?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. But in fact they were not, they were inside some kind of a case; isn’t that correct?
A. A paper bag sir.
The officers verified at the suppression hearing that they continued to search after they had determined that nobody else was present in the house and that none of the searching officers had made any inquiries prior to the search to ascertain whether they were additional victims in the house.
Under these circumstances, the emergency exception did not justify a warrant-less search.1 The objective evidence indicated that the victim was already outside; he had informed the dispatcher that he was alone in the house; the women who arrived later were already outside; there was no objective evidence on the scene that there was a victim in the house in need of immediate assistance; no inquiries were made to determine whether there was another injured person in the house; the search continued after the officers ascertained that there was no one else in the house; and the search was not confined to looking for persons in need of medical attention, but included searching drawers and paper bags. One of the officers who searched and discovered the firearm remained in the room securing the gun until “someone relieved me inside the house to maintain control over the crime scene inside the house.”
The totality of the circumstances indicates that the officers were investigating the cause of the emergency in conducting the search — a law enforcement function, and not rendering assistance to a person in need of immediate aid — a community care-taking function. They were treating the house as a crime scene. Their suspicions of criminal activity may well have been aroused by Russell’s initial use of a false *1097name, but suspicions of criminal activity do not justify employment of the emergency community caretaker exception to conduct a warrantless search. The Supreme Court has made it quite clear that there is no “crime scene” exception to the warrant requirement. Mincey, 437 U.S. at 395, 98 S.Ct. 2408.
The government properly concedes that we have never extended the community caretaker doctrine this far. In every case in which we have applied the emergency doctrine, officers had objective evidence thát immediate emergency aid was required and took further steps to verify that there was, in fact, an emergency situation present in the premises. The best case that the government offers is Martinez. However, in Martinez, the officers heard shouting inside a house in which a victim had exited and had reason to believe that a man inside the house might be injured. The officers also questioned persons at the scene before entering. The officer who entered the house did not conduct a general search, but only observed a weapon in plain view on the couch as he was removing the occupant. 406 F.3d at 1165. In Martinez, we also recognized the especially volatile and dangerous nature of domestic disputes. Id.
I recognize fully and appreciate the need for law enforcement to make split second decisions when confronted with emergency situations. We must be deferential to the judgments of officers who are responding to potentially dangerous situations. However, we deprive the emergency doctrine of its vitality when we condone generalized warrantless searches in vacant houses when the person in need of immediate aid has already departed. Searching drawers and paper bags after the officers have ascertained that there is no one in need of aid cannot be considered rendering emergency medical assistance. After medical aid has been given, and the emergency quelled, officers are certainly justified in investigating the cause of the emergency; but this is a law enforcement function subject to the usual rules pertaining to law enforcement searches and seizures. For these reasons, in my view, under the circumstances presented by this case, the government has not overcome the presumption that a warrantless search of a private residence is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment,.

. The majority claims that the district court made a factual finding of emergency, to which we must defer. However, the record does not support this assertion. The district court did not even use the word "emergency” in its findings, much less make a specific finding of emergency. In any case, as the majority notes, the determination of the circumstances under which a warrantless search may be authorized is a mixed question of fact and law that we review de novo. United States v. Bynum, 362 F.3d 574, 578-79 (9th Cir.2004); Martinez, 406 F.3d at 1163.