Court Opinion

ID: 9520607
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 01:45:17.225301+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:46:32.015575
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE KARNS, dissenting: The problem here, as I see it, is that no one had ever identified defendant, prior to the time she was forced to come to the door of the motel room, as the person who threw the package over the fence. When Lieutenant Tinsman related to Captain Umbdenstock what he had seen, and it was Umbdenstock who had received the tip and directed Tinsman to view the area in question, he could not relate the description given to defendant, nor the car described by Tinsman, to defendant. The local police were notified to be on the lookout not for an Oldsmobile but a blue Cadillac, which was obviously not the car that Tinsman had seen, as Tinsman confirmed in his testimony. Umbdenstock testified that after talking to Tinsman he could not say that the driver was defendant, whom he knew and could describe. I do not believe that the police had probable cause to arrest defendant at the time they arrived at her motel room. The information known to Umbdenstock and Tinsman and related to the local police was obviously based on a tip from an anonymous informant whose reliability was never established. (Aguilar v. Texas (1964), 378 U.S. 108, 12 L. Ed. 2d 723, 84 S. Ct. 1509.) The only corroboration here was of the kind rejected in People v. Greer (1981), 87 Ill. 2d 89, 429 N.E.2d 505, and People v. Gates (1981), 85 Ill. 2d 376, 423 N.E.2d 887, as “self verifying.” Additionally, I consider the warrantless viewing of defendant at her motel room to be equivalent to a warrantless entry to effectuate her arrest. She did not just voluntarily come to the door to be viewed by Lieutenant Tinsman. The police stated that the door would be “knocked down” if she didn’t come to the door. What was done here was the equivalent of a warrantless entry into her room, absent exigent circumstances, of a kind condemned in Payton v. New York (1980), 445 U.S. 573, 63 L. Ed. 2d 639, 100 S. Ct. 1371. As to consent, the able trial judge found defendant did not consent. His determination of this fact question, as well as others, is not to be ignored unless clearly erroneous. (People v. Clark (1982), 92 Ill. 2d 96, 440 N.E.2d 869.) Here the majority has apparently found the resolution of factual disputes, and matters of credibility, by the trial court, to be “clearly erroneous”; however, it seems obvious that the trial court found that the statement that the door would be “knocked down” was directed to the occupants of the room. I do not believe that the testimony is ambiguous. The trial court gave thoughtful consideration to a resolution of the factual questions here. His decision should be affirmed.