Court Opinion

ID: 9781847
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 17:33:43.427685+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:34:40.442794
License: Public Domain

*496ARMSTRONG, J.,
concurring.
I concur in the majority’s decision, because it is consistent with our current way of analyzing the issues in this case. I write simply to note my belief that we should abandon the analysis of abandonment under Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution, on which the majority relies.
Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution, provides:
“No law shall violate the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable search, or seizure; and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath, or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or thing to be seized.”
I believe that we have been constructing a body of law on abandonment that has had the effect of removing the very protection that Article I, section 9, is intended to secure for people. The facts of the companion case to this case, State v. Dickson, 173 Or App 567, 24 P3d 909 (2001), provide an excellent illustration of my point.
When the defendant in Dickson dropped his backpack, he abandoned his backpack to whatever consequence lawfully could follow from that act. Article I, section 9, is part of the law, and a very important part, that properly bears on what lawfully could be done to the defendant’s backpack as a result of his act. However, by constructing a separate body of law on abandonment of rights under Article I, section 9, we have removed from the analytical equation the very law that is intended to apply to police conduct toward people and their property and effects.
The following hypothetical may help illustrate the problem. Assume that rival gang members are involved in a fight. Included among the group on one side is an undercover police officer. The other group is overwhelmed, and one of their number drops his backpack to escape from the crowd, expecting the act of dropping the backpack to lighten his load sufficiently to enable him to get away. Assume further that someone other than the undercover police officer picks the *497backpack up and, treating it as spoils of the fight, takes it home.
If the owner later brought a replevin or conversion action against the person who took his backpack, the court would analyze the relevant property law to determine if the owner had abandoned his backpack. In resolving that issue, the fact that the owner might expect the backpack to be attractive or of interest to the rival gang members should not bear on whether the owner had abandoned it. As a matter of policy, the law would favor the owner’s decision to drop the backpack and to rely on the law and the legal system to protect his interests in it. In other words, I would be surprised if the result of the case would be a decision in favor of the person who took the backpack, on the ground that the owner had abandoned it.
Assume, alternatively, that the undercover police officer picked up the backpack, and suspecting that it contained contraband, opened it. The officer’s act in doing that should be analyzed under Article I, section 9. There should not be a special body of abandonment law involving Article I, section 9, that would remove that provision from the body of law that bears on the lawfulness of the officer’s act. The purpose of Article I, section 9, is to secure protection against the government. The government is entitled to be treated as is anyone else with regard to rights in property, subject to the further constraint imposed by Article I, section 9. Our special body of abandonment law, a body of law that is explicitly distinct from property law, has the effect of removing from the evaluation of the legality of governmental conduct toward property the very body of law that is intended to secure property against governmental intrusion. That appears quite paradoxical to me.
The protection secured by Article I, section 9, is secured to all people, including those who engage in criminal conduct or who are accused or suspected of crime. Consequently, it should not matter if the person who dropped the backpack knew that police officers were in the crowd or that police officers would have an interest in or be able to pick up the backpack. By dropping the backpack, the owner subjects it to whatever handling by others that the law allows. That *498body of law supplies the context in which his act should be judged. In other words, the owner “abandons” his backpack within the context of the law that governs his act. Article I, section 9, is a critical part of that legal context. Again, our abandonment law removes Article I, section 9, from the law by which the legality of the police conduct toward property is to be judged, even though the sole purpose of Article I, section 9, is to supply the law that governs police conduct toward property, and our abandonment law does that while continuing to recognize that the owner has a property interest in the backpack, which is the interest that is to be protected against police intrusion by Article I, section 9. That makes no sense.
State v. Belcher, 89 Or App 401, 749 P2d 591, affd 306 Or 343, 759 P2d 1096 (1988), appears to be the case in which we began the process of creating a distinctive body of abandonment law under Article I, section 9. It is easy to show that the effort to do that in that case was completely unnecessary, as the Supreme Court demonstrated in affirming our decision in the case. The case involved police scrutiny of the contents of a backpack that had been left by the defendant in the course of a fight at a parking lot. We said that the defendant had abandoned his protection under Article I, section 9, because the defendant should have anticipated that leaving his backpack in the parking lot would subject it to scrutiny. We could, and should, have easily said that police did not violate Article I, section 9, by opening the backpack in an effort to determine its owner, because, as a matter of property law, they had the lawful authority to do that, and, as a consequence, the intrusion did not constitute an unreasonable search proscribed by Article I, section 9.That is essentially the way the Supreme Court treated the issue in affirming our decision in Belcher, 306 Or 345-46, and the way that it resolved the same issue in State v. Pidcock, 306 Or 335, 339-42, 759 P2d 1092 (1988). See also ORS 98.005-.025 (describes rights and obligations of finder and owner of found property). In other words, the Supreme Court appears to have viewed the issue in the way that I suggest that we should, which should give us pause about continuing down the track that we are on.
*499Dickson should be analyzed similarly. It should not turn on abandonment but, rather, on whether the police violated Article I, section 9. The state offered arguments in Dickson why the search did not violate that provision. For all I know, those arguments might be correct, but Dickson and similar cases should be analyzed on that basis, not on the basis of our independently developed law on abandonment.