Court Opinion

ID: 9797223
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 04:15:37.89319+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:53:29.403579
License: Public Domain

Hill, J.
dissenting: I must respectfully dissent. The majority holds that Officer Tucker had legitimate reasons to seize the cigarette pack from the defendant. I agree. In circumstances such as these, a police officer must decide, within seconds, whether to allow the defendant to grab something from her purse. Johnson disobeyed Officer Tucker’s directive to not reach into her purse. Officer Tucker knew from experience that people involved with drugs and prostitution often carried razors in cigarette packages. Based on Officer Tucker’s training, experience, and instincts honed by experience, he thought it important to secure the cigarette pack from this woman’s grasp. After considering all the circumstances, the district court held this search reasonable, as would I.
I do not agree with the majority’s conclusion. As I understand its ruling, once the officer seized the cigarette pack, he could not legally examine the contents of the cigarette pack to see if it held a weapon about which he was concerned. The majority concludes, after the fact, that since Officer Tucker had not suspected Johnson was involved in the drug trade before he seized the cigarette pack, the search of the cigarette pack was impermissible since it was no longer in her control. Does this mean that an officer can lawfully seize a container for his or her protection but then not examine its contents to discover if there is indeed danger? If that indeed is the rule, I pray the container has no exploding device.
Citing cases from other jurisdictions, the majority firsts makes the comparison of a cigarette pack to a purse. Then the majority compares a purse to a car and refers to Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332, 173 L. Ed. 2d. 485, 129 S. Ct. 1710 (2009), as support. Obviously, the majority thinks a cigarette pack is comparable to a car. I find this reasoning strained for the circumstances and expectations of privacy surrounding such searches are different. We must have some sense of reasonable proportion here. A glance inside an open cigarette pack is not the same intrusion as an officer pawing through the contents of a purse nor is it the same as a methodical search of a car for weapons or contraband. I would not hold that one has the same expectation of privacy in a cigarette pack as one’s expectation of privacy in a purse, a container of valuables and per*810sonal items. Nor do I find a cigarette pack the same as a car, a conveyance capable of holding many things. The majority stretches the point when making the analogy of a cigarette pack with an automobile.