Court Opinion

ID: 9572437
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:41:38.058553+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:32:56.231219
License: Public Domain

WARDEN, J.,
dissenting.
The majority holds that defendant owned the backpack and its contents but that, somehow, he had no constitutionally protected interest in them. That holding violates Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution. It is based on a distinction between abandonment of ownership and abandonment “in the constitutional context,” 89 Or App at 404, which has no basis in Oregon law. I therefore dissent.
The majority seems to recognize that, if defendant retained any rights in the backpack, the officer violated them when he searched it. The only purpose for which the officer could legitimately look through the pack, based on the information that he had when he did so, was to discover who owned it. The trial court stated that it was unlikely that the leather bag contained any identification, and I agree. Accordingly, the search fits the general “principle that, in a non-investigative, nonemergency situation, it is unreasonable for an officer to open a closed container.” State v. Rounds, 73 Or App 148, 155, 698 P2d 71, rev den 299 Or 663 (1985); see also State v. Keller, 265 Or 622, 510 P2d 568 (1973).1
The majority does not claim that defendant abandoned his ownership of the backpack when he dropped it. Such a claim would be untenable, because abandonment of ownership requires that defendant voluntarily relinquish possession of the pack with the intention of terminating his ownership without vesting ownership in any other person. Dober v. Ukase Investment Co., 139 Or 626, 629, 10 P2d 356 *408(1932); Rich v. Runyon, 52 Or App 107, 112-13, 627 P2d 1265 (1981); see also 1 CJS, “Abandonment,” § 6. Rather, the majority asserts that defendant abandoned his constitutional protections in the pack. In arriving at that conclusion, the majority relies on a case decided under the Fourth Amendment and ignores at least the last five years of Oregon search and seizure case law.
In State v. Green, 44 Or App 253, 605 P2d 746 (1980), the case on which the majority relies, the defendant and a companion had fled on foot after being chased in their car by friends of a person whose house they had burglarized. They left their car after finding themselves on a dead-end street. The police impounded the car and searched it without a warrant. We held:
“Where two suspected thieves have been pursued from the scene of an apparent burglary and finally leap from their car and flee, they have abandoned any expectation of privacy with respect to the car in the same way that a fleeing robber who drops a bag of loot has abandoned the loot. Society is not prepared to recognize as reasonable — and the constitution does not compel it to recognize as reasonable — any subjective expectation of (or hope for) privacy the fleeing burglars may have retained in the car they left behind.”
While the opinion does not state on which constitution it relies, it cites Fourth Amendment cases, including one federal court of appeals case. 44 Or App at 259.
We decided State v. Green, supra, in the period between State v. Florance, 270 Or 169, 527 P2d 1202 (1974), and State v. Caraher, 293 Or 741, 653 P2d 942 (1982), a period when the Oregon Supreme Court was construing Article I, section 9, consistently with federal interpretations of the Fourth Amendment. Our decision followed that lead and determined the defendant’s rights in the car by applying the federal “reasonable expectation of privacy test” derived from Katz v. United States, 389 US 347, 88 S Ct 507, 19 L Ed 2d 576 (1967). Our statement that “the facts in this case constitute abandonment — not abandonment in the common law sense, but abandonment for constitutional purposes,” 44 Or App at 259, is meaningless except in the context of the Katz test.
With State v. Caraher, supra, the Supreme Court reasserted the independent status of Article I, section 9. In *409State v. Flores, 68 Or App 617, 685 P2d 999, rev den 298 Or 151 (1984), we concluded that it would “treat post-Florance but pre-Caraher cases as federally-based and as deciding nothing under the Oregon Constitution, even when they purport to adopt a federal rule as the Oregon constitutional rule.” 68 Or App at 625. That prediction was correct. See, e.g., State v. Tanner, 304 Or 312, 745 P2d 757 (1987); State v. Owens, 302 Or 196, 729 P2d 524 (1986); State v. Kock, 302 Or 29, 725 P2d 1285 (1986). Thus, State v. Green, supra, retains precedential value only if the Katz test is consistent with Oregon law; it is not.
Article I, section 9, protects the people’s right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable search, or seizure * * In State v. Turechek, 74 Or App 228, 702 P2d 1131 (1985), the issue was whether an officer could properly search a pickup truck for its vehicle identification number (VIN). Cases from other jurisdictions were in conflict on whether vehicle owners had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the VIN or in the area of the vehicle where it was located. We did not decide the case on that basis. We simply noted that the “protection of Article I, section 9, extends to ‘effects’, among which defendant’s pickup is surely included.” 74 Or App at 232. We therefore held that the officer conducted a search when he opened the truck’s door to find the VIN. That holding was consistent with our previous holding that the Katz test was irrelevant when a place searched was within the curtilage of the defendant’s home. See State v. Ohling, 70 Or App 249, 252 n 4, 688 P2d 1384, rev den 298 Or 334 (1984); State v. Russo, 68 Or App 760, 764 n 1, 683 P2d 163 (1984). Even if Katz had any role under the Oregon Constitution, that test could not reduce the protection which the constitution explicitly affords. “If a police intrusion is a trespass into the defendant’s home, papers or effects, it violates the defendant’s rights.” State v. Dixson/Digby, 87 Or App 1, 9 n 8, 740 P2d 1224, rev allowed 304 Or 437 (1987). If a person owns property, that person necessarily retains rights in it which the constitution protects. There is no distinction under the Oregon Constitution between abandonment for common law purposes and for constitutional purposes.
State v. Tanner, supra, makes that point clear. In Tanner, the police, while searching a house in violation of Article I, section 9, discovered property which the defendant *410had pledged to the owner of the house as security for a loan. The issue was whether the defendant could assert the illegality of the search in order to exclude the evidence from his trial for theft of the property. The Supreme Court emphasized that Article I, section 9, protects both privacy and property interests: privacy interests from search and property interests from seizure. 304 Or at 319; see also State v. Owens, supra, 302 Or at 206; State v. Elkins, 245 Or 279, 286-88, 422 P2d 250 (1966). Because the defendant attacked only the discovery of the property, not its seizure, the court emphasized his privacy interest. However, in doing so it criticized the Katz test, 304 Or at 321-22 n 7, and did not use it in determining the defendant’s rights. Rather than having those rights depend on the defendant’s expectations, it held that an illegal police search which violated the rights of the person to whom the defendant entrusted the property also violated the defendant’s rights.
The Supreme Court rejected the state’s arguments that the defendant’s limited rights to the property meant that he had no privacy interest in it:
“The state contends that defendant had no immediate right of access to the tapes and equipment, but that fact alone does not preclude defendant’s continuing entrustment of the effects. So long as there remained a possibility that defendant would reclaim the effects, the entrustment was sufficiently viable to demonstrate that the illegal search of the Best residence violated his privacy interest under section 9.” 304 Or at 323. (Emphasis supplied.)
Accordingly, the defendant in State v. Tanner, supra, had a continuing privacy interest in the property that he had pledged and which he might lose if he could not repay the loan. In the present case, defendant also had continuing property and privacy interests in a backpack whose ownership he did not abandon and in which he, unlike the defendant in Tanner, continued to have the paramount right of possession. If anything, his interests are stronger than those of the defendant in Tanner. Article I, section 9, gives those interests protection, which the officer’s search violated, and which the majority strips from him by its unfounded distinction between property law and constitutional abandonment. I cannot agree and therefore dissent.
*411Joseph, C. J., and Newman, J., join in this dissenting opinion.

 There is no evidence that the officer acted in accordance with a properly authorized administrative program, designed and administered so that his actions involved no exercise of discretion. See State v. Atkinson, 298 Or 1, 688 P2d 832 (1984).