Court Opinion

ID: 9776102
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 19:19:02.693489+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:03:52.411375
License: Public Domain

OPINION

WOMACK, J.,
delivered the opinion of the Court,
in which McCORMICK, P.J., and MANSFIELD, KELLER, and HOLLAND, JJ., joined.
This case calls on us to decide whether the search and seizure provision of the Texas Constitution was violated when a peace officer went to the aid of a motorist who was unconscious in his vehicle on a public highway.
I.
About 2:00 a.m. on April 29, 1995, Officer T.A. Page of the Benbrook Police Department was dispatched to the intersection of the westbound service road of Southwest Loop 820 and Winscott “to assist another officer on an ambulance call. A woman — it was reported that there was a woman possibly having a heart attack in a vehicle at that address.” Page was the first officer to arrive. He found a pickup truck “sitting in the inside lane” of the service road, which is marked for a turn lane, about 50 feet back from the intersection. An individual with “long hair in a ponytail” was “slumped over the steering wheel. Just like he was asleep or passed out or possibly had a heart attack or something and was laying over the steering wheel.” The truck’s engine was running; all the windows were rolled up. There was no other traffic on the road.
Page pulled his marked vehicle around, behind the truck, and activated his emergency lights. The officer’s main concerns were “emergency medical concerns at that point ... to make sure he was alive and well.” Like all Benbrook police officers, Page was a “first responder unit ... trained in CPR and first aid.” It was a philosophy of the police department to be “service-oriented” and “help the community out.” Officers used “citizen assist cards” to record such activities.
Page got out of his vehicle, walked up to the truck, and started rapping on the window to try to awaken the (haver, who he could now see was a man. At first the driver did not respond at all. Another officer, Doug Bird, arrived, and both officers kept rapping at the window and yelling at the driver to wake up. “He eventually woke up and pulled the handle on the door and opened the door.” The driver seemed to be disoriented, and Page smelled an odor of alcohol about him. The driver said “he was okay, things like that.” One of the officers asked him to step out of the vehicle, and the driver complied. As he did so, the truck, which had a standard transmission that was not in gear, began rolling backward.
The officers began an investigation for DWI. The parties stipulated that the driver was the appellant, and that at a trial the State would offer additional testimony about the investigation that the State “would not be able to elicit in fact but for the initial detention.”
*433The appellant was indicted for the offense of driving while intoxicated which was enhanced by two previous DWI convictions. See Penal Code §§ 49.04 & 49.09(b). He filed a written motion to suppress evidence “because of the violation of the Defendant’s rights against unreasonable search and seizure solely under Tex. Const. Art. I, Sec. 9, 10 and 19; and Tex.Code Crim. Proc. Ann. Arts. 1.04, 1.05, 1.06, 38.21, 38.22 and 38.23.” The appellant withdrew an earlier motion which had invoked both state and federal constitutions. He told the trial court that “the Texas Constitution and law ... are the only issues that are before the Court in this motion.”
The trial court denied the motion to suppress evidence after hearing the testimony and stipulations which we have summarized. The appellant waived trial by jury and pleaded guilty. The court assessed a sentence of 5 years’ imprisonment, suspended for a period of 10 years, and a fine of $1,250. The sentence did not exceed the recommendation of the State, to which the appellant and his attorney had agreed. This appeal is based on the trial court’s denial of the appellant’s motion to suppress evidence. The Second Court of Appeals affirmed. Hulit v. State, 947 S.W.2d 707 (Tex.App.—Fort Worth 1997).
We granted review of the appellant’s ground that the lower courts were in error “because there is no ‘community caretaking function’ exception to the warrant requirement under Texas law.” Appellant’s Petition at 4.
II.
It is well to make clear at the start what is in issue, and what is not. The trial court ruled that the appellant was detained when the officers asked the appellant to get out of his truck. The Court of Appeals did not rule on that question of when the detention began, and we have not granted review to consider it. We shall assume, without deciding, that the appellant was seized when he was told to step out of his truck.
Nor is it an issue whether, before the point of seizure that we have identified, there was reasonable suspicion to believe that the appellant was driving while intoxicated (as the trial court ruled), or whether the seizure was based on a reasonable suspicion that a criminal offense was being committed in the officers’ presence because of a violation of any section of the Traffic Code, such as those that regulate stopping and standing vehicles on streets and highways. The Court of Appeals made no decision on those issues for us to review.
The Court of Appeals clearly identified the issue as whether, “when an officer reasonably believes that the safety of an individual, or the public, is threatened, he may perform a ‘community caretaking’ function, unrelated to the detection or investigation of crime, by detaining the individual without a warrant.” Hulit v. State, 947 S.W.2d at 709.
Less clear was that court’s basis for resolving the issue. The Court of Appeals correctly pointed out that the appellant expressly waived any complaint under the federal constitution and statutes, and was proceeding under the Texas Constitution. Ibid. The Court of Appeals also criticized the appellant for erroneously summarizing one of our opinions on the state constitution, and for failing to adequately brief his state constitutional ground. Ibid. The Court refused to “make an argument for appellant” as to why the state constitution would provide more protection. Id. at 709 n. 3. And it said it would “only consider his state jurisprudential arguments.” Id. at 709. This language could, but we think should not, be construed as saying that the Court of Appeals would not consider the appellant’s state constitutional ground, and that it was resolving the case on non-constitutional state jurisprudence. There is no self-contained, common law jurisprudence of the right to be free from unlawful search and seizure. There could not be a “state jurisprudential argument” on search and seizure that is not based on some constitutional or statutory provision. We think the Court of Appeals was saying that it would interpret the Texas Constitution in light of the appellant’s arguments that were based on state jurisprudence, and that it would not invent any other constitutional arguments for him.
*434The appellant made it very clear in the district court that he was relying solely on the state constitution and laws. In this court he has narrowed the basis of this argument to the state constitutional provision on search and seizure, summarizing his argument as, “This Court should not adopt as an exception to Tex. Const. Art. I, Section 9 the ‘community caretaking’ function adopted by the Court of Appeals below.” Appellant’s Brief at 3.
Therefore we can finally identify the precise issue that is before us: whether Article I, Section 9 of the Texas Constitution was violated by the officers’ detaining the appellant without a warrant to determine if he needed first aid, a seizure which the officers made in performance of a community care-taking function, unrelated to the detection or investigation of crime.
III.
Article I, Section 9 of the Texas Constitution recognizes the right of the people to be secure from all unreasonable seizures or searches. ■ To prove that his right under that section was violated, the appellant presents this argument:
Warrantless searches are per se unreasonable unless they fall into a recognized exception to the warrant requirement. [Harris v. United States, 331 U.S. 145, 67 S.Ct. 1098, 91 L.Ed. 1399 (1947) ]. It is well settled that the exceptions to the warrant requirement require the existence of probable cause and an exigent circumstance to be valid. Id. The alleged “community caretaking function” requires no such exigent circumstances or probable cause and thus is not a legitimate exception to the warrant requirement. [HJence any arrest, search and seizure based thereon is per se unreasonable.
Appellant’s Brief at 14 (citation omitted).
The first sentence of the appellant’s argument makes three distinct assertions: There is a warrant requirement in the constitution; there are recognized exceptions to the warrant requirement; warrantless searches are per se unreasonable if they do not fall within a recognized exception. We need not decide at this point whether these assertions are the actual holdings of the Supreme Court in Harris, or whether they have been altered by the jurisprudence of the past 50 years, or even the relevance of a holding about searches in a case about seizures.1 Harris is about the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and we have “expressly conclude[d] that this Court, when analyzing and interpreting Art. I, § 9, Tex. Const., will not be bound by Supreme Court decisions addressing the comparable Fourth Amendment issue.” Heitman v. State, 815 S.W.2d 681, 690 (Tex.Cr.App.1991). To decide whether the appellant’s argument is correct, we must decide whether his assertions are true for the Texas Constitution.
The appellant argues that the warrant requirement of the Texas Constitution was violated when he was seized without a warrant under circumstances that did not fall within an established exception. By “the warrant requirement,” he means a requirement that a seizure be authorized by a *435warrant, in the absence of which the seizure would be unlawful even if it were otherwise reasonable. Is there such a requirement in Article I, Section 9 of the Texas Constitution? We shall examine the text of the Constitution, refer to our prior decisions, consider the history of the common law, and consider Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.
Article I, Section 9 reads:
The people shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers and possessions, from all unreasonable seizures or searches, and no warrant to search any place, or to seize any person or thing, shall issue without describing them as near as may be, nor without probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation.
Section 9, like the Fourth Amendment,2 comprises two, independent clauses. The first recognizes the right to be free from unreasonable seizures or searches. The second imposes limits on warrants. Neither clause requires a warrant or even authorizes a warrant. The warrant clause does not say when a warrant must issue, or when it may issue; it says only when warrants may not issue. It is cast in the negative (“no warrant ... shall issue”). And even if a warrant met the minimum requirements of the warrant clause (description, probable cause, and affidavit), the warrant still would be unlawful if the seizure or search that it authorized were unreasonable. The natural reading of Section 9 does not support the appellant’s assertion that it requires a warrant for a reasonable seizure.
In our prior decisions, we have not found a warrant requirement in Article I, Section 9. In finding constitutional a statute which required common carriers to allow peace officers to inspect their records of shipments of intoxicating liquors, this Court pointed out, “It is not every search that our Constitution inhibits. It is only unreasonable searches. In our opinion that provision of our Bill of Rights prohibiting unreasonable seizures and searches, if it has any application whatever to the statute in question in this case, has in no way been violated, and said act of the Legislature is, in our opinion, in every way valid and constitutional.” Hughes v. State, 67 Tex. Cr. 333, 361, 149 S.W. 173, 184 (1912). Therefore the warrant clause in Section 9 does not mean that a warrant is indispensable to a valid search and seizure. A.J. Thomas and Ann Van Wynen Thomas, “Interpretive Commentary,” 1 Vernon’s Annotated Texas Constitution 438 (1997).
Historical considerations give no support to the contention that the Texas Constitution imposes a general requirement of a warrant to seize a person. At common law, seizure of a person (that is, arrest) was permitted when an officer had probable cause to believe that the person was committing, or had committed, a felony, or that the person was committing a misdemeanor involving a breach of the peace in the officer’s presence. See Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132, 156-57, 45 S.Ct. 280, 69 L.Ed. 543 (1925). The arrest statutes of Texas follow the common law pattern, except that they expand the officer’s authority by permitting warrantless arrest for any misdemeanor committed in the officer’s presence regardless of whether it involves a breach of the peace,3 and for certain misdemeanors that are not committed in the officer’s presence.4
We have recognized that, because of the similarities of the search and seizure provisions in the state and federal constitutions, United States Supreme Court cases may be permissive authority in interpreting the Texas Constitution. See Heitman v. State, 815 S.W.2d at 690 n. 22. But we do not find persuasive the appellant’s citation of Fourth Amendment law from the Supreme Court on this subject. First, the holding that the Fourth Amendment requires a war*436rant is, as the appellant’s brief says, a requirement for searches. The Fourth Amendment does not require a warrant for a seizure of a person that does not involve an intrusion into a home. United States v. Watson, 423 U.S. 411, 96 S.Ct. 820, 46 L.Ed.2d 598 (1976). Cf. Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980).
Second, although the Supreme Court has frequently said that the Fourth Amendment imposes a general warrant requirement for searches,5 these statements have often been followed by the Court’s statements that the central inquiry under the Fourth Amendment is the reasonableness of the search or seizure under the totality of the circumstances.6 It is the latter approach which we find consistent with the language of Article I, Section 9 of the Texas Constitution.
Third, historical research indicates that the Framers’ primary, if not sole, concern in drafting the Fourth Amendment was avoiding a repetition of the British colonial practice of issuing general warrants or warrants based on bare suspicion.7 Such warrants were doubly pernicious because they not only authorized intrusions on the privacy of the colonists, they prevented civil redress by shielding the executing officers from civil liability.8 Supreme Court cases which have held that the Fourth Amendment was intended to impose a warrant requirement are not well founded in historical fact. Insofar as Article I, Section 9 of the Texas Constitution was directed at preventing the same evil that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prevent, the history of the Fourth Amendment informs our interpretation of its meaning.
Fourth, by finding a general requirement of a warrant to which there are exceptions, the Supreme Court has created a jurisprudential mare’s nest.9 There are so many exceptions to the warrant requirement that most searches and seizures are conducted without warrants and justified under one of the exceptions. Such a model of the Fourth Amendment not only makes a mockery of the supposed requirement, it interferes with a more fine-tuned assessment of the competing interests at stake.10 For these reasons we find the Supreme Court’s statements about a warrant requirement unpersuasive.
It is our holding that Article I, Section 9 of the Texas Constitution contains no requirement that a seizure or search be authorized by a warrant, and that a seizure or search that is otherwise reasonable will not be found to be in violation of that section because it was not authorized by a warrant.
This is not to say that statutes which require warrants for seizure or search may be ignored. Nor do we say that the issuance of a warrant by a neutral magistrate may not be a factor in the totality of circumstances by which we judge whether a seizure or search was reasonable.
We understand that our holding means that Section 9 of our Bill of Rights does not offer greater protection to the individual than the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and it may offer less protection. But our holding is the construction that is faithful to the Constitution which our people have adopted, and it is our duty to interpret that Constitution indepen*437dent of the interpretations of federal courts. Heitman v. State, supra.
As the Court of Appeals noted in this case, Heitman does not mean that the Texas Constitution cannot be interpreted to give less protection than the federal constitution. It only means that the Texas Constitution will be interpreted independently. See Hulit v. State, 947 S.W.2d at 709. Its protections may be lesser, greater, or the same as those of the federal constitution.11
• In Heitman, we repeated the dictum of our sister court: “The federal constitution sets the floor for individual rights; state constitutions establish the ceiling.” LeCroy v. Hanlon, 713 S.W.2d 335, 338 (Tex.Sup. 1986). With all respect to our Sister Court, we think its metaphor is wrong. The state constitution and the federal constitution are not parts of one legal building; each is its own structure. Their shapes may be different, as may their parts. Each may shield rights that the other does not. The ceiling of one may be lower than the floor of the other. Because of the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution, a defendant who is entitled to claim a the protection of a federal provision may receive a greater protection from that floor than the greatest protection that the ceiling of the Texas Constitution would give him. But that does not mean that the Texas Constitution has no ceilings that are lower than those of the federal constitution. See Welchek v. State, 93 Tex. Cr. 271, 247 S.W. 524 (1922) (Article I, Section 9 creates no exclusionary rule similar to that found in Fourth Amendment for federal prosecutions).
In our holding there is no violation of the Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the United States Constitution.
State courts are the final interpreters of state law even though their actions are reviewable under the federal constitution, treaties, or laws. The supreme court of a state is truly the highest court in terms of this body of law and it is not a “lower court” even in relation to the Supreme Court of the United States. It must follow the Supreme Court’s rulings on the meaning of the Constitution of the United States or federal law, but it is free to interpret state laws or the state constitution in any way that does not violate principles of federal law.
John E. Nowak, Ronald D. Rotunda, J. Nelson Young, 1 Treatise on Constitutional Law 31 (1986). We do not make any holding about the appellant’s rights under federal law.12 In this case, the appellant has chosen not to seek any shelter in the federal constitution. (In our architectural metaphor, he may not be able to fit his facts under the federal ceiling.) This case has called on us to decide whether our constitution will give him the shelter he wants. It does not.
The Supremacy Clause means that, in practical terms, persons will always be able to avail themselves of the greater right. This is very important to litigants and their counsel, who are naturally and properly result-oriented. But it does not mean that a court, faithfully interpreting state laws, can only find in them protections that equal or exceed federal laws.
*438We find that the police officers acted reasonably when they approached the vehicle in which the appellant was slumped unconscious on a public highway, awakened the appellant, and asked him to step out so they could see if he was in need of assistance. We hold that Article I, Section 9 of the Texas Constitution was not violated by their actions. We do this, not by finding that there is a community care-taking exception to a warrant requirement, but by asking whether, from the totality of the circumstances, after considering the public and private interests that are at stake, their action was an unreasonable seizure. It was not.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is affirmed.
McCORMICK, P.J., filed a concurring opinion.
MEYERS, J., filed a concurring opinion.
KELLER, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which McCORMICK, P.J., joined.
PRICE, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which MEYERS, J., joined.
BAIRD, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which OVERSTREET, J., joined.

. We will note that the dissent’s statement, "It is axiomatic that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against 'unreasonable searches and seizures’ is premised on the Warrant Clause” (post at 446), is wrong.
The Amendment is silent as to how the Reasonableness Clause and the Warrant Clause interact with one another, nor is it clear which clause should be considered the most important. [I]n the arrest context the manner in which the Supreme Court has interpreted the relationship between the two clauses is fairly straightforward. For other searches and seizures, the Court’s jurisprudence has been somewhat more difficult to pin down.
Two competing approaches can be discerned in the Court's cases. The first [like the dissent’s] assumes that the Warrant Clause is the predominant clause ....
However, there is a competing perspective on the Fourth Amendment which, in practice if not in theory, seems to have gained the ascendancy. As summarized by the Court in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968), a case decided one year after Katz [which the dissents cites], "the central inquiry under the Fourth Amendment (is) the reasonableness in all the circumstances of the particular governmental invasion of a citizen’s personal security. ...
Both approaches have been adopted in Supreme Court opinions.”
Charles H. Whitebread & Christopher Slobogin, Criminal Procedure 129-30 (3d ed. 1993).

. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” U.S. Const, amend. IV.

. See Tex.Code Crim. Proc. art. 14.01. In this regard Texas law is like the laws of most American jurisdictions. See Charles H. Whitebread and Christopher Slobogin, Criminal Procedure 86 n.73 (1993).

. See Tex.Code Crim. Proc. art. 14.03(a).

. E.g., Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967) (opinion of Stewart, J.). See Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 68 S.Ct. 367, 92 L.Ed. 436 (1948).

. E.g., Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968). See United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 70 S.Ct. 430, 94 L.Ed. 653 (1950).

. Charles H. Whitebread & Christopher Slobogin, Criminal Procedure 130 (3d. ed 1993) ("There is considerable historical support ....”); Akhil Reed Amar, The Constitution and Criminal Procedure 10-13 (1997); Telford Taylor, Two Studies in Constitutional Interpretation 41 (1969) ("[0]ur constitutional fathers were not concerned about warrantless searches, but about overreaching warrants”).

. Amar, supra n. 7, at 13-16.

. Craig Bradley, Two Models of the Fourth Amendment, 83 Mich. L. Rev. 1468, 1475 (1985) ("By its continued adherence to the warrant requirement in theory, though not in fact, the Court has sown massive confusion among the police and lower courts”).

. See Whitebread and Slobogin, supra n. 2, at 130.

. The dissent is mistaken in saying that this court cannot interpret our state constitution as affording less protection than the federal constitution. See post at 444-445. As a distinguished state jurist and leader of the new federalism said, "The right question, is not whether a state's guarantee is the same as or broader than its federal counterpart as interpreted by the Supreme Court. The right question is what the state’s guarantee means and how it applies to the case at hand. The answer may turn out the same as it would under federal law. The state’s law may prove to be more protective than federal law. The state law also may be less protective. In that case the court must go on to decide the claim under federal law, assuming it has been raised." Hans A. Linde, E Pluribus — Constitutional Theory and State Courts, 18 Ga. L. Rev. 165, 179 (1984).

. The dissent cites McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 4 L.Ed. 579 (1819). Post at 444. As we know, Maryland’s law taxing a federal bank was held to be unconstitutional. But the state law we are construing is not violating federal law. Texas' search and seizure provision is not taking away the appellant's rights under the Fourth Amendment. It simply offers different, and parallel, rights to the appellant, who is free to invoke whichever right is greater. It is as though the United States law and Maryland law taxed banks which, if they were federally chartered, could choose to pay whichever tax was lower.