Court Opinion

ID: 9521451
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:05:22.093157+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:49:46.835764
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE GOLDENHERSH, dissenting: I dissent and would affirm the judgment of the appellate court. In Payton v. New York (1980), 445 U.S. 573, 63 L. Ed. 2d 639, 100 S. Ct. 1371, the Supreme Court made it clear that warrantless arrests in a home are presumptively unreasonable and that in the absence of exigent circumstances the presence of probable cause is not sufficient to justify a warrantless arrest. Here the record contains no evidence to support a finding of probable cause that the occupants of the apartment were in any manner involved in the offenses mentioned in the informer’s tip or in any subsequent occurrence, and there was no evidence of exigent circumstances. Officer Vitek, who received the telephone tip, candidly admitted that the informant obtained his information from an unidentified third party to whose reliability he could not attest. The tip provided only the information that the suspect lived in Lisle and drove a 1975 maroon-over-white Pontiac. As it turned out, the automobile was not even owned by the defendant. It was, in fact, owned by his father. The informant’s tip referred to “Fotomat” robberies, with no information concerning locations or dates. There was nothing to connect these defendants to those robberies, and there was no robbery of a Fotomat on the night in question. One of the occupants of the Pontiac was in a restaurant for a very brief period, and it was then reported that the restaurant had been robbed. The police, in attempting to follow the vehicle, lost it in traffic, and when it was again seen it was unoccupied and parked in the lot of a large apartment complex. There was no testimony concerning the source of the police information that Killian or any of the other defendants occupied the apartment where the search took place. There was no testimony which connected the individuals who occupied the automobile during the surveillance with the apartment which the police entered. The efforts of the majority to bootstrap a “reasonable inference” fails because there is no evidence, and Officer Damico’s comment concerning “the information received” does not serve as a substitute for evidence. The record contains no evidence of exigent circumstances. There were at least 10 or 12 police officers in the surveillance teams, and there was no testimony to explain why officers could not have been stationed at the automobile and near the apartment to prevent an escape while search and arrest warrants were obtained. There is no testimony to indicate that an escape, if indeed one was possible or contemplated, could have been effected in any manner other than by use of the automobile, and obviously an escape would have been very easily prevented. The majority states that the exigent-circumstances exception to the warrant requirement applies when police officers enter the apartment in pursuit of an armed subject whom they have probable cause to believe committed a known offense. As an abstract proposition this is probably true, but those are not the facts in this case. When the police went to the apartment they could hardly have been in “hot pursuit” because they could not possibly have known whether the individuals who they saw in the automobile outside the restaurant, and who were not identified, had entered the apartment. The majority states, too, that the police moved quickly to apprehend suspects they had reason to believe were armed. Again, I do not quarrel with the abstract proposition, but there is no evidence which connects the occupants of the apartment with the robbery which the police had allegedly witnessed and as was made obvious by the search, the occupants of the apartment were not armed. The circuit and appellate courts correctly decided this matter and I would affirm the judgment. JUSTICE SIMON joins in this dissent.