Court Opinion

ID: 9747301
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 15:09:21.461473+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:22.597947
License: Public Domain

DEL SOLE, Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent from the Majority’s ruling in this case because I cannot support its conclusion that the in-home warrantless arrest of Appellee, George Quiles, was valid. In *176so ruling the Majority accepts the Commonwealth’s argument that the officers’ entry into the home in which Quiles was arrested was consensual and that under such circumstances it was unnecessary for the police to announce their identity and purpose. It is with the Majority’s initial conclusion, that the entry was consensual, with which I must differ.
The Majority rests its decision on two cases. It begins by citing Commonwealth v. Morgan, 517 Pa. 93, 534 A.2d 1054 (1987), which speaks of the requirement of the police to announce their identity and purpose when they are armed with a search warrant and are told by the resident, after observing him inside, to “come on in.” The issue in Morgan concerned the officer’s duty to comply with the “knock and announce rule” prior to executing a search warrant. The court ruled that such compliance was unnecessary where the police already possessed a warrant and where they observed the defendant inside, called the defendant’s name and heard him respond to “come on in.” Because of these factual differences, I view Morgan as non-instructive on the question of whether, in this case, the officers had authority to enter the premises, without a warrant, after knocking and hearing an unidentified voice answering to “come in.”
The Commonwealth asserts that it was reasonable in this case for the officers to presume that the female who. announced “come in” possessed authority to consent to their entry because they had recovered evidence in a previous search suggesting that a female person lived at the residence. The Commonwealth and the Majority cite Commonwealth v. Blair, 394 Pa.Super. 207, 575 A.2d 593 (1990), to support the conclusion that the entry was consensual. The Blair court ruled that consent must be judged objectively and that it is reasonable for officers to assume that a person answering a door has authority to consent to entry into the residence.
In Blair, the officer knocked on the door of a residence seeking to speak to Mrs. Blair who was suspected of being involved in an automobile accident. The door was answered by Mrs. Blair’s neighbor, who did not identify herself but permitted the police officer to enter. Regarding this set of facts the court stated that “the police officer was reasonably *177mistaken when he assumed that the woman who answered the door had actual authority to admit him.” Although the neighbor in Blair had no actual authority, evidence derived from the officer’s entry into the home was not suppressed because the police officer was found to have made a “reasonable mistake.”
I find the Majority’s reliance on this court’s decision in Blair to be misguided because Blair was decided prior to our Supreme Court’s decision in Commonwealth v. Edmunds, 526 Pa. 374, 586 A.2d 887 (1991). In Edmunds the court expressly rejected the analysis undertaken by the United States Supreme Court in United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984) which concluded that the Fourth Amendment does not mandate the suppression of evidence seized as a result of a constitutionally defect warrant, as long as the officers acted in good faith relying upon a warrant issued by a neutral and detached magistrate. The Edmunds court looked to the purpose of Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizure, and distinguished it from the purpose of deterring police misconduct underlying the exclusionary rule under the Fourth Amendment. Based upon this distinction, the Edmunds court ruled that evidence seized as a result of a search conducted pursuant to a defective search warrant must be suppressed despite the police officer’s “good faith” reliance on the warrant. The court remarked on the strong, historically recognized, right to privacy embodied in our Constitution and stated:
Citizens in this Commonwealth possess such rights, even where a police officer in “good faith” carrying out his or her duties inadvertently invades the privacy or circumvents the strictures of probable cause. To adopt a ‘good faith’ exception to the exclusionary rule, we believe, would virtually emasculate those clear safeguards which have been carefully developed under the Pennsylvania Constitution over the past 200 years.
Id. 526 Pa. at 398, 586 A.2d at 899.
I view the Edmunds decision as negatively impacting on this court’s holding in Blair. I believe the rationale in Ed*178munds cannot support a ruling that it is reasonable for police officers to assume that a person who answers a door has authority to consent to entry and that, based upon this reasonable belief, a mistake as to authority will be overlooked. Edmunds teaches us that the reasonableness of police conduct is irrelevant when examining the strict protections afforded the citizens of this Commonwealth under our Constitution.
In this case the officer’s knock was answered by an unidentified female voice announcing to “come in.” Absent evidence that the officers knew the identity of the speaker, See Commonwealth v. Morgan, supra, (where officer observed the defendant and called his name before defendant answered “come in”), and absent evidence that the speaker had actual authority to consent to the officers’ entry into the premises, I would find that a subsequent search was unconstitutional absent exigent circumstances.
Because I find no evidence of exigent circumstances in this case and because the police officers were presented only with a female voice offering them entry to the premises without evidence of this person’s actual authority to consent to their entry, I would suppress the evidence seized in this case.