Court Opinion

ID: 9797236
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 04:16:04.156141+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:53:32.694581
License: Public Domain

Leben, J.,
concurring: I join the opinion of the court in all respects but one. In discussing the factors for determining whether tire defendant’s confession after an illegal arrest may nonetheless be admitted, the court concludes that the officer’s misconduct was “flagrant.” The court finds that it was flagrant to order Wagner out of his truck at gunpoint, force him to lay on the ground, and handcuff him when there was not probable cause to arrest him.
The majority is right in noting that flagrant misconduct was found in State v. Hill, 281 Kan. 136, 130 P.3d 1 (2006), but the facts leading to the use of force in our case are quite different. In Hill, a police officer ordered Hill at gunpoint from his car while stopped on a city street in Salina. The officer had no cause to suspect Hill of anything other than being with another person whose home was about to be searched under a pending search warrant. In our case, the officers had found an unoccupied pickup truck on a deserted country road in the middle of the night with the hood warm and the keys in the ignition. No one came back to the truck for about an hour, during which time the officers found the barbed wire fence nearby had been freshly cut. Even though they did not have probable cause to arrest anyone, they had reason to believe that “something’s going on,” and that something could well have involved a danger to the officers.
*299In this context, while the officer’s initial actions in taking Wagner into custody may seem overly precautious when the officer does not yet have probable cause to make an arrest, they were not altogether unrelated to the dangers at hand. Thus, I would not label the amount of force initially used to take Wagner into custody flagrant misconduct. The real misconduct here was arresting a person without probable cause, which has often been considered purposeful or flagrant misconduct. See Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590, 605, 45 L. Ed. 2d 416, 95 S. Ct. 2254 (1975) (finding illegal arrest “had a quality of purposefulness” when detectives arrested defendant for investigatory purposes “in the hope that something might turn up”); Dunaway v. New York, 442 U.S. 200, 216, 60 L. Ed. 2d 2824, 99 S. Ct. 2248 (1979) (same); Taylor v. Alabama, 457 U.S. 687, 690-91, 73 L. Ed. 2d 314, 102 S. Ct. 2664 (1982) (same).
Whether we call the police misconduct purposeful or flagrant here does not affect the result in this case, and I agree fully with the remainder of the opinion. Wagner was in custody for 10 straight hours here before he made his statement, and he had no reason to believe he would be released anytime soon. The officers had told him that he was being investigated by federal authorities and others but that a confession to the Emporia officers might well make things easier for him. In these circumstances, the effects of the unlawful arrest were not attenuated, as the court’s opinion properly concludes. See Taylor, 457 U.S. 687 (confession not admissible when only 6 hours elapsed between illegal arrest and confession and defendant in police custody entire time). The result would be the same here whether Wagner had been nicely asked to exit the vehicle and then arrested or whether, as occurred, he was forced from the vehicle at gunpoint.