Court Opinion

ID: 9584084
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:44:28.942885+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:06:31.876063
License: Public Domain

Benham, Chief Justice.
This appeal is from the trial court’s grant of a motion to suppress evidence in a murder prosecution. See OCGA § 5-7-1 (a) (4). Testimony at the hearing on the motion to suppress outlined the following events. On January 15, 1998, shortly after 10:00 p.m., Terri Lynn Peterson made an emergency call to 911 because her five-year-old nephew, Terrell Peterson, was not breathing. The child was taken by emergency personnel to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead. Detective Griffie of the Atlanta Police Department, who was assigned to the case, arrived at the hospital shortly after midnight. There he observed the dead child’s body with numerous bruises, abrasions and cuts covering his head, face, torso and extremities. After consulting with medical personnel, Detective Griffie formed the opinion that the child had been the victim of severe abuse, neglect, strangulation, and starvation. Detective Griffie spoke with Terri Lynn Peterson and learned that two small children, ages six and eleven, were still present at the Peterson home with Terri Lynn Peterson’s boyfriend, Calvin Pittman. When he arrived at the Peterson home, the detective was admitted into the home by two uniformed police officers who told him that Pittman had been taken from the home to police headquarters for questioning and that they were caring for the two minor children who were without adult supervision. Being concerned for the safety of the two minor children who were in a bedroom on the second floor of the Peterson home, Detective Griffie immediately initiated efforts to contact relatives to take care of the children. He did so by climbing the stairs to the second floor of the home to ask the children the identity of their nearest relatives. At the top of the stairs, he noticed a pair of pantyhose on the banister in front of the bedroom and several notes attached to the door of the bedroom in which the children were sleeping.1 When he *658entered the bedroom, one of the children was suffering an asthma attack and Detective Griffie, with the assistance of the other child, helped the stricken child obtain access to a breathing machine in an adjoining bedroom. Through the open door of another bedroom, Detective Griffie saw a belt and a piece of telephone cord that could have been used to cause the injuries he had observed on the victim in the hospital emergency room. The children told Detective Griffie that the pantyhose were used to tie the victim to the bannister.
After meeting with no success in locating relatives of the two minor children, Detective Griffie arranged for court-ordered placement of the children in a shelter. Detective Griffie had a police photographer come to the Peterson home and take pictures of the pantyhose, the rope, the belt, and the notes affixed to the door of the children’s bedroom, then seized the articles.
The grand jury indicted Terri Lynn Peterson, Calvin Pittman, and Pharina Peterson, the victim’s grandmother, for malice murder, three counts of felony murder, aggravated assault, aggravated battery, and three counts of cruelty to a child. The defendants moved for suppression of the items seized by Detective Griffie and the photographs made at his direction. The trial court granted the motion, finding that Detective Griffie was not authorized to seize the items without a warrant under the “plain view doctrine” because no exigent circumstances required his presence in the apartment.
The “plain view doctrine,” which must be considered on a case-by-case basis (United States v. Anderson, 154 F3d 1225, 1233 (10th Cir. 1998)), permits the warrantless seizure of evidence visible to a police officer who sees it from a vantage point the officer is legally entitled to occupy. State v. McTaggart, 241 Ga. App. 852 (528 SE2d 309) (2000). See also State v. David, 269 Ga. 533 (2) (501 SE2d 494) (1998). There is no question that the evidence at issue was in Detective Griffie’s plain view. Whether Detective Griffie was authorized to be where he was when he saw the evidence is the key to this appeal. Applying a common sense approach to the matter, we conclude that there are two reasons why Detective Griffie was authorized to enter the home without a warrant, and that the trial court erred in concluding otherwise.2
1. In its order granting the motion to suppress, the trial court *659relied on the presence of uniformed officers to hold that no exigent circumstances existed to authorize Detective Grifiie’s entry. Necessarily implicit in that ruling, and crucial to its rationale, is the legality of the uniformed officers’ presence in the home to secure it and to protect the children. That being so, Detective Grifiie’s entry for the purpose of seeing that the children who had been left without responsible adult supervision were cared for properly was not a violation of the residents’ Fourth Amendment rights.
[Additional investigators or officials may . . . enter a citizen’s property after one official has already intruded legally. [Cits.] Later arrivals may join their colleagues even though the exigent circumstances justifying the initial entry no longer exist. [Cit.]
United States v. Brand, 556 F2d 1312, 1317 (5th Cir. 1977).
Of course, the later officials must confine their intrusion to the scope of the original invasion unless a warrant or one of the exceptions to the warrant requirement justifies a more thorough or wide ranging search.
Id. at fa. 9.
The only evidence regarding Detective Griffie’s entry into the house was that he did it for the purpose of caring for the children. Since that is the role the trial court implicitly found the uniformed officers to be serving, Detective Griffie’s intrusion was limited to the scope of the original intrusion and was, therefore, legal notwithstanding the exigency no longer existed.
The dissent’s suggestion that reliance on the necessary implication in the trial court’s order is illogical depends on the dissent’s unfounded speculation regarding the trial court’s reasoning. Without reliance on such speculation, a clear-eyed reading of the trial court’s order reveals that without such an implied finding, the order makes no sense. We are unwilling to dismiss so lightly the reasoning of the trial court.
2. Nonetheless, if the trial court’s order were to be construed as not to include a holding that the uniformed officers were legitimately present to care for the children, the fact that the children were without responsible adult supervision because of the action of police officers would constitute an exigent circumstance that would authorize Detective Griffie to enter the home to assist the children. A law enforcement officer may make a legally permissible warrantless entry into a residence when exigent circumstances exist. State v. David, supra at 536 (3). Knowledge or the reasonable belief that minor children in a residence are without adult supervision is an exi*660gent circumstance that authorizes police entry to help those believed to be in need of immediate aid. State v. Jones, 937 P2d 310, 317 (Ariz. 1997); State v. Plant, 461 NW2d 253 (Neb. 1990); State v. Copeland, 631 S2d 1223 (La. App. 1994); State v. Garland, 636 A2d 541 (N.J. App. 1994); State v. Jones, 608 P2d 1220 (Ore. App. 1980). The temporary care of minor children left without adult supervision by police action requires police to care for the children until responsibility for their care and custody is undertaken by a responsible adult. See Witherspoon v. United States, 838 F2d 803, 807 (5th Cir. 1988); People v. Sutton, 65 Cal. App. 3d 341 (1976). Indeed, for law enforcement officers to leave minor children unattended after removing the person providing the children with adult supervision may violate the children’s right to due process. White v. Rockford, 592 F2d 381 (7th Cir. 1979).
The foreign authority cited by the dissent for the proposition that the police may not unnecessarily or unreasonably create an exigency and then take advantage of that exigency are imminently sensible. Indeed, the appellate courts of this State have made similar holdings, such as that in Collins v. State, 161 Ga. App. 546 (1) (287 SE2d 708) (1982): “This court would be remiss in its duty if it permitted artificially created exigent circumstances.” Permitting the police to take all the adults from a home for the purpose of leaving the children without responsible adult supervision and thereby justify a warrantless entrance would certainly violate the Fourth Aunendment rights of the adult residents. However, suggesting the cited cases have any application to the present case is specious: there is no evidence and no suggestion that appellee Pittman or any other responsible adult was removed from the home for the purpose of creating such an exigency.
In light of the applicable authority cited above, it is clear that the absence of responsible adult supervision of children is an exigent circumstance justifying a warrantless entry. However, the trial court ruled in the present case that no exigent circumstances existed because the young victim was dead and police officers were on the I scene to care for the surviving children. The second part of that con-1 elusion requires that the trial court take on the role of determining 1 which law enforcement officer should make arrangements for the | care of the children, holding in effect that Detective Griffie was not 9 the appropriate officer. It is not the role of the courts to assign duties to police officers, and the trial court’s determination that Detective Griffie was not authorized to enter the home because police officers were already there was an unwarranted usurpation of authority rightfully in the hands of police authorities. Thus, there is no legal basis for the trial court’s conclusion that the uniformed officers could care for the children, but Detective Griffie could not.
*6613. While we must accept findings by a trial court which are supported by the evidence, and must construe the evidence to support the trial court’s findings and judgments (Tate v. State, 264 Ga. 53 (1) (440 SE2d 646) (1994)), we are not bound by findings which are clearly erroneous. State v. David, supra at 535 (1). Here, the trial court’s ruling is clearly erroneous. If the uniformed officers were legally present to take care of the children, Detective Griffie’s entry was legal and his actions in the home were consistent with the scope of that original legal police presence. If the uniformed officers were not there to care for the children, the absence of responsible adult supervision constituted exigent circumstances authorizing Detective Griffie’s entry, and the trial court’s mistaken assumption of authority to determine which police officer may perform which police function rendered its finding regarding exigent circumstances clearly erroneous. Using either analysis, the trial court’s grant of the motion to suppress must be reversed.

Judgment reversed.

All the Justices concur, except Fletcher, P. J., and Sears and Carley, JJ, who dissent.

 One of the notes was entitled “Terrell’s List Bad” and stated:
Make sure he gets a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast.
Lunch he gets grits and dinner he gets grits.

His hands are always tied.

He can’t go to the bathroom by himself.
He can’t go in my room
Tasha’s or Tommy’s [the six- and eleven-year-old children who lived in the home]

*658
Definitely not Terries’

Make sure he gets plenty of water he sleeps in hall.
(Emphasis in original.)

 The resolution of the issues on this appeal, as well as the trial court’s decision on these matters, was made unreasonably difficult by the State’s inexplicable failure to call as witnesses any of the uniformed officers by whom, in the trial court’s words, “the dwelling was being secured. . . .” However, resolution of the issues is possible by careful and reasonable consideration of the trial court’s order and Detective Griffie’s testimony.