Court Opinion

ID: 9515823
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-06 23:05:19.97067+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:08:58.767103
License: Public Domain

SANDSTROM, Justice,
dissenting.
[¶ 92] As the United States Supreme Court has said repeatedly, “The touch*40stone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness.” See, e.g., Florida v. Jimeno, 500 U.S. 248, 250, 111 S.Ct. 1801, 114 L.Ed.2d 297 (1991). Here the majority holds the search of the vehicle sitting in the driveway of the house was reasonable but the search of the house was not. The magistrate had determined there was probable cause to believe drugs and other evidence were inside the house, so once the search of the vehicle began in the driveway, one of two things was going to happen — those inside the house were going to remove or destroy the drugs and other evidence, or, as Justice Crothers concludes, they were inevitably going to be discovered.
[¶ 93] The magistrate had originally authorized a daytime search but modified the warrant to permit a nighttime search. For reasons that are not clear, there is no recording of what transpired when the officer went back to the judge when the warrant was modified. The reasoning of the Chief Justice in his concurrence in State v. Fields, 2005 ND 15, ¶ 18, 691 N.W.2d 233, appears to apply here:
I write separately to note that while we reject the per-se presumption that drugs are “easily disposed of’ to justify either the “no-knock” or nighttime search warrant, the term “easily disposed of’ has significantly different temporal meanings in the two contexts. In the “no-knock” warrant the term “easily disposed of’ refers to the ability to dispose of drugs in the very brief time between the knock and the entry if a knock were required. In the context of the nighttime search warrant the time which would elapse between execution and the entry, if no nighttime search warrant were issued, is much greater and the term “easily disposed of’ logically refers to disposition other than, for example, flushing down the toilet or swallowing the drug. Thus evidence that a subject of a search warrant consumed or delivered drugs within a few hours of their receipt or made deliveries in the nighttime hours would justify issuance of a nighttime search warrant.
[¶ 94] The high risk of destruction of the drugs in the house while the vehicle was being searched in the driveway provides the touchstone of reasonableness of the nighttime search warrant here. On the other hand, if it does not, then Justice Crothers is correct, and they would have been inevitably discovered. I would affirm.
[¶ 95] Dale V. Sandstrom