Court Opinion

ID: 9749361
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 16:40:27.577923+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:47.431914
License: Public Domain

Peck, J.,
dissenting. In its customary zeal to excuse drug traffickers and abusers from the consequences of their crimes, which recently attained a new and lamentable high in State v. Kirchoff, 156 Vt. 1, 587 A.2d 988 (1991), the majority employs a rationale that glosses over the real key factor: the defendant’s *337initial denial that he owned the “kit” that contained the contraband.
The majority contends that the prosecution made no showing that defendant had “abandoned” the kit. There are two clear answers to this contention. On the one hand, a person cannot abandon an item he does not own. It is undisputed that, initially, defendant claimed expressly that he did not own the kit. If, indeed, that had been the case, the fact that the officer opened the kit before confronting defendant would be entirely irrelevant. It would be clear that some unknown and unidentifiable person must have abandoned it.
On the other hand, assuming, as appears to have been the case here, that the kit had belonged to defendant, the situation is virtually on all fours with State v. Kerr, 143 Vt. 597, 608-09, 470 A.2d 670, 676 (1983), in which an investigating officer saw the defendant drop the plastic bag he had been carrying and walk away from it.
I submit there is more than one way, at least in the figurative sense, to “walk away” from something; another way, certainly, is a disclaimer of ownership of, or interest in, a given item of property. In this case, defendant concedes that the kit lay “in plain view,” and yet he denied ownership. It is at this point that the question of abandonment must be answered. The officer could have opened the kit with impunity if he had waited for the moment defendant denied ownership. Since, by doing so, however, he himself established an abandonment, it is hypertechnical in the extreme to attach any relevance at all to the earlier point when the kit was opened. The denial constituted an abandonment; what defendant may have said or done thereafter, and what the officer may have done before confronting the defendant, are both wholly irrelevant once abandonment was so clearly established. If the defendant in Kerr had returned after the officer had inspected the bag, and only then claimed ownership, the result would have been no different.
The State’s burden of proof to show abandonment was satisfied as clearly and as simply as it could possibly be done. Moreover, it was accomplished through the defendant’s own statement that he did not own the kit, and through his conduct, which showed, as the court found, that he had no “particular expectation of privacy or that he had any control over it at that *338point, [he] just leftit there.” And this notwithstanding, the -kit lay “in plain sight.”
One of the citations on which the majority appears to rely as an authority for its decision, Childers v. State, 158 Ga. App. 613, 615,- 281 S.E.2d 349, 351 (1981), is about as far removed from the case before us as is possible. In that case, a woman’s purse, found within the limited confines of a room, might logically belong to the only woman present; it lay in “close proximity” to where the woman was seated, and was the only one of its kind in the room. Moreover, unlike the defendant in this case, the woman acknowledged from the outset, and never denied, ownership of the purse. In the matter before us, the kit was discovered out of doors, a considerable area, one must admit. There was nothing characteristic about it to associate it with anyone, and it was located in a spot, well removed from other accident debris, where it is most unlikely, if not absolutely impossible, that it would have reached if it had been ejected from the truck during the accident. Regardless, these considerations too became irrelevant once defendant disclaimed ownership. The police are not required to obtain anyone’s permission to open a container which has been abandoned.-
The majority has missed the one simple but conclusive' point which establishes the defendant’s abandonment of the kit, and should have required an affirmance. Notwithstanding defendant’s lack-of-interest conduct and his express disclaimer, the majority succeeds, by a hypertechnicality, in luring back the “moving finger” of Edward Fitzgerald’s rendering of the Rubaiyat, by after-the-fact reasoning.
The moving finger writes, and having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wash out a Word of it.
What piety, wit and tears could not accomplish, the majority has done by the simple expedient of rewriting the script after the performance has ended and the curtain rung down.
It is remarkable when admission of guilt produces a reversal. The drug-law violators score again with a reversal which should have been an affirmance.