Court Opinion

ID: 9680600
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 07:34:52.630837+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:29.563022
License: Public Domain

RONNIE L. WHITE, Judge,
dissenting.
Missouri courts have, for at least a century, narrowly circumscribed the authority of municipal officers to make warrantless arrests. Our courts have long seen these arrests as particularly threatening to the personal liberty, and even the personal safety, of Missourians. The principal opinion at best ignores, and in my view seriously undermines, this jurisprudence by justifying a facially illegal arrest with no more than speculation regarding what the arresting officer must have thought his authority was. Although the complete absence of competent evidence that the arrest here was subject to lawful authority borders on the kind of manifest injustice for which plain error relief is available, such relief is unnecessary because the record unambiguously shows that this claim of error was preserved for appeal. Accordingly, with respect, I dissent.
I. Extraterritorial Arrests by Municipal Officers are Illegal
In Missouri, it has long been established that municipal law enforcement officials have only those powers conferred upon them by statute.1 Statute^ granting these officers the power to arrest without a warrant, a power traditionally viewed as “being in derogation of liberty,” have been strictly construed.2 One result of narrowly circumscribing the authority of municipal officers has been to geographically limit the areas in which these officers may lawfully operate. Specifically, warrantless arrests made by municipal officers outside the boundaries of their municipality are— in the absence of some express statutory exception — illegal.3
This rule is designed to protect fundamental liberties:
Perhaps the most important reason why a state might limit the jurisdiction of city and town officers to their respective *509communities is that smaller communities are unlikely to have the resources to provide their officers with proper training in the elements of probable cause or arrest procedures. By limiting an officer’s jurisdiction to the community in which she serves, a state helps to ensure not only that the power of the police over individuals will be appropriately restricted, but also that an officer-will be sufficiently trained for the types of arrests likely to occur in her community. This type of restriction helps to protect the very interests underlying the Fourth Amendment, those of the individual in privacy and personal freedom, and, at the same time, balances the interests of government in protecting society and making arrests in a safe, efficient and constitutional manner.4
A review of the cases in which warrantless arrests by municipal officers have been an issue also suggests that such arrests frequently occasion violent confrontations,5 and may, for protection of the arrestees, the public and the officers themselves, best be handled by officers with additional training and experience, or at least officers who are familiar with local conditions. The restriction also serves an interest in local accountability, since residents of a municipality who feel that local officers have failed to perform their duties have recourse to the democratic process to control these officials. Residents outside a municipality have no ability (other than through the state legislature) to control the behavior of officers who venture outside their jurisdiction. The rule that ex-trajurisdictional arrests by municipal officials are generally illegal is grounded in serious concerns regarding liberty, public safety and democratic accountability, and should not — in the absence of a specific legislative authorization — be disturbed.
For an officer of a fourth class city, such as the officer here, three possible exceptions to the rule against extraterritorial arrests are readily apparent. First, such an officer may make an arrest on city owned or leased property outside the bounds of his or her municipality;6 no party has suggested that this exception is relevant here. Second, certain officers are authorized to make arrests outside their jurisdictions under the “fresh pursuit” statute, § 544.157, RSMo, but the record here contains neither evidence nor any claim that the conditions of that statute have been met. Finally, there is the authority provided by § 70.815.2, RSMo:
The governing body of any political subdivision may by ordinance, order or other ruling enter into a contract or agreement with any other political subdivision ... for the provision of police services by one political subdivision to another on request. The scope of the agreement may be general or specific, and may or *510may not provide for compensation for such services. Officers providing police services in another jurisdiction pursuant to such an agreement shall have the same powers of arrest as officers of the requesting political subdivision, and shall have the same immunity as if acting within their own jurisdiction.
The principal opinion’s unsupported conclusion that Officer Patrick had authority to make warrantless arrests in Lakeview village if such an agreement existed is speculative, at best, since the statute gives an officer acting under an agreement only those arrest powers a local officer would have, and this Court has long held that the statutes under which village police officers operate do not authorize warrantless arrests.7 In any case, the question is not presented here, since, contrary to the principal opinion’s suggestion, the trial court never received evidence of any agreement between Lake Ozark and Lakeview.
The principal opinion says that “the police officer testified that on the evening in question, in reliance on instructions given by his supervisor, he was on patrol in Lakeview pursuant to a mutual aid agreement between Lakeview and Lake Ozark.” This is a misleading characterization, at best, of the officer’s actual testimony. Officer Patrick never testified that he was “on patrol” anywhere on June 21, 1998, and never testified that anyone instructed him to patrol in Lakeview that night.8 More importantly, Officer Patrick never connected his authority to operate in Lakeview to the purported agreement.
The only testimony regarding the agreement was Officer Patrick’s ‘Tes” when asked if he believed that Lake Ozark “had a mutual aid contract” with Lakeview.9 However, the trial court sustained the defense’s objection to this question, ruling that the officer could not testify as to the existence of the agreement, but also ruling that if the State proved the officer’s “duties” and what he was “directed to supervise,” then the court would permit the State to forego proof of such an agreement. Thus, the trial court refused to receive Officer Patrick’s testimony as evidence of the existence of this agreement and, more importantly, the State abandoned any attempt to prove the terms of the purported agreement or to connect Patrick’s presence in Lakeview to any authority whatsoever. The only testimony the trial court permitted touching even remotely on Officer Patrick’s authority to conduct arrests outside Lake Ozark was that, based upon his education and experience, his “area of operation” included Lake Ozark and Lakeview.
In my view, this is an insufficient basis from which to conclude, as the principal opinion does, that Officer Patrick had a good faith belief that he was entitled to make warrantless arrests in Lakeview (not least because he never testified that he believed he had authority to make such arrests). More importantly, the implicit suggestion that an officer’s good faith be*511lief that he had authority to make an arrest suffices to make the arrest legal is both unwarranted and unwise. An officer’s authority to make arrests in this situation depends entirely on statutory authority and official acts by government bodies. The officer’s state of mind is simply not relevant to these considerations. Where, as here, a police officer admits making an arrest that is prima facie illegal, I would require some specific, competent evidence to overcome the presumption of illegality before evidence gathered in the course of the arrest can be used in a criminal prosecution. The use of such evidence in the absence of any substantial demonstration of authority approaches a manifest injustice.
II. Defendant Did Not Waive His Right to Challenge the Legality of His e Arrest
Since the record, in my view, demonstrates that appellant preserved this issue for appeal, plain error relief is unnecessary. The principal opinion’s contention that appellant failed to preserve his challenge to the legality of his arrest is based upon a misreading of the record, as well as a misapplication of the law. The statute the principal opinion relies on regarding motions to suppress does not apply to this case, and this Court’s rule regarding motions to suppress, which is controlling, permits the trial court to entertain motions to suppress during trial, as the trial court here straightforwardly did.
The principal opinion treats section 542.296, RSMo, and Rule 24.05 as if they were interchangeable, which they self-evidently are not. The statutory provision defines a motion to suppress as a motion by a criminal defendant “to suppress the use in evidence of the property or matter seized” illegally. Defined this narrowly, the principal opinion is correct that defendant did not file a motion to suppress; but defendant was not seeking to have evidence of any illegally seized “property or matter” suppressed. The principal opinion (grudgingly) concedes that the statute has no application here,10 but nevertheless continues to rely on the terms of the statute as if they were identical to the rule. Only the statute contains the requirements that a motion to suppress (as defined in the statute) be made in writing and be made before commencement of the trial unless the defendant was unaware of the grounds for the motion.
This Court’s rule regarding motions to suppress contains neither of these restrictions and, since it is a procedural rule, would control over the statute, even if the statute purported to apply to this case. Rule 24.05 says simply that: “Requests that evidence be suppressed shall be raised by motion before trial; however, the court may in its discretion entertain a motion to suppress evidence at any time during trial.” The principal opinion misstates the law when it suggests that “the lone exception to a pre-trial motion is where the defendant had no reason to anticipate that the unlawfully seized evidence would be introduced and was surprised by its introduction.” While this is an arguable construction of the statute, the lone exception to Rule 24.05 is when “the court ... in its discretion entertain[s][the] motion ... during trial.”
Defendant’s request was that evidence of his arrest be suppressed because the *512arrest was illegal.11 Under the rule, the court undoubtedly had discretion to deny the request based upon its untimeliness. The court, however, did not do that. Instead, it exercised its discretion to consider the request and to overrule it. If the court was rejecting the motion because it was untimely, there would have been no need to require the State to lay the foundation that its witness was authorized to make extrajurisdictional arrests, as the trial court required. That the trial court could have rejected the motion as untimely does not mean that this Court may treat as unpreserved allegations of error arising from rulings that the trial court did, in fact, undertake to decide, particularly where, as here, the court was acting within its explicit discretion to decide these matters during trial.
Recognizing, perhaps, that the record refutes the notion that defendant never moved to have the evidence of his arrest excluded and that the trial court never exercised its discretion to overrule the motion, the principal opinion offers the alternative theory that defendant did move for the exclusion of this evidence, but that he failed to meet his burden of proof on the motion. This theory, however, rests on the misconception that “the accused loses the benefit of the presumption at a hearing on a timely filed motion to suppress that all warrantless seizures are illegal.” It is particularly puzzling that the principal opinion relies on State v.. Villa-Perez as the sole authority for this proposition, since that case, which involved a motion to suppress at trial, holds the opposite: the accused “has the burden of establishing that his constitutional rights were violated by the challenged search or seizure, however the burden is on the State to justify a warrantless search and to demonstrate that such falls within an exception to the warrant requirement....”12 Villa-Perez holds, as I would hold here, that the initial burden on a motion to suppress made at trial is on the defendant to show that the arrest was prima facie illegal,13 but the burden then shifts to the State to show the presence of an exception.
In this case, defendant met his burden of showing that the arrest was illegal on its face, since the officer admitted he made the arrest outside his jurisdiction. The burden then shifted to the State to show an exception to the general rule prohibiting such arrests. The principal opinion’s holding that the defendant was required to disprove all possible exceptions to the rule against extrajurisdictional arrests is neither logically nor practically feasible. The *513number of possible factual exceptions to the rule is not small. Perhaps the arrest was made on Lake Ozark owned or leased property; perhaps Officer Patrick was engaged in fresh pursuit or had a warrant for Mr. Galazin’s arrest; perhaps Officer Patrick saw Mr. Galazin commit a felony; perhaps Officer Patrick was also a State law enforcement officer, or a county law enforcement officer, or a State conservation agent, or some other State or federal officer entitled to make arrests in Lake-view. It can not be the case that defendant was required to disprove all of these theories and scores of other imaginable scenarios in order to meet his burden of demonstrating that his arrest was illegal.
III. Further Proceedings
The principal opinion does at least provide an opportunity to reach the merits of Mr. Galazin’s arrest. If it is the case, as the majority holds, that defendant’s failure to make his motion before trial amounted to a waiver of his ability to challenge the legality of his arrest, and if it was, as the majority also holds, apparent that a routine investigation would have revealed that grounds for this challenge existed at the time a motion could have been made, then I see no reason why effective counsel would not have raised this issue in a pretrial motion. To the extent that the substantive claim that his arrest was illegal is meritorious, Mr. Galazin has, under the majority’s analysis, a powerful argument that his conviction should be overturned on grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel.
Since, however, I see no procedural bar to reaching the merits of this claim in this proceeding, I would avoid collateral litigation and reverse and remand this cause for a new trial.

. See State v. Holcomb, 86 Mo. 371 (1885).

. Rodgers v. Schroeder, 220 Mo.App. 575, 287 S.W. 861, 862 (1926).

. Kimber v. Director of Revenue, 817 S.W.2d 627, 631 (Mo.App.1991); City of Fredericktown v. Bell, 761 S.W.2d 715, 716-17 (Mo.App.1989); City of Advance v. Maryland Cas. Co., 302 S.W.2d 28, 31-32 (Mo.1957); Rodgers, 287 S.W. at 862-64.

. Abbott v. City of Crocker, 30 F.3d 994, 1000 (8th Cir.1994) (Arnold, R., C.J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).

. See, e.g., id. at 996 (City of Crocker police officer alleged to have struck arrestee four times in the face with his flashlight after chasing him outside city limits to make concededly illegal arrest); State v. Goodman, 449 S.W.2d 656, 658 (Mo.1970) (town marshal, driving an unmarked car, out of uniform and carrying no badge, together with his non-officer associate, stopped at gunpoint and frisked defendants outside city limits, even though marshal conceded he had not seen them breaking any laws or had no information indicating that these were the suspects he was looking for); Hacker v. City of Potosi, 340 S.W.2d 166, 168-69 (Mo.App.1960) (officer chasing speeding driver to house outside city limits shot while attempting arrest); State ex rel. Kaercher v. Roth, 330 Mo. 105, 49 S.W.2d 109 (1932) (passenger in car driven by fleeing misdemeanant shot in lung by constable attempting to effect arrest outside city limits).

. §§ 85.610, 85.620, RSMo 2000.

. See §§ 80.410, 80.420; State v. Holcomb, 86 Mo. 371, 381 (1885).

. The Officer testified that his "area of operation” on that date was "City of Lake Ozark Police Department.” He said he received a radio call that a car was driving erratically, and that he eventually made contact with the car in Lakeview. Later he testified that, based upon his education and experience, his (or possibly the department’s) area of operation was Lake Ozark, Lakeview and Lakeside. "Area of operation” was the prosecutor’s term, and neither he nor the witness provided any elaboration of what the term was supposed to mean.

. Patrick did later testify that he had never seen any such agreement, and that all his knowledge regarding his "area of operations” was based upon what he was told by others.

. The principal opinion qualifies this concession with the word "arguably,” but I do not understand the principal opinion to seriously maintain (as it would have to for the statute to apply) that the defendant himself was "property or matter” illegally seized in the course of the arrest.

. The principal opinion’s suggestion that defendant did not make a motion to suppress because he did not refer to the Fourth Amendment is misguided. The right to be free from extraterritorial arrests by municipal officers long predates the application of the Fourth Amendment to the States, and in fact arises from Missouri, not federal law. As the Eighth Circuit has held specifically with regard to this doctrine, an extrajurisdictional arrest that is illegal under state law is not automatically a Fourth Amendment violation. Abbott v. City of Crocker, 30 F.3d 994, 997-98 (8th Cir.1994). It would have been contrary to the law of this circuit for defendant to claim, as the principal opinion suggests he would have had to make a motion to suppress, that the seizure was a violation of the federal constitution. Contrary to the principal opinion’s insinuation, it is not inconceivable that Missouri law might provide slightly more freedom from illegal arrests than the bare minimum the federal constitution mandates.

. 835 S.W.2d 897, 902 (quoting State v. Burkhardt, 795 S.W.2d 399, 404 (Mo. banc 1990)).

. This is a higher burden than the defendant bears at a pre-trial motion to suppress hearing, where the State bears both the initial burden of going forward and the ultimate burden of persuasion. § 542.296.6, RSMo.