Court Opinion

ID: 9524484
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:53:12.552452+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:10:36.334637
License: Public Domain

SABERS, Justice
(concurring in part and dissenting in part).
All of the photographs taken of any items inside the Vogel home by Trooper Miller, while he was physically trespassing on Hinkley Realty property,* should be suppressed. These photographs were taken during a physical trespass without a search warrant. A neighbor’s permission to an officer to trespass upon another’s property is of little value in attempting to justify this warrantless photographic search. It is one thing to accept the following unchallenged testimony of Trooper Miller. In the course of a flight from Pierre to Sioux Falls, while flying a fixed-wing aircraft at an altitude of 500 feet, he claimed to have noticed green, leafy plants inside the dome’s two by three foot windows, which he claimed to identify as marijuana. It is a completely different matter to use these illegally obtained photographs to support a search warrant.
Even the majority’s quotation from California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207, 213, 106 S.Ct. 1809, 1812, 90 L.Ed.2d 210, 216 (1986), points out the problem:
The Fourth Amendment protection of the home has never been extended to require law enforcement officers to shield their eyes when passing by a home on public thoroughfares.
The obvious problem is that Trooper Miller was not passing by the Vogel home on a public thoroughfare. He was trespassing on Vogel/Hinkley property. Clearly, Vo-gel had a reasonable expectation of privacy within his home.
The majority relies on the “open fields” doctrine of Oliver v. United States, 466 U.S. 170, 104 S.Ct. 1735, 80 L.Ed.2d 214 (1984), to establish the legitimacy of Trooper Miller’s search. This exception to the warrant requirement applies only to situations where the police trespass upon the land to search an open field, not a police trespass to search the private home on that land. The Oliver Court’s reasoning clearly sets out this crucial distinction:
open fields do not provide the setting for those intimate activities that the [Fourth] *278Amendment is intended to shelter from government interference or surveillance. There is no societal interest in protecting the privacy of those activities, ... Moreover, as a practical matter these lands usually are accessible to the public and the police in ways that a home, ... would not be.
Id., 466 U.S. at 179, 104 S.Ct. at 1741.
The majority contorts the reasoning in Oliver by attempting to apply what seems to be a type of “plain view” argument. The majority reasons that since the marijuana plants in the home were visible to Trooper Miller from an “open field” the search was proper. The “plain view” doctrine, or any analogy to the “plain view” doctrine, is inapplicable to this case. One of the three required elements for the application of “plain view” is that “the officer must discover incriminating evidence ‘inadvertently,’ which is to say, he may not ‘know in advance the location of [certain] evidence[.]’ ” Texas v. Brown, 460 U.S. 730, 737, 103 S.Ct. 1535, 1540, 75 L.Ed.2d 502, 510 (1983) (citing Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 470, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 2040, 29 L.Ed.2d 564, 582 (1971)). Trooper Miller did not “inadvertently” discover the marijuana inside Vogel’s home while searching an open field on the property. He trespassed on the property in order to photographically search for the marijuana in Vogel’s home.
The majority also refers to United States v. Dunn, 480 U.S. 294, 107 S.Ct. 1134, 94 L.Ed.2d 326 (1987) to support its holding. Dunn, however, involved the police search of a barn from an open field. The Dunn Court specifically found that the barn was outside the curtilage of the home so as not to be “placed under the home’s ‘umbrella’ of Fourth Amendment protection.” Id., 107 S.Ct. at 1139. Despite the broad dicta of Dunn which the majority cites, the present case involves the search of a private home, not the search of a bam outside the home’s curtilage as in Dunn. The Court in Dunn continued to emphasize the central Fourth Amendment protection afforded a home because of the “intimate activity associated with the ‘sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life.’ ” Id., 107 S.Ct. at 1139 (quoting Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630, 6 S.Ct. 524, 532, 29 L.Ed. 746, 751 (1886)).
Even the State’s argument concedes:
However, the State recognizes that it has some burden of establishing the fact that the officer was in a place where he had a right to be so for purposes of this argument we will concede the fact that the property in question was held by Hinkley Realty.
The State has failed to meet their burden, and the majority’s attempt to disguise this unlawful search under the “open fields” exception is simply wrong.
Therefore,'! respectfully dissent.

 Hinkley Realty Company is the owner of the home and the property upon which the officer took photos of the home. Michael Vogel is an officer of Hinkley Realty, the caretaker of the property and the resident of the home. The property contains approximately forty acres. The home is located on the east side of the property, approximately one-eighth of a mile north of U.S. highway 34 southeast of Pierre. To reach the home you must traverse a poorly-maintained, private, dead-end trail with big rocks. The closest neighbor is from one-fourth to three-fourths of a mile from the Vogel home.