Court Opinion

ID: 9503330
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-06 19:41:41.075072+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:03:23.653964
License: Public Domain

DURHAM, J.,
concurring.
I join the majority’s decision. Given this court’s opinion in State v. Brown, 301 Or 268, 721 P2d 1357 (1986), the “mobility” of defendant’s van created an exigent circumstance that supported the officer’s decision to search it without a warrant. The presence in the van of an unsupervised minor might have contributed to the exigency, or perhaps created another exigency, but the state did not argue those points below.
The proposition that Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution allows the police to search every stopped vehicle in Oregon without a warrant based on a flexible criterion like “mobility’ remains controversial. The Brown majority adopted that proposition to lend certainty to the decision-making process of law enforcement officers. That is, of course, a worthwhile goal. But, in my view, the Brown court’s decision oversold the notion that it would lead to certainty. Whether a vehicle is “mobile,” or sufficiently mobile under the particular facts to permit a warrantless search, can change with every stop.
The decision in Brown also understated the constitutional policy requiring a judicial examination of the particular facts to determine whether a particular search is reasonable. The one-size-fits-all rule of Brown for searching a *182citizen’s property is difficult to harmonize with the state constitutional prohibition on searches that are not reasonable under all the particular circumstances.
Defendant asserts no argument that this court erred in deciding Brown. It is appropriate, therefore, to wait for a different case before taking up the questions that surround the Brown decision.
Accordingly, I concur.