Court Opinion

ID: 9537049
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 07:11:47.637896+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:55:50.821119
License: Public Domain

LOHR, Justice,
concurring:
I concur in the opinion and judgment of the court, but consider it appropriate to explain why I view the facts here differently than in People v. Wolf, 635 P.2d 213 (1981), a case in which I joined Justice Quinn’s dissent. There, Denver officers conducted an investigation of a suspected purchaser of stolen merchandise at his place of business in Adams County. They set up two transactions between an informant and the suspect at that location. The informant was wired with a radio transmitter and the police monitored the conversations between the informant and the suspect from a nearby van. The investigation continued over a five hour period and culminated in the suspect’s arrest by the Denver officers at the suspect’s place of business in Adams County. No warrant was obtained for that arrest.
Justice Quinn’s dissent noted that section 16-3-106, C.R.S.1973 (1978 Repl.Vol. 8) limits the authority of police officers to arrest outside their jurisdictions to “carefully defined exigencies.” 635 P.2d at 218. The dissenting opinion then states:
This reasonable circumscription of arrest powers is not without constitutional significance to the security of one’s person from unreasonable searches and seizures. Colo. Const., Art. II, Sec. 7. Conceding that a statutory violation by a governmental officer need not rise per se to the level of constitutional significance for purposes of the exclusionary rule, our prior case law indicates that the unjustified exercise of extraterritorial arrest powers by a police officer does implicate constitutional interests.
635 P.2d at 218-219.
Based on a record showing an absence of “an extraterritorial emergency calling for an immediate police response,” absence of “good faith mistake on the part of the officers about the legality of their conduct,” knowledge of the officers that “they were exceeding the territorial boundaries of their authority in making the arrest,” and absence of “effort to solicit the assistance of officers in Adams County ... or to obtain an arrest warrant,” the dissenting opinion applied a totality of the circumstances test and adopted the position that the police actions were “within the zone of constitutional unreasonableness under Article II, Section 7, of the Colorado Constitution.” 635 P.2d at 219-220.
In contrast, in the present case a warrant was obtained and, as Justice Kirshbaum’s opinion and Justice Quinn’s special concurrence so well illustrate, the authority of a peace officer to execute a warrant outside his jurisdiction was not free from doubt until today. The egregious disregard for a clear statutory standard which so tainted the police conduct in People v. Wolf is simply not present here. The same totality of the circumstances test that yielded the dissenters’ conclusion in People v. Wolf that the arrest was constitutionally unreason*158able under Article II, Section 7, of the Colorado Constitution, here produces the opposite result, as the majority holds. Therefore, I concur in Justice Kirshbaum’s opinion for the majority.