Court Opinion

ID: 9477658
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:28:14.645805+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:58.981642
License: Public Domain

FARRIS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I.
The threshold issue, as the majority acknowledges, is whether the police conducted a search when Dennis Winsor opened the door and exposed his face to the officers. No search occurred if Winsor voluntarily opened the door. See Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351, 88 S.Ct. 507, 511, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967). Whether Winsor voluntarily opened the door is a question of fact to be determined from all the surrounding circumstances. Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218, 248-49, 93 S.Ct. 2041, 2058-59, 36 L.Ed.2d 854 (1973); United States v. Ritter, 152 F.2d 435, 439 (9th Cir.1985). The district court never made a finding on the issue because it justified the police conduct on the basis of (1) the “hot pursuit” doctrine, and (2) the hotel manager’s consent to search the rooms. Although I agree that the grounds upon which the district court relied were improper, the case must be remanded to the district court for findings on the issue of voluntariness. Because the majority chooses not to remand, but to engage in fact finding as a necessary step in reversing a criminal conviction, I dissent.
In the order denying Steven Winsor’s motion to suppress, the district court found that
In any event, there was no search of Room 213 which would implicate Steven Dale Winsor’s Fourth Amendment interests. The police officers had the manager’s permission to look through each room of the hotel, and indeed had been supplied a pass key for that purpose. All the police did when they arrived outside room 213 was to knock, announce themselves, and demand that the occupants open the door. Dennis Winsor *1580opened the door on command. This does not constitute a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.
Excerpt of Record at 84-85.
On the basis of these findings, the three-judge panel that originally reviewed this case assumed that Dennis Winsor had involuntarily opened the door. The majority now purportedly “agrees” with the panel’s assumption that the door was opened involuntarily:
We reject the government’s further argument that any search that may have occurred can be sustained on the basis of consent because Dennis Winsor “voluntarily” opened the door. Appellee’s Brief at 23. We agree with the original panel that “[cjompliance with a police ‘demand’ is not consent.” 816 F.2d at 1397. Accord Bumper v. North Carolina, 391 U.S. 543, 548-50, 88 S.Ct. 1788, 1791-92, 20 L.Ed.2d 797 (1968).
Majority Op. at 1573 n. 3.
The majority cannot “agree” with the panel’s assumption that Dennis Winsor involuntarily opened the door. The panel’s assumption was not pivotal to the decision — the panel ultimately affirmed Steven Winsor’s conviction and avoided the needless gesture of remanding the case for findings on the issue of voluntariness. Here, however, the majority’s finding on voluntariness is pivotal. Winsor’s conviction can only be reversed if the majority finds that Dennis Winsor involuntarily opened the door. Fact finding under these circumstances is never appropriate for an appellate court.
The majority denies that it engages in fact finding. It argues that the court can decide the voluntariness issue as a matter of law because the essential facts are not in dispute. Majority Op. at 1573 n. 3. None of the cases relied upon by the majority, however, support the novel proposition that voluntariness can be found as a matter of law. In Bumper and Al-Azzawy, the trial courts made findings of fact on the issue of voluntariness. The appellate courts decided only whether the trial courts had clearly erred in making their findings. See Bumper, 391 U.S. at 547-50, 88 S.Ct. at 1791-92 and AlAzzawy, 784 F.2d at 894-95. In Johnson, the government never argued that the defendant consented to the search, but that the search was proper as an incident to a valid arrest. 333 U.S. at 13, 68 S.Ct. at 368. The government apparently conceded that the search was not voluntary. In Amos, the government argued the consent issue, but the opinion does not indicate whether the trial court made findings on the issue. 255 U.S. at 315, 317, 41 S.Ct. at 267, 268. Even if Amos had stated that voluntariness could be found as a matter of law — which it did not — Amos was decided in 1921 and would no longer be good law in light of Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218, 93 S.Ct. 2041, 36 L.Ed.2d 854 (1973), the leading case in the area. Schneckloth expressly held that voluntariness is a question of fact. Id. at 248-49, 93 S.Ct. at 2058-59.
The majority also engages in sleight of hand when it says that the essential facts are not in dispute. Certain facts are relevant to the ultimate determination of the voluntariness issue, but the essential fact question is whether Dennis Winsor voluntarily opened the door. As the majority recognizes, that issue is in dispute. The district court never made a finding on the issue because it relied on other grounds to justify the police conduct. The district court did state that the police demanded that the occupants open the door and that Dennis Winsor opened the door on command, but these “findings” were not made for purposes of deciding the voluntariness issue. Had the district court addressed that issue, it would have necessarily considered the totality of circumstances before making a finding on the voluntariness issue. Id.
The totality of the circumstances included more than the fact that the police made a demand and that Dennis Winsor opened the door on command. The Winsors must have known, for example, that they could not escape from the hotel. Police had the building surrounded, and a helicopter hovered above the two-story structure. The police were in the hallway making a room-by-room inquiry. The district court found *1581that “Dennis Winsor was at that very time destroying the evidence by altering his appearance, hiding the clothing in which he committed the robbery and flushing other evidence of the robbery down the toilet.” Excerpt of Record at 84. Whether it is a reasonable inference from the facts that Dennis Winsor, in his altered appearance, opened the door voluntarily in an attempt to deceive the police so that they would move on to the next room is a question for the trier of fact. I would remand to the trial court for a factual determination of the issue.
II.
Even if this court could properly find that Dennis Winsor involuntarily opened the door, I would uphold the search. Arizona v. Hicks, — U.S. -, 107 S.Ct. 1149, 94 L.Ed.2d 347 (1987), does not hold that dwelling place searches and seizures always require probable cause. The Court indicated that searches and seizures of dwelling places, although based on less than probable cause, can be reasonable if they are minimally intrusive and operationally necessary. Id. 107 S.Ct. at 1154. The Court never had to decide whether the search in Hicks qualified for this exception to the probable cause requirement because the government never argued that the search was operationally necessary. Id.
In the case before us, however, the search was minimally intrusive and operationally necessary. The police had a dangerous and purportedly armed bank robbery suspect trapped in a hotel. They did not have probable cause to believe that the suspect was in any particular room but they knew that he was secreting himself in one of the rooms of the two-story hotel. The search of the Winsors’ room was minimally intrusive because the police required only that the Winsors open the door to the room. The search was operationally necessary because there was no practicable means for the police to discover where the suspect was hiding.
The police could have waited indefinitely, as the majority would have them do, until probable cause arose. This would have required the police to wait until they could pinpoint the room in which the suspect could be hiding. The suspect knew that he was trapped, however, and he posed a grave danger to the occupants of the hotel and to the policemen pursuing him. Under these circumstances, I would hold that the police, in requiring Winsor to open the door, effected a reasonable search.
BEEZER, Circuit Judge, concurs in Section I but does not join in Section II.