Court Opinion

ID: 9600456
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 01:27:22.056572+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:01:52.609179
License: Public Domain

ALICE M. BATCHELDER, Chief Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the lead opinion. I write separately to note — with regard to the lead opinion’s discussion of Officer Fidler’s testimony describing Officer Nielsen’s verbal observations at the scene — that we need to be cautious about the weight we ascribe to an officer’s on-the-spot use of singular pronouns. The fact that while waiting for someone in Archibald’s residence to answer the door, Officer Nielsen told his fellow officers that he could “hear him,” and that he could hear “someone moving around inside,” is hardly, in my view, evidence from which we could or should conclude that Officer Nielsen heard, or believed he heard, only one individual inside the residence. Surely that word usage would not suffice to counter other evidence in the record supporting an officer’s suspicion that more than one person was inside. And surely, if Officer Nielsen had instead said he could “hear them, moving around inside,” we would not say that this pronoun choice sufficed to counter other evidence in the record that would have led a reasonable officer to believe that only one person was inside the residence. What is important here is that, other than the significant delay before Archibald opened the door, the officers had virtually no evidence to support any suspicion that more than one person was in the residence.
Nor should the lead opinion be read to stand for the proposition that there is an invisible impenetrable threshold at the door of a home, such that if an arrest occurs slightly inside or slightly outside that threshold, the entire legal analysis fundamentally changes. Instead, the test remains that “during a search incident to an arrest occurring inside a home, officers may, ‘as a precautionary matter and without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, look in closets and other spaces immediately adjoining the place of arrest from which an attack could be immediately launched.’ ” United States v. Colbert, 76 F.3d 773, 776 (6th Cir.1996) (quoting Maryland v. Buie, 494 U.S. 325, 334, 110 S.Ct. 1093, 108 L.Ed.2d 276 (1990)). Because the government waived analysis under this first Buie test, we analyzed the facts under the second Buie test, under which officers may conduct a more extensive search only when they have “articulable facts which, taken together with the rational inferences from those facts, would warrant a reasonably prudent officer in believing that the area to be swept harbors an individual posing a danger to those on the arrest scene.” Buie, at 334, 110 S.Ct. 1093. We do not address whether Archibald was arrested outside or inside his home. Rather, we are simply conducting an analysis of whether, under the facts of the case, the second Buie test was met. And in this case, it was not.