Court Opinion

ID: 9570372
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:22:43.956813+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:07:10.631091
License: Public Domain

*314LENT, J.
The issue is whether one who entrusts an effect to another has a right under Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution against an unlawful search that discovers the effect.1 We hold one does.
Defendant took video tapes and equipment from his employer’s place of business and pledged them to Charles and Lori Best as collateral for a loan. Police officers, acting under an invalid warrant, discovered these items during a search of the Best residence. The discovery led to defendant’s indictment for theft.
Defendant, relying on Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution, moved to suppress evidence uncovered by the search. The circuit court granted the motion, concluding that defendant had “an expectation of privacy in the Best residence by virtue of the fact that the home was the repository of defendant’s collateral.” On the state’s appeal from the suppression order, the Court of Appeals reversed. State v. Tanner, 82 Or App 296, 728 P2d 47 (1986). That court held that a “thief has no protected interest in stolen property.” 82 Or App at 300. We allowed defendant’s petition for review to consider the applicability of Article I, section 9, to effects entrusted to other persons.
I.
In order to make clear the issue presented by this case, we note and emphasize several issues that are not presented.
First, there is no issue of the lawfulness of the search of the Best residence. The circuit court ruled that the warrant under which the search was conducted was invalid, and the state has not challenged that ruling on appeal. What the state does contend is that the evidence obtained should nonetheless have been admissible on the ground that the unlawful search did not violate the Article I, section 9, rights of defendant.
*315Unlike the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule, which has been predicated in recent years on deterrence of police misconduct, see, e.g., United States v. Leon, 468 US 897, 905-08, 104 S Ct 3405, 82 L Ed 2d 677 (1984), the exclusionary rule of section 9 is predicated on the personal right of a criminal defendant to be free from an “unreasonable search, or seizure,” State v. Davis, 295 Or 227, 231-37, 666 P2d 802 (1983); State v. Laundy, 103 Or 443, 494, 204 P 958, 206 P 290 (1922) (adopting the former Fourth Amendment rationale expressed in such early United States Supreme Court cases as Weeks v. United States, 232 US 383, 34 S Ct 341, 58 L Ed 652 (1914)).2 That is, the search or seizure must violate the defen*316dant’s section 9 rights before evidence obtained thereby will be suppressed; a defendant’s section 9 rights are not violated merely by admitting evidence obtained in violation of section 9. The issue in this case thus is not whether the police violated section 9—that much is conceded—but whether the police violated defendant’s section 9 rights.
Second, there is no issue of defendant’s standing to challenge the unlawful search of the Best residence. A criminal defendant always has standing to challenge the admission of evidence introduced by the state. State v. McMurphy, 291 Or 782, 785, 635 P2d 372 (1981). The question whether a defendant’s personal rights were violated by an unlawful search or seizure is often mislabeled a question of “standing,” but the question goes to the merits of a motion to suppress. The term “standing” should be used only in the narrow sense of capacity to make a legal challenge.
Third, although the Court of Appeals’ decision was based on its conclusion that “a thief has no protected interest in stolen property,” 82 Or App at 300, the character of the effects given by defendant to the Bests, and in particular whether they were stolen, is irrelevant in this instance. Searches and seizures are separate acts calling for separate analysis. See State v. Owens, 302 Or 196, 205-07, 729 P2d 524 (1986); State v. Elkins, 245 Or 279, 286-88, 422 P2d 250 (1966). The unlawfulness of which defendant complains was a search of the Best residence. If the police violated any right of defendant’s, it was a right against the search that uncovered the effects, not some right in the effects themselves. An unlawful search that uncovers effects such as stolen goods or contraband, which also may not legally be possessed, will nevertheless result in suppression of those effects because the unlawfulness involves an infringement of rights apart from possessory interests (or the lack thereof) in the stolen goods or contraband seized as a consequence of the unlawful search. See, e.g., State v. Kock, 302 Or 29, 725 P2d 1285 (1986) (suppression of stolen goods seized during unlawful search of parked automobile); State v. Perry, 298 Or 21, 688 P2d 827 *317(1984) (suppression of marijuana seized during illegal search of suitcase).3
II.
The general issue that must be addressed in this case is whether the entrustment of an effect to another person is sufficient to establish an Article I, section 9, right against an unlawful search that uncovers the effect. For example, are the rights of a hotel guest who entrusts valuables to the hotel violated if the police unlawfully break into the hotel’s safe where the valuables are stored? Are the rights of a person who loans a hunting rifle to another violated if the rifle is discovered during an unlawful search of the other person’s automobile? If the general issue cannot be decided in the affirmative, there is no basis for defendant’s contention that his section 9 rights were violated in the specific circumstances of this case.
Only two cases decided under section 9 have touched upon this issue. In the first case, State v. Laundy, supra, the defendant was convicted of criminal syndicalism for being a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). One of his assignments of error on appeal was the trial court’s denial of his petition for the return of certain evidence, among which was an IWW songbook taken from the desk of one Myers. Myers’ desk was across a large room from the defendant’s desk, in an area subleased by an organization separate from the organization for whom the defendant worked. In disposing of this aspect of the defendant’s assignment of error, the court stated, “If any articles were unlawfully taken from Myers’ desk, the defendant cannot complain for the reason *318that if the right of any person was violated it was that of Myers or that of some other third person, and not that of the defendant.” 103 Or at 498.
The opinion does not state whether the defendant had entrusted the songbook to Myers or had any other connection with it. At trial, the state had introduced the songbook into evidence, in order to establish the doctrines espoused by the IWW, not to show that the defendant was a member. Absent a connection between the songbook and the defendant, Laundy is not dispositive of the issue before us.
More relevant is State v. Hoover, 219 Or 288, 347 P2d 69 (1959). In Hoover, police officers stopped an automobile driven by the defendant after a report that the occupants had threatened someone with a gun. During the stop, one of the occupants whispered to an officer that the defendant had given the gun to his wife, who was sitting on it. The officer then reached into the car, pushed the woman aside and seized the gun. The defendant was subsequently charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm, and he moved for the return and suppression of the gun on the ground that it was obtained by the state in violation of section 9. This court stated:
“The revolver was concealed by the device of having Mrs. Hoover [the defendant’s wife] sit on it. Thus, we might easily dispose of the case by ruling that the search, if in fact unlawful, was a search of Mrs. Hoover’s person and not of the automobile. Were this the case it would be her rights that were violated and the defendant would have no standing to make a complaint. State v. Laundy, supra. * * * However, since the revolver was lying on the car seat we think that the search was equally a search of the car and of Mrs. Hoover. Neither party has raised the line of argument we have just suggested, and we will treat the search as of the automobile alone.”
219 Or at 296-97. Although the court’s statement was dictum that amounted to an offhand suggestion, it is clearly on point if it retains any validity.
Both Laundy and Hoover were premised on the notion that section 9 interests are limited to possessory interests in a place searched or in a thing seized. In Laundy, the search of Myers’ desk could only have infringed upon Myers’ rights because only Myers was shown to have had a possessory interest in the desk. 103 Or at 498. Similarly, in Hoover the *319search of Mrs. Hoover could only have infringed upon her rights because only she could have had a possessory interest in her body. 219 Or at 296-97. But the search of the automobile could have infringed upon the defendant’s rights because, as the court went to some pains to point out, he was a bailee, which the court deemed to be “an interest of sufficient substance to fall within constitutional protection.” Id. at 296. By implication, the search could not have infringed upon the defendant’s rights if he had been a mere occupant and thus lacked a possessory interest in the automobile.
Since the decisions in Laundy and Hoover, however, this court has frequently recognized that section 9 interests are not limited to possessory interests in places or things. In State v. Elkins, supra, 245 Or at 288-92, the court noted three interests protected by section 9: privacy, property, and “some sort of a nebulous, poorly-defined right to be protected from undignified, forceable violations of the person,” citing for the latter Rochin v. California, 342 US 165, 72 S Ct 205, 96 L Ed 183 (1952). The court’s opinion was concerned with property interests against unlawful seizures, but the court identified privacy as the principal interest protected against unlawful searches, stating that the right of privacy had “recently been the subject of great emphasis.” 245 Or at 289, 291. This was probably a reference to the then ongoing transformation of Fourth Amendment search jurisprudence from an analysis based on the protection of possessory interests in places to an analysis based on the protection of privacy interests, a transformation that was to culminate a few months later in Katz v. United States, 389 US 347, 88 S Ct 507, 19 L Ed 2d 576 (1967). See 1 LaFave, Search and Seizure § 2.1, at 302-05 (2d ed 1987); Amsterdam, Perspectives on the Fourth Amendment, 58 Minn L Rev 349, 356-58, 381-83 (1974) 4
*320Subsequent opinions of this court have continued to recognize privacy as one of the interests protected by section 9. See, e.g., State v. Owens, supra, 302 Or at 206; State v. Louis, 296 Or 57, 60-61, 672 P2d 708 (1983); State v. Blackburn/Barber, 266 Or 28, 34, 511 P2d 381 (1973). In Owens, a search was explicitly defined in terms of privacy interests: “A ‘search’ occurs when a person’s privacy interests are invaded.” 302 Or at 206. We therefore do not regard this court’s prior statements in Laundy and Hoover as helpful in resolving the issue before us.5
The extent to which actions by state officials are governed by section 9 is defined by the general privacy interests of “the people” rather than by the privacy interests of particular individuals.6 Houses and telephone conversations, for example, are considered “private,” and for that reason when police officers enter houses or eavesdrop on telephone conversations they must do so in conformity with section 9. Section 9 thus presents the police with a web of rules that are meant to protect the privacy interests of “the people,” and the police violate section 9 if and only if they violate these rules. It cannot be otherwise, for the police cannot be expected to act on individual privacy interests, which they ordinarily have no means of ascertaining. The question of whose privacy rights have been violated is logically separate from the question whether section 9 has been violated.
*321It is not correct, then, to say that a warrantless search of A’s house violated section 9 because it violated A’s privacy interests in the house. It would be more accurate to say that the search of A’s house violated section 9 because it violated the privacy of the house. Given that the police have violated the privacy of the house, the question then arises whether that violation has infringed upon anyone’s privacy interests. If the house proves to be abandoned, the police may have violated section 9 without violating anyone’s section 9 rights.
Residence in a house is uniformly deemed to be a sufficient basis for concluding that the violation of the privacy of the house violated the residents’ privacy interests, but there is no reason to assume that the class of persons with privacy interests in a house is limited to residents. If A invites B to dinner at A’s house and the police burst in on the dinner, it would be ludicrous to contend that the police have infringed upon a privacy interest of A but not upon a privacy interest of B. Cf. 4 LaFave, supra, § 11.3(b) (arguing that a dinner guest could reasonably expect the host’s home to constitute a zone of privacy where the guest would be free from unreasonable governmental interference). On the other hand, B’s interest in the privacy of the house would not be as extensive as that of A. An invitation to dinner would not necessarily give B an interest in the privacy of the basement. It may also be that if B were a trespasser, B would not have a recognizable privacy interest. Cf. id.
It is true that B, as a dinner guest, has no right to exclude the police (or anyone else) if A invites them in, but in that case the police have not violated section 9 at all. A section 9 privacy interest is an interest against the state; it is not an interest against private parties. See State v. Blackburn/Barber, supra, 266 Or at 34; State v. Hilton, 119 Or 441, 444-45, 249 P 1103 (1926). That A controls access to the house does not preclude B from asserting a privacy interest against the state if it violates the privacy of the house.7
*322Should the result be any different if, instead of inviting B to dinner, A allows B to store effects on A’s premises? In both cases A has allowed B to make use of the privacy of A’s house. The nature of what is shielded from unlawful searches is of no significance. Again, B’s section 9 interests will not be violated if A allows the police to enter the house and discover the effects, but that is because A controls access to the house, not because B does not have a privacy interest against the state. And again, B’s section 9 interests are only as extensive as A’s explicit or implied permission to store the effect. B’s privacy interests would not be violated by an illegal search of A’s house to the extent that the search did not uncover the effects stored with A’s permission. Cf. 4 LaFave, supra, § 11.3(c) (arguing that one who entrusts effects to another has a “justified expectation of privacy vis-a-vis those items”).
The state argues that a person who entrusts effects to another can have no privacy interest against the discovery of the effects by the state unless the entrustor designates a particular place where the effects are to be kept. But the designation of a particular place has no relevance to the entrustor’s privacy interests against the state. If B asks A to store an effect in A’s bedroom closet and A stores it in a desk drawer, it cannot seriously be argued that B’s privacy interest against the state is any less substantial. The state may no more invade A’s desk than it may invade A’s bedroom closet. The state perhaps fears that by failing to designate a specific location for storage, B will somehow gain a greater privacy interest, but, as noted above, this is not so. By entrusting an effect to A, B has made use of only so much privacy as protects the effect from *323the state. If the police unlawfully enter a room in A’s house in which an effect entrusted by B is stored, but do not discover the effect, B’s privacy interests have not been harmed.
III.
In general, then, the entrustment of an effect to another is sufficient to establish a privacy interest that is violated when the effect is discovered through an unlawful search. The final question is whether defendant had a privacy interest under the circumstances of this case.
The circuit court found that defendant gave the video tapes and equipment to Charles and Lori Best as security for a loan. Though we might have found different facts, there is evidence in the record to support this finding, so we are bound by it under the rule announced in Ball v. Gladden, 250 Or 485, 487-88, 443 P2d 621 (1968). See also State v. Warner, 284 Or 147, 156-59, 585 P2d 681 (1978).
Had the circuit court found that defendant had sold or given away the effects, that might have been a sufficient basis for concluding that defendant no longer had a privacy interest that could be violated by the discovery of the effects, cf. 4 LaFave, supra, § 11.3(c), at 305-06 & nn 116-17, but a person who pledges effects as collateral is in much the same position as one who entrusts effects to another for other purposes. The state contends that defendant had no immediate right of access to the tapes and equipment, but that fact alone does not preclude defendant’s continuing entrustment of the effects. So long as there remained a possibility that defendant would reclaim the effects, the entrustment was sufficiently viable to demonstrate that the illegal search of the Best residence violated his privacy interests under section 9.
The decision of the Court of Appeals is reversed; the suppression order of the circuit court is reinstated. The case is remanded to the circuit court for further proceedings.

 Article I, section 9, provides:
“No law shall violate the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable search, or seizure; and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath, or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or thing to be seized.”

 Justice Jones’s dissenting opinion argues that evidence obtained in violation of Article I, section 9, should be excluded in order to deter future violations of that section. This argument was rejected in State v. Davis, 295 Or 227, 231-37, 666 P2d 802 (1983). We have reexamined Davis in light of the dissenting opinion and again reject the argument for the reasons stated in Davis.
The argument of the dissenting opinion boils down to three points: (1) the U.S. Supreme Court now believes that deterrence is the foundation for the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule; (2) other state courts have stated that deterrence is the foundation for “the” exclusionary rule; and (3) founding exclusion upon a constitutional right will undermine the exclusionary rule because the court might in the future conclude that “other remedies” would be adequate. The first point is indubitable but also irrelevant because this is an Article I, section 9, case, not a Fourth Amendment case. To be sure, Davis relied in part on State v. Laundy, 103 Or 443, 494, 204 P 958, 206 P 290 (1922), which adopted for Article I, section 9, the former Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule rationale expressed in such early U.S. Supreme Court decisions as Weeks v. United States, 232 US 383, 34 S Ct 341, 58 L Ed 652 (1914), but it is the dissenting opinion, not Davis, that misreads those cases. See Weeks, 232 US at 398; Gouled v. United States, 255 US 298, 312-13, 41 S Ct 261, 65 L Ed 647 (1921); Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, 251 US 385, 391-92, 40 S Ct 182, 64 L Ed 319 (1920); Kamisar, Does (Did) (Should) the Exclusionary Rule Rest on a “Principled Basis” Rather Than an “Empirical Proposition”?, 16 Creighton L Rev 565 (1983); Schrock & Welsh, Up From Calandra: The Exclusionary Rule as a Constitutional Requirement, 59 Minn L Rev 251 (1974).
As to the second point, the dissenting opinion’s assertion that “the vast majority of the states * * * have stated that the rationale for the exclusionary rule is to deter police misconduct” is, in addition to being largely irrelevant, misleading because the dissenting opinion does not reveal that nearly all of the cases cited for that proposition, including the Oregon cases, were decided under the Fourth Amendment or using Fourth Amendment analysis. The dissenting opinion might as well have cited U.S. Court of Appeals cases.
As to the final point, the dissenting opinion confuses a constitutional right to exclude evidence obtained in violation of Article I, section 9, with a remedy for that violation. The constitutional right to exclude is not a remedy and for that reason cannot be replaced with an “adequate alternative,” as the dissenting opinion states it fears.
In short, the dissenting opinion has not made any principled argument for adopting the deterrence rationale and has failed to come to grips with the fundamental *316difficulties of that rationale, which this court has already noted in some detail in Davis. See Davis, 295 Or at 234-35 & nn 9-11.

 Even as to the effect itself, this court has recognized that section 9 protects possessory and property interests in contraband. See, e.g., State v. Owens, 302 Or 196, 207, 729 P2d 524 (1986); State v. Elkins, 245 Or 279, 290, 422 P2d 250 (1966). There is no occasion here to decide to what extent, if any, constitutionally protected interests in stolen property may differ from those in contraband. We do note, however, that the Court of Appeals’ formulation of the issue raises a number of troubling procedural difficulties. Among the questions this court submitted to the parties were:
“Does the [Court of Appeals’] analysis mean that the trial court must determine whether the defendant is guilty of theft before the court can rule on the defendant’s motion to suppress items of evidence whenever the prosecution alleges that defendant stole the items? Must the court conduct a hearing adequate to find all elements of theft proven beyond a reasonable doubt? If not, what must be proved before the trial court can decline to suppress evidence on the ground that defendant cannot object to an unlawful seizure of the evidence?”

 Prior to Katz, the Court’s emphasis on the protection of possessory interests in places had led to absurd distinctions such as that between Goldman v. United States, 316 US 129, 62 S Ct 993, 86 L Ed 2d 1322 (1942), and Clinton v. Virginia, 377 US 158, 84 S Ct 1186, 12 L Ed 2d 213 (1964): In Goldman, the Court held that use of an electronic amplifying device placed against a party wall to eavesdrop on conversations in an adjacent office did not violate the Fourth Amendment rights of the tenant of the adjacent office; in Clinton, use of a similar device was held to violate the Fourth Amendment rights of the adjacent tenant because, unlike the device used in Goldman, this device was attached to the wall with a tack that trespassed into the adjacent space. The Court obliterated such distinctions in Katz by holding that electronic eavesdropping on a telephone conversation infringed upon interests protected by the Fourth Amendment because it “violated the privacy upon which [the speaker] justifiably relied” in using the telephone. 389 US at 353.

 At first blush, the text of Article I, section 9, might seem to support the conclusion that section 9 protects only possessory interests. The Court of Appeals emphasized that section 9 protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.” State v. Tanner, 82 Or App 296, 298 n 1, 728 P2d 47 (1986). The adjective “their,” however, is plural, and its antecedent is “the people.” The text is a directive to the state not to violate the security of the people by violating private “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” If the protection of section 9 were textually limited to a person’s own possessory interests, it would read: “the right of a person to be secure in his (or her) person, houses, papers, and effects” or “the right of the people to be secure in their own persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Compare Article I, section 28: “No soldier shall * * * be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, * * (Emphasis added.) Once it is determined that the state has violated the security of the people’s “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” the question remains whose rights have been infringed by that violation. The text is not helpful on that score.

 Interests other than privacy are protected by section 9. See State v. Owens, supra, n 3, 302 Or at 206-07; State v. Elkins, supra, n 3, 245 Or at 288-92. Because privacy interests are the only section 9 interests implicated in this case, we refer only to those interests in the discussion.

 The argument that the absence of control over a place precludes a privacy interest in that place is based largely on the Supreme Court of the United States’ Fourth Amendment “expectation of privacy” analysis. See, e.g., Rawlings v. Kentucky, 448 US 98, 105, 100 S Ct 2556, 65 L Ed 2d 633 (1980). This court employed that analysis in a case decided under the Fourth Amendment, State v. Holt, 291 Or 343, 630 P2d 854 (1981), but has never adopted it for analyzing section 9 privacy interests.
One difficulty with analyzing privacy interests in terms of “expectations” is that *322the issue is one of right, not expectation. Rights under section 9 are defined not by the privacy one expects but by the privacy one has a right to expect from the government. That access to an area is controlled by someone else makes it no less private with respect to an unlawful entry by the government. As Professor Amsterdam wrote in 1974, if subjective expectations were determinative of privacy rights, “the government could diminish each person’s subjective expectation of privacy merely by announcing half-hourly on television that 1984 was being advanced by a decade and that we were all forthwith being placed under comprehensive electronic surveillance.” Amsterdam, Perspectives on the Fourth Amendment, 58 Minn L Rev 349, 384 (1974).
Another somewhat related difficulty with the “expectations” approach is that it too easily confuses privacy with secrecy. A person who invites 100 guests to a private party at a private residence cannot reasonably expect much about the residence to remain secret. The residence is no less private, however. Uninvited persons may not enter, and the state may not enter without consent except under a properly authorized warrant or under exigent circumstances.