Court Opinion

ID: 9676349
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 05:22:29.226557+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:47.893778
License: Public Domain

John B. Robbins, Judge, dissenting. I dissent from today’s majority opinion because I believe that the trial court clearly erred in concluding that appellants lacked standing to contest the search of the motel room to which officers gained entrance through their verbal consents. As correctly noted by the majority opinion, the rights secured by the Fourth Amendment are personal in nature. Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128 (1978). Thus, a defendant must have standing before he can challenge a search on Fourth Amendment grounds. Id.; Littlepage v. State, 314 Ark. 361, 863 S.W.2d 276 (1993). Further, the proponent of a motion to suppress bears the burden of establishing that his Fourth Amendment rights have been violated. McCoy v. State, 325 Ark. 155, 925 S.W.2d 391 (1996). At the suppression hearing, three police officers and the hotel manager were the only witnesses. Appellants did not testify at the suppression hearing to assert facts in support of their standing, although either could have done so without danger of self-incrimination, as noted by the majority opinion. Nonetheless, the appellants’ burden to establish standing does not translate into a requirement that a defendant always testify to manifest a subjective expectation of privacy that society is prepared to recognize. Indeed, our court has accepted a person’s name written on the hotel register as probative evidence of such an expectation of privacy. See Rockett v. State, supra. What the trial judge had before him to consider were the following pertinent facts relevant to a reasonable expectation of privacy: two men accused of using this rented motel room as a drug-selling location; a closed door to the motel room; two men asleep in the motel room beds woken only after persistent knocking at the door; at least one of the men in partial undress; evidence that the officers believed these men possessed authority to give consent to search. Arkansas Rule of Criminal Procedure 11.2(c) requires that effective consent may be given for search of premises only from a person who “by ownership or otherwise, is apparently entitled to give or withhold consent.” While this appeal presents a fact scenario falling somewhere between the cases cited by the State and the case cited by appellants, I believe it demonstrates a greater privacy interest than that of persons coming and going intermittently from a hotel room in which their names were not registered. These men were sound asleep in the beds. As noted in the Supreme Court’s opinion in Minnesota v. Olson: We are at our most vulnerable when we are asleep, because we cannot monitor our own safety or the security of our belongings. It is for this reason that, although we may spend all day in public places, when we cannot sleep in our own home, we seek out another private place to sleep, whether it be a hotel room or the home of a friend. Society expects at least as much privacy in these places as in a telephone booth[.] 495 U.S. at 99. Because I would hold that the trial court clearly erred in finding these men to lack standing, I dissent. I am authorized to state that Judge Baker joins in this dissent.