Court Opinion

ID: 9483634
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:27:10.273892+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:44.859011
License: Public Domain

SEYMOUR, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I am unable to join the majority opinion. In my view, the instant case differs significantly from Washington v. Chrisman, 455 U.S. 1, 102 S.Ct. 812, 70 L.Ed.2d 778 (1982), and cannot be persuasively distinguished from United States v. Anthon, 648 F.2d 669 (10th Cir.1981). Accordingly, I would hold that the evidence discovered inside Mr. Butler’s home must be suppressed.
The police in this case entered Mr. Butler's home without consent and without a warrant.
The Fourth Amendment protects the individual’s privacy in a variety of settings. In none is the zone of privacy more clearly defined than when bounded by the unambiguous physical dimensions of an individual’s home — a zone that finds its roots in clear and specific constitutional terms: “The right of the people to be secure in their ... houses ... shall not be violated.” That language unequivocally establishes the proposition that “[a]t the very core [of the Fourth Amendment] stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.” In terms that apply equally to seizures of property and to seizures of persons, the Fourth Amendment has drawn a firm line at the entrance to the house. Absent exigent circumstances, that threshold may not reasonably be crossed without a warrant.
Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 589-90, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 1381-82, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980) (emphasis added) (citation omitted); see also United States v. Maez, 872 F.2d 1444, 1450-51 (10th Cir.1989); United States v. Aquino, 836 F.2d 1268, 1271-72 (10th Cir.1988); United States v. Morgan, 743 F.2d 1158, 1161 (6th Cir.1984).
As Payton clearly emphasizes, police may enter a home without a warrant only when exigent circumstances are present. We have defined exigent circumstances as arising when
(1) the law enforcement officers ... have reasonable grounds to believe that there is immediate need to protect their lives or others or their property or that of others, (2) the search [is not] motivated by an intent to arrest and seize evidence, and (3) there [is] some reasonable basis, approaching probable cause, to associate an emergency with the area or place to be searched.
United States v. Smith, 797 F.2d 836, 840 (10th Cir.1986); see also Aquino, 836 F.2d at 1271-72. As an exception to the warrant requirement, exigent circumstances must be “jealously and carefully drawn.” Aquino, 836 F.2d at 1270; Smith, 797 F.2d at 841.
*623[B]eeause each exception to the warrant requirement invariably impinges to some extent on the protective purpose of the Fourth Amendment, the few situations in which a search may be conducted in the absence of a warrant have been carefully delineated and “the burden is on those seeking the exemption to show the need for it.”
Smith, 797 F.2d at 841 (quoting Arkansas v. Sanders, 442 U.S. 753, 759-60, 99 S.Ct. 2586, 2591, 61 L.Ed.2d 235 (1979)). The government’s burden of establishing that sufficient exigent circumstances exist to justify warrantless entry “is particularly heavy where the police seek to enter a suspect’s home ... because warrantless seizures inside a home are presumptively unreasonable.” Maez, 872 F.2d at 1452; see also Aquino, 836 F.2d at 1271.
In this case, the sole circumstance upon which the majority relies is the fact that Mr. Butler was arrested barefooted in a yard that was littered with flattened beer cans and some broken glass. However, the evidence is undisputed that Mr. Butler and his companions, who were also barefooted, had just walked back and forth across the yard without injury to go to the river to bathe. Moreover, Mr. Butler did not express concern about the possibility of injury to his bare feet and did not request the opportunity to put on his shoes.
In Anthon, the defendant was arrested in the hallway of his hotel dressed in bathing trunks and taken back to his room to change clothes. We held that “[t]he arrest in the hotel hallway did not provide exigent circumstances justifying a warrantless search of the hotel room.” 648 F.2d at 675. In so doing, we pointed out that the officers were not responding to an emergency call, were not in hot pursuit of a fleeing felon, and were not acting to prevent the destruction or removal of evidence. Id. Significantly, we emphasized the lack of evidence that “Anthon requested to be returned to his room or that he consented to the officers’ entry into the room.” Id. In this regard, we said:
Although the trial court record may very well have established that Anthon requested that he be allowed to re-enter the hotel room to change his clothes and gather his personal effects if the trial attorneys had properly pursued interrogation in this regard, the fact is that there is nothing in the record before us to indicate whether such a request was made. On the contrary, the record simply indicates that immediately following Anthon’s arrest the officers returned him to his room. Accordingly, the warrant-less entry into Anthon’s hotel room was violative of his rights secured by the Fourth Amendment.
Id. at 676.
With Anthon and Chrisman as guides, it is clear to me that the government here has not' established sufficient exigent circumstances to legitimize the warrantless entry into Mr. Butler’s home. Chrisman provides that a police officer has a right to accompany an arrested defendant into his room when he requests to go there, but Chrisman cannot, under Payton, stand for the proposition that the officer may take an arrestee into his house without consent. The analysis in Chrisman is fully dependent upon the defendant’s request to return to his room, see Chrisman, 455 U.S. at 6 n. 3, 102 S.Ct. at 816 n. 3, because absent such request the police officer had no right to cross the threshold. The plain view exception to the warrant requirement is, of course, premised on the officer viewing the evidence “in a place where the officer has a right to be.” Id. at 6, 102 S.Ct. at 816. The district court in the present case found neither a request by Mr. Butler that the officer take him into his house, or his consent. Accord Morgan, 743 F.2d at 1164 (Chrisman not applicable when arrestee did not invite police to accompany him to his room).
In relying on United States v. Brown, 951 F.2d 999, 1005 (9th Cir.1991); United States v. Di Stefano, 555 F.2d 1094 (2d Cir.1977); and United States v. Titus, 445 F.2d 577 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 404 U.S. 957, 92 S.Ct. 323, 30 L.Ed.2d 274 (1971), the majority builds on a house of cards that falls with one slight breath. The statement in Brown does no more than recite the holding in Chrisman, and is pure dicta *624in any event because no officer accompanied anyone into his home to obtain clothing or identification in that case. The court in Di Stef ano relied only on Titus, a controlling case in the same circuit. Titus involved the warrantless entry into the apartment of the defendant’s girlfriend to prevent the defendant from escaping arrest. The court held there that preventing escape constituted exigent circumstances for entering the apartment. Titus is clearly distinguishable on its facts. The war-rantless entry of a home to prevent the escape of a defendant the police have probable cause to arrest is not analogous to an entry to obtain shoes for a barefoot arres-tee who does not request them. Titus thus does not provide support for the police entry of Mr. Butler’s home in this case, especially given this court’s strong statements in Anthon that such an entry is prohibited without exigent circumstances or consent.
I am unwilling to dilute the concept of exigent circumstances, particularly to justify the warrantless entry into a home. The officer here testified that Mr. Butler did not suggest that they go inside to retrieve his shoes; instead, the officer testified that he said to Mr. Butler, “ ‘Let’s go inside’ ... ‘to get your shoes,’ ” rec., vol. II, at 14. Taking an arrestee in bare feet across a littered yard he has just traversed safely presents no greater exigency than taking an arrestee to the police station in his bathing suit. Indeed, in my view the majority trivializes an exception to the warrant requirement that should be “jealously and carefully drawn.” I would hold that the warrantless entry of Mr. Butler’s home violated the Fourth Amendment.