People v. Kuntze

• Decision Date: 04 November 1963
• Docket Number: No. 98,98
• Citation: 124 N.W.2d 269,371 Mich. 419
• Parties: The PEOPLE of the State of Michigan, Plaintiff and Appellee, v. William KUNTZE, Norman Buckmaster and David Seanor, Defendants and Appellants.
• Court: Michigan Supreme Court

Page 269

124 N.W.2d 269

371 Mich. 419

The PEOPLE of the State of Michigan, Plaintiff and Appellee, v. William KUNTZE, Norman Buckmaster and David Seanor,

Defendants and Appellants.

No. 98.

Supreme Court of Michigan.

Nov. 4, 1963.

Russell W. Bradley, Pros. Atty., Menominee, for the people.

Doyle & Doyle, Menominee, for respondents-appellants.

Frank J. Kelley, Atty. Gen., Robert A. Derengoski, Sol. Gen., Lansing, for the Atty. Gen. of Michigan, amicus curiae.

T. Harrison Stanton, Jackson, Gilbert M. Frimet, Nedwin L. Smokler, Ferndale, Chairman Sub-Committee of the Civil Liberties Committee of the State Bar of Michigan, amicus curiae of Civil Liberties Committee of the State Bar of Mich.

Leo A. Farhat, Lansing, Chairman, Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence, William N. Kritselis, Lansing, for the State Bar of Michigan Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence, amicus curiae.

Before the Entire Bench, except O'HARA, J.

SOURIS, Justice (for affirmance).

Defendants were convicted of possession of part of a deer in violation of C.L.S.1956, § 312.9 (Stat.Ann.1958 Rev. § 13.1338) a misdemeanor. Their motion, made before trial and preserved for review, to suppress evidence essential to their conviction on the ground that it had been obtained by an illegal search and seizure in violation of their constitutional rights, was denied. They appeal, claiming the trial court erred in denying their motion to suppress.

One evening in September of 1960, after nightfall, State Police Troopers Schwab and Righter were proceeding by patrol car to a point west of the village of Daggett in Menominee county to investigate a report that occupants of a car were shining deer in a field and that a shot had been heard. The report was made at the troopers' police post by a local justice of the peace. As the officers drove through Daggett, they observed defendants' car and another car traveling just ahead of the patrol car. A short distance beyond the village limits the officers saw defendants' car turn off onto a side road and thence into a nearby farmyard where the officers said they knew it had no right to be and where its headlights were extinguished. A few hundred feet beyond the side road onto which defendants had turned, the officers came upon the other car which they had earlier observed in the village. It had stopped alongside the highway and two of its occupants were opening its hood as the officers stopped their patrol car and walked up to them. The occupants of the car advised the officers their car was not operating properly and, in response to inquiry by Schwab or Righter, denied they were shining deer in the area. Upon the officers' requests, they voluntarily opened the car's trunk so that it could be examined. Finding nothing, the officers returned to their patrol car.

They then noticed that the headlights of defendants' car in the farmyard had been turned on again and that defendants were returning to the highway. The officers pulled off the highway and as defendants' car drove by noticed that it did not have a light illuminating its license plate, in violation of the motor vehicle code. They thereupon re-entered the highway, pulled up along the left side of defendants' car from the rear and signaled defendants to stop by turning on the patrol car's oscillating roof light, hood light and spotlight and by sounding its horn. When defendants failed to respond to their signals, the troopers swung in behind defendants' car and flashed their spotlight into the rear window of defendants' car as a signal to stop. The spotlight revealed to the officers two of the defendants bending forward and moving their shoulders and arms in what seemed to them to be an effort to stuff an object under the front seat on which all the occupants were sitting. The defendants' car then stopped and the patrol car stopped behind it.

Trooper Righter, who had been driving the police car, alighted and approached defendants' car from its left side; his partner, Trooper Schwab, approached it from its right side. Their patrol car's headlights were shining into the rear of defendants' car and both troopers carried flashlights which they shined into the interior of the car. As Schwab approached the defendants, he noticed what looked to him to be blood spots and smears on the shoulders and backs of the white sweat shirts of the two passengers nearest him and he thereupon ordered them out of the car.

As the two passengers got out of the car, Trooper Righter, standing alongside the car on the driver's side, observed in the beams of his flashlight a leg of a deer partially protruding from under the front seat. He ordered the driver out of the car, led him around the car to its right side where Schwab and the other defendants were standing, reached through the open passenger door and extracted a hind quarter of a deer. It is the hind quarter of a deer defendants sought unsuccessfully to have suppressed from evidence on the ground its seizure was illegal.

We need not be diverted in this case by effort to determine whether defendants had been arrested prior to search of their car. Such inquiry perhaps would be appropriate if the only justification for seizure of the deer hind quarter was that it was discovered during a search without a warrant made incidental to a prior valid arrest. People v. Harper, 365 Mich. 494, 113 N.W.2d 808. It would be absured to suggest in this case that this search and seizure was made only incidental to defendants' arrest for violation of the motor vehicle code. Such a suggestion in this case would require us to disregard significant events which occurred before, during and after the time defendants were chased by the officers and finally stopped.

Aside from those cases in which legality of seizure of evidence depends solely upon the reasonableness of a search without a warrant made incidental to a valid arrest, a prior valid arrest is not essential to a police officer's right to search and seize. Like most state and federal courts, we have previously held that the validity of a search and seizure made without a warrant does not depend upon a prior valid arrest. People v. Kamhout, 227 Mich. 172, 198 N.W. 831; People v. Bringardner, 233 Mich. 449, 206 N.W. 988; People v. Dungey, 235 Mich. 144, 209 N.W. 57; People v. Alicki, 321 Mich. 701, 33 N.W.2d 124. See, also, Carroll v. United States (1925), 267 U.S. 132, 158, 45 S.Ct. 280, 69 L.Ed. 543, and annotation at 89 A.L.R.2d 715, 'Lawfulness of nonconsensual search and seizure without warrant, prior to arrest.'

While it is not necessary, therefore, to determine whether or not defendants were formally arrested before the leg of deer was seized, the fact that they had violated the motor vehicle code (without regard to the officers' possible right to stop defendants otherwise) is of some significance to the extent it required the officers in the proper exercise of their duty to stop defendants' car. The officers' right to do so is not questioned; nor can such right be doubted. Having done so, they put themselves in relation to defendants and their car in a place they had a right to be and from such vantage point Trooper Righter observed the commission of a misdemeanor by the defendants in his presence. We may note, parenthetically, that defendants make no claim, such as was made in People v. Roache, 237 Mich. 215, 211 N.W. 742; People v. Anders (1959), 167 Cal.App.2d 65, 333 P.2d 854; Johnson v. State (1950), 92 Okl.Cr. 63, 220 P.2d 469, that the officers stopped them for a motor vehicle code viclation merely as a pretext to afford the officers an opportunity to search defendants or their car. The only evidence received on the motion to suppress was the officers' testimony and from that the trial judge was entitled to find, as he did, that defendants were stopped legally for a traffic violation.

Having lawfully stopped the defendants, the legal propriety of the subsequent search and seizure of the leg of deer (and its admissibility in evidence, People v. Marxhausen, 204 Mich. 559, 171 N.W. 557, 3 A.L.R. 1505) depends upon the information the officers...