Com. v. Labron
| Decision Date | 26 February 1997 |
| Citation | 690 A.2d 228,547 Pa. 344 |
| Parties | COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania, Appellee, v. Edwin LABRON, Appellant. |
| Court | Pennsylvania Supreme Court |
This case is before us on remand from the United States Supreme Court for further proceedings not inconsistent with its per curiam opinion, Pennsylvania v. Labron, U.S. , 116 S. Ct. 2485, 135 L. Ed. 2d 1031 (1996).
We issued an opinion in this matter on December 29, 1995, which details the factual and procedural history of the case. Commonwealth v. Labron, 543 Pa. 86, 669 A.2d 917 (1995). We held that evidence obtained from a warrantless search of an automobile was properly suppressed. The United States Supreme Court summarily reversed our decision, along with Commonwealth v. Kilgore, 544 Pa. 439, 677 A.2d 311 (1995), holding that the warrantless searches of the automobiles did not violate the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution because probable cause was established. The Court further stated that "the law of the Commonwealth thus appears to us 'interwoven with the federal law, and . . . the adequacy and independence of any possible state law ground is not clear from the face of the opinion.'" 116 S. Ct. at __, citing Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. 1032, 1040-1041, [*345] 103 S. Ct. 3469, 3476-3477, 77 L. Ed. 2d 1201 (1983).1
Appellant, Edwin Labron, has filed a Petition for Clarification and/or Affirmance of this Court's Judgment as Resting Upon State Constitutional Grounds. We now reaffirm our holding in Labron, and explicitly note that it was, in fact, decided upon independent state grounds, i.e., Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution. Although we cited United States Supreme Court cases in our discussion of the automobile exception, we continually referred to our Court's prior interpretation of the exception to the warrant requirement. Specifically, we relied upon our decision in Commonwealth v. White, 543 Pa. 45, 669 A.2d 896 (1996), which was decided the same day.2 In White, we discussed the automobile exception and noted that, "this Court, when considering the relative importance of privacy as against securing criminal convictions, has struck a different balance than has the United States Supreme Court, and under the Pennsylvania balance, an individual's privacy interests are given greater deference than under federal law." Id. at 56, 669 A.2d at 902. Following this citation to White, we concluded in Labron that "this Commonwealth's jurisprudence of the automobile exception has long required both the existence of probable cause and the presence of exigent circumstances to justify a warrantless search." Labron, 543 Pa. at 100-101, 669 A.2d at 924.
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Com. v. Perry
...perpetuates an unfortunate misapprehension of White that began with the non-precedential plurality opinion in Commonwealth v. Labron, 547 Pa. 344, 690 A.2d 228 (1997) (Labron II). Moreover, even if White's holding constituted such a forthright, distinct and acknowledged state constitutional......
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Florida v. Powell, No. 08–1175.
...it was, in fact, decided upon independent grounds, i.e., Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.” Commonwealth v. Labron, 547 Pa. 344, 345, 690 A.2d 228 (1997). That we have overreached before is no reason to repeat the mistake again.5 In examining what the state-court opinio......
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State v. Brillon
...constitutional grounds, and on remand we should rely upon those grounds to reinstate the opinion. See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Labron, 547 Pa. 344, 690 A.2d 228, 228-29 (1997) (following reversal and remand by United States Supreme Court based on its conclusion that state court had not expres......
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