Evans v. United States

• Decision Date: 06 August 2015
• Docket Number: No. 13–CM–1173.,13–CM–1173.
• Parties: Jamel EVANS, Appellant, v. UNITED STATES, Appellee.
• Court: D.C. Court of Appeals

122 A.3d 876

Jamel EVANS, Appellant

v.UNITED STATES, Appellee.

No. 13–CM–1173.

District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Argued Dec. 16, 2014.

Decided Aug. 6, 2015.

Murray Kamionski, Manhattan Beach, CA, for appellant.

James A. Ewing, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Ronald C. Machen Jr., United States Attorney at the time the brief was filed, and Elizabeth Trosman, Chrisellen R. Kolb, and Karen Seifert, Assistant United States Attorneys, were on the brief, for appellee.

Before BECKWITH and McLEESE, Associate Judges, and FERREN, Senior Judge.

Opinion

McLEESE, Associate Judge:

Appellant Jamel Evans challenges his convictions for attempted possession of unregistered firearms and attempted unlawful possession of ammunition. Mr. Evans argues that the trial court erroneously admitted evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment and that the evidence was insufficient to support his convictions. We agree with Mr. Evans's Fourth Amendment claim but conclude that the evidence was sufficient. We therefore reverse and remand for further proceedings.

I.

Viewed in the light most favorable to the verdict, the government's evidence at trial indicated the following. In April 2013, Mr. Evans called 911 to report a domestic-violence assault. When Officer Daniel Gray responded, he found Mr. Evans and Shantay Taylor arguing in the parking lot of an apartment building. Mr. Evans was bleeding, and Ms. Taylor had blood on her clothes. Ms. Taylor said that Mr. Evans had punched her several times. Mr. Evans stated that the two had been in his apartment and that Ms. Taylor had hit him, scratched him, and assaulted him with an ashtray. Mr. Evans told the police that he was trying to get Ms. Taylor out of his apartment. Neither Mr. Evans nor Ms. Taylor indicated that anyone else was involved in the incident or was present in Mr. Evans's apartment.

While Officer Gray and his partner were talking with Mr. Evans and Ms. Taylor, Officer Michael Wendt arrived and walked into the apartment building. Officer Wendt saw blood outside of apartment 201, and the door to that apartment was open. Officer Wendt entered the apartment and looked through the apartment room by room. In one bedroom, he saw a gun leaning against the wall of an open closet. He also saw a .38–caliber round of ammunition, sitting on a dresser in the same bedroom. Officer Wendt entered a second bedroom but did not see any contraband in plain view in that bedroom.

In a subsequent search of the apartment pursuant to a search warrant, the police recovered a 16–gauge shotgun from a bedroom closet. There was men's clothing in that closet.¹ The bedroom was messy and contained an unmade bed. In the same bedroom, the police recovered the round of .38–caliber ammunition from the top of the dresser. On top of that dresser the police also found a pill bottle with the name Yvette Murray.

In a closet in a second bedroom, the police found a .22–caliber rifle. It is unclear whether the door to that closet was open or closed when the police entered the apartment. The rifle was right inside the door to the closet, in the same position as the gun in the first closet. The second bedroom also contained an animal cage. On top of that cage was a box containing rounds of 9–millimeter ammunition. An extra-large men's jacket was also lying on top of the cage. The police found six zip lock bags containing marijuana in one of the pockets of that jacket. It is unclear whether the second bedroom contained a bed. The police found a judicial summons in the apartment. The name “Christina Brunson” and the apartment's address appeared on that summons. Finally, Mr. Evans had not registered the guns or any .38–caliber weapon.

The trial court found Mr. Evans guilty of attempted possession of both guns and of the round of .38–caliber ammunition. The trial court acquitted Mr. Evans of the charges relating to the ammunition inside the box in the second bedroom and the marijuana inside the coat in that bedroom.

II.

Mr. Evans argues that Officer Wendt's initial search of the apartment was unlawful under the Fourth Amendment and that the evidence of the contraband recovered from the apartment was inadmissible. We agree.

A.

We first provide additional factual background relevant to Mr. Evans's Fourth Amendment claim. The evidence indicated that Officer Wendt arrived at the parking lot outside 622 Eastern Avenue within two minutes after he heard the radio call concerning an alleged domestic-violence incident at that address. When he arrived, two officers were already separately interviewing Mr. Evans and Ms. Taylor. Officer Wendt saw blood on Mr. Evans's head and that Ms. Taylor was excited, but he did not speak with her. After standing and watching for less than five minutes, Officer Wendt entered the apartment building.

When Officer Wendt saw blood outside of Apartment 201, he entered that apartment. He entered because he was concerned that another victim might be inside, he was looking for weapons, and he wanted to determine whether the apartment needed to be secured as a crime scene. Officer Wendt looked through the apartment room by room, checking whether anyone else was in the apartment.

After Officer Wendt noticed a gun and a round of ammunition in the apartment, police officers secured the apartment and obtained an emergency search warrant. The affidavit in support of the search warrant described the altercation between Ms. Taylor and Mr. Evans. The affidavit also described Officer Wendt's entry into apartment 201 and his discovery of a shotgun and a round of ammunition. The affidavit also indicated that Ms. Taylor told police that Mr. Evans sold marijuana and that she had seen Mr. Evans bagging up marijuana in the apartment that morning. The affidavit alleged that there was probable cause to believe that the apartment contained the contraband Officer Wendt had seen, additional weapons and ammunition, marijuana, and other evidence of a drug offense.²

B.

The United States argues primarily that Officer Wendt's warrantless entry was lawful under the “emergency aid” exception to the warrant requirement. We conclude otherwise.

The Fourth Amendment permits an officer to enter a dwelling without a warrant if the officer has “an objectively reasonable basis for believing” that entry is necessary “to render emergency assistance to an injured occupant or to protect an occupant from imminent injury.” Brigham City, Utah v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398, 406, 403, 126 S.Ct. 1943, 164 L.Ed.2d 650 (2006). Although this court has previously required that police have “probable cause to believe that immediate entry [was] necessary,” United States v. Booth, 455 A.2d 1351, 1355 (D.C.1983), we have not had occasion to address that requirement in light of Brigham City 's use of the phrase “reasonable basis for believing.” Compare, e.g., United States v. Infante, 701 F.3d 386, 392–93 (1st Cir.2012) (reasonable-basis standard “approximat[es] probable cause”), with, e.g., United States v. Porter, 594 F.3d 1251, 1258 (10th Cir.2010) (reasonable-belief standard “is more lenient than the probable cause standard”). We need not address the potential implications of Brigham City in this case. Even applying a less stringent reasonable-belief standard, we conclude that the police did not have adequate reason to believe that immediate entry was necessary to provide emergency aid.

As a preliminary matter, we note that the United States bore the burden of establishing the legality of Officer Wendt's warrantless entry. See, e.g., Womack v. United States, 673 A.2d 603, 617 (D.C.1996) (“[I]f a warrantless search or seizure produced evidence that the government seeks to introduce at trial, the burden is on the government to overcome the presumption of illegality by justifying the search based on facts that could bring it within certain recognized, limited exceptions to the warrant requirement.”); Sandoval v. Las Vegas Metro. Police Dep't, 756 F.3d 1154, 1164 (9th Cir.2014) (“the government bears the burden of showing specific and articulable facts to justify” invocation of emergency-aid exception) (internal quotation marks omitted). Without deciding the issue, we also accept the United States's statement during oral argument that the legality of Officer Wendt's entry must be assessed based not solely on what Officer Wendt knew at the time of entry, but also on what the other investigating officers on the scene knew at that time. Cf., e.g., Parsons v. United States, 15 A.3d 276, 279 (D.C.2011) ( “The doctrine of collective knowledge is firmly established in this jurisdiction and provides that although individual officers may not have sufficient knowledge to establish probable cause, the information collectively known, even if not communicated by one officer to the other, can be sufficient.”) (internal quotation marks and brackets omitted); Turner v. United States, 623 A.2d 1170, 1172 n. 2 (D.C.1993) (collective-knowledge doctrine “must apply equally to information augmenting or diminishing the objective basis the police have for conducting a seizure”).

In this case, Officer Wendt knew at the time of entry that he had been called to the scene to respond to an alleged incident of domestic violence; that other officers were separately interviewing a man and a woman in the parking lot of the building to which the police had been called; that the man was bleeding profusely from the head, all over the ground; that the man said that he had been hit by an ashtray; and that there was blood leading into the apartment. Other officers on the scene had interviewed Mr. Evans and Ms. Taylor for five or ten minutes before Officer Wendt entered the apartment. Officer Gray had spoken with Ms. Taylor, who described an altercation involving only herself and Mr. Evans. It is less clear whether Officer Gray had spoken to Mr. Evans by the time Officer Wendt entered the apartment, or precisely what Mr. Evans had said to another officer who spoke to Mr. Evans first. It appears, however,...