People v. McCauley, 1-16-0812
| Decision Date | 28 December 2018 |
| Docket Number | No. 1-16-0812,1-16-0812 |
| Citation | 2018 IL App (1st) 160812,429 Ill.Dec. 252,124 N.E.3d 21 |
| Parties | The PEOPLE of the State of Illinois, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Otis MCCAULEY, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | United States Appellate Court of Illinois |
Michael J. Pelletier, Patricia Mysza, and Kathryn L. Oberer, of State Appellate Defender’s Office, of Chicago, for appellant.
Kimberly M. Foxx, State’s Attorney, of Chicago (Alan J. Spellberg, Joseph Alexander, and Hareena Meghani-Wakely, Assistant State’s Attorneys, of counsel), for the People.
¶ 1 Defendant Otis McCauley was convicted after a bench trial of delivery of a controlled substance and possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver. Defendant sold drugs to an undercover officer inside the home of Tiny Barry, for whom defendant regularly performed housework. Shortly after that transaction, the undercover officer's partners returned to Barry's house to arrest defendant. The details of that encounter were a matter of dispute, but at some point, the officers entered Barry's house, without a warrant, and seized some more drugs from a table in the foyer.
¶ 2 The trial court denied defendant's motion to suppress, finding that he "lacked standing" to challenge the warrantless entry (i.e. , search) and seizure of the drugs, since he did not live in Barry's house and was merely an "invitee."
¶ 3 Defendant argues that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy in Barry's house. So unless exigent circumstances justified the warrantless entry and seizure, the drugs seized from the table in the foyer must be suppressed. (Perhaps other evidence, too, defendant says—such as the undercover officer's on-scene identification of defendant, and prerecorded funds seized from defendant during a search incident to his arrest.) The trial court, having denied the motion on "standing" grounds, did not decide whether there were exigent circumstances. Defendant thus asks that we remand for the trial court to do so. ¶ 4 The trial court's reasoning was legally erroneous. But defendant did not carry his burden of establishing that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy in Barry's house. We thus affirm the denial of his motion to suppress. We also vacate his $250 DNA fee.
¶ 6 At defendant's bench trial, Officer Angela Pittman, the undercover buy officer, testified first for the State. When she finished testifying, defense counsel asked for leave to file a "motion to quash and suppress evidence." Counsel did not specify what evidence the defense sought to suppress. But the motion was based on Officer Pittman's testimony that defendant was arrested outside, rather than inside, Barry's house. (According to counsel, that testimony conflicted with the police reports, and thus revealed a basis for suppression that counsel was not aware of prior to the trial.) So the theory of the motion—at least as the trial court paraphrased it—was that the officers could not enter the house and seize the drugs, after arresting defendant outside, without a warrant.
¶ 7 The trial court suspended the trial to hear evidence on the motion. That evidence included the testimony of Officer Michael Clemons, who testified for the State, and defendant.
¶ 8 Officer Pittman testified that on April 30, 2014, she was assigned to an undercover narcotics detail with Officer Clemons and Officer John Zinchuk. Around 10:30 a.m., the officers went to the 5600 block of South Elizabeth Avenue. Officer Pittman spoke to a man on the street about purchasing cannabis. The man directed her to a specific house on that block and told her to knock on the window. When she did, defendant opened the front door. Officer Pittman asked to buy six bags of cannabis. Defendant went inside, and Officer Pittman followed at his invitation. The house was empty, except for a table in the entry foyer, a couple of feet from the front door. Officer Pittman did not see anyone but defendant inside.
¶ 9 Defendant walked over to the table. There were several bags on the table, containing various substances that Officer Pittman suspected to be cannabis, heroin, and crack cocaine. She asked defendant to exchange one bag of cannabis for one bag of heroin. Defendant obliged. Officer Pittman gave defendant $60 in pre-recorded funds, in exchange for the six bags; left the house; and signaled to her partners that the buy had been completed.
¶ 10 Officer Clemons testified that he went to the front door after receiving the signal from Officer Pittman. Defendant opened the door. Officer Pittman radioed her partners and identified defendant as the person who sold her drugs. Defendant was soon arrested, but the officers gave conflicting accounts of precisely where the arrest was made.
¶ 11 Officer Pittman testified that the front door was open and defendant was standing outside the house. Specifically, defendant was on the porch—both when she identified him and when her partners arrested him. It was after the arrest that her partners went inside the house.
¶ 12 Officer Clemons testified that defendant was about to step outside but never did. While defendant was still "standing in the doorway," he must have seen Officer Clemons on the porch, because he tried to run back inside. Officer Clemons and another officer (whom he did not name) grabbed defendant. A "struggle" ensued, and they all "fell back into the doorway."
¶ 13 Officer Clemons testified that a table with several bags of "different types of [suspected] narcotics" was located just to the right of the front door, and was clearly visible from the porch when defendant opened the door.
¶ 14 Defendant testified that the house belonged to Tiny Barry, who lived there with her two sons. Defendant did not live there. But he helped out around the house as often as three times a week. He cleaned the house, fed the dog, and cleaned out the dog's cage. On the day in question, Barry was in the process of moving, and she had asked defendant to help her clean and pack. According to defendant, there were various items of furniture and moving boxes throughout the house, including several boxes next to the front door.
¶ 15 Defendant was in the kitchen, feeding the dog and cleaning the dog's cage, when Officer Pittman knocked on the window. Defendant opened the door, and Officer Pittman asked to buy some cannabis. Defendant "told her there ain't no weed in this house" and closed the door.
¶ 16 Defendant estimated that the officers returned about 23 minutes later. Defendant opened the door halfway and remained inside while he talked to them. Soon, a total of five or six officers "bum-rushed the house," pushed him back, and came inside. The officers searched the entire house, including the kitchen, the bedrooms, and the moving boxes.
¶ 17 Defendant denied that there were drugs on the table. Rather, after the officers searched the house and went through Barry's moving boxes, Officer Pittman announced that she found money and drugs. (Officer Pittman, for her part, denied that she went back inside the house after completing the initial transaction.)
¶ 18 There was no dispute that the officers did not have either a search warrant or an arrest warrant when they entered Barry's house.
¶ 19 After defendant testified, the trial court heard arguments on the motion to suppress. The parties principally disputed whether defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in Barry's house, based on his regular performance of chores on her behalf. The trial court found, on this basis, that defendant was an "invitee" in Barry's house. An "invitee," the trial court held, may challenge a search of any "personal effects" he may have left in "the room in which he is sleeping," but an "invitee" lacks "standing to challenge the search of the entire house." The trial court denied the motion, and the trial resumed.
¶ 20 The State called Officer Zinchuk as its final witness. He testified that defendant was detained on the front porch while trying to run back inside. Officer Zinchuk searched defendant and recovered the pre-recorded funds used by Officer Pittman to buy the drugs. He also recovered 4 bags of heroin, 6 bags of cocaine, and 9 bags of cannabis from a table by the front door. Those drugs were clearly visible from the doorway. The house was "vacant," and looked like it was "under construction." Officer Zinchuk did not recall seeing anything inside except the table with the drugs on it; and to his knowledge, none of the officers searched the entire house.
¶ 21 The parties stipulated, among other things, that the items purchased by Officer Pittman tested positive for 1.5 grams of heroin, and that the items recovered from the house tested positive for 0.4 grams of heroin and 0.1 grams of cocaine.
¶ 22 At the close of evidence, the defense renewed its motion to suppress. The trial court adhered to its ruling that defendant "lacked standing" to challenge the warrantless entry and search, because he was simply "cleaning the house" and "wasn't residing there."
¶ 23 The trial court found defendant guilty of delivery of a controlled substance (heroin) and two counts of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver (heroin and cocaine). The trial court found that the officers seized drugs from "the same table that the defendant went to to retrieve the drugs that he sold [Officer] Pittman"—and thus not from a wholesale search of the house, as defendant had testified. In its findings, the trial court also noted that "there is some dispute as to how [the officers] entered" Barry's house. But the court never definitively resolved that dispute. Instead, the court briefly summarized some of the testimony on this point and immediately reiterated its ruling that "defendant lacked standing in the motion."
¶ 24 Defendant filed a motion for new trial, in which he alleged, among other things, that the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress.
¶ 25 Based on his criminal history, ...
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