State v. Gant
| Decision Date | 29 March 2002 |
| Docket Number | No. 2 CA-CR 2000-0430.,2 CA-CR 2000-0430. |
| Citation | 202 Ariz. 240,43 P.3d 188 |
| Parties | The STATE of Arizona, Appellee, v. Rodney Joseph GANT, Appellant. |
| Court | Arizona Court of Appeals |
Janet Napolitano, Arizona Attorney General, by Randall M. Howe and Eric J. Olsson, Tucson for appellee.
Law Offices of Thomas Jacobs, by Thomas Jacobs, Tucson for appellant.
¶ 1 After a jury trial, appellant Rodney Gant was found guilty of unlawful possession of cocaine for sale and unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia. The trial court sentenced him to concurrent, mitigated prison terms, the longest of which was three years. Because we agree with Gant that the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress evidence, we reverse his convictions.
¶ 2 Gant argues that the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress a handgun and a plastic bag of cocaine found when his vehicle was searched after his arrest, asserting that the warrantless search violated his Fourth Amendment rights. When reviewing a trial court's ruling on a motion to suppress evidence based on an alleged Fourth Amendment violation, we defer to the court's factual findings but review de novo mixed questions of law and fact. State v. Wyman, 197 Ariz. 10, 3 P.3d 392 (App.2000). Because warrantless searches are presumptively unreasonable and unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment, the state bears the burden of proving the lawfulness of the acquisition of evidence seized without a warrant. Rodriguez v. Arellano, 194 Ariz. 211, 979 P.2d 539 (App.1999); see also State v. Valle, 196 Ariz. 324, 996 P.2d 125 (App.2000)
. In determining whether the state has carried that burden, we consider only the evidence presented at the suppression hearing. See State v. Sanchez, 200 Ariz. 163, 24 P.3d 610 (App.2001). And, we view that evidence in the light most favorable to sustaining the trial court's ruling. Id.
¶ 3 At the hearing on Gant's motion to suppress, the court stated:
¶ 4 Gant's counsel stated that, "if the State concedes those are the facts, I think those are facts sufficient to proceed on the motion." The prosecutor replied: Consequently, the parties did not introduce any evidence at the suppression hearing either in support of or in opposition to Gant's motion.
¶ 5 In his motion to suppress the evidence found in his vehicle, Gant did not contest the lawfulness of his arrest but, rather, argued only that the ensuing warrantless search of his vehicle was illegal because no exceptions to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement applied. The state argued that the search was lawful because it had been conducted incident to Gant's arrest or, alternatively, that, because the police had probable cause to search his vehicle, a warrantless search was permissible under the automobile exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. The trial court denied Gant's motion, finding that the search of the car was lawful because it was a search incident to his arrest. We disagree.
¶ 6 In Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 763, 89 S.Ct. 2034, 2040, 23 L.Ed.2d 685, 694 (1969), the Supreme Court held that, when police make a lawful arrest, they may, without a warrant, search the person in custody as well as the "area from within which he might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence." Applying that principle to a situation in which the person arrested had been occupying a vehicle when police initiated contact with him, the Court later held that officers may search the entire passenger compartment of a vehicle, and all containers therein, as a "contemporaneous incident" of a lawful arrest. New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454, 460, 101 S.Ct. 2860, 2864, 69 L.Ed.2d 768, 775 (1981).1 This rule, denominated "bright-line" by one of the dissenting justices, id. at 463, 101 S.Ct. at 2866, 69 L.Ed.2d at 777, was premised on the generalization, rather than the probability in a given case, that objects within a vehicle's passenger compartment are within an arrestee's reach. Even so, the Court specifically stated that its holding was limited to the "particular and problematic" context in which it had arisen, and did not "alter[ ] the fundamental principles established in the Chimel case regarding the basic scope of searches incident to lawful custodial arrests." 453 U.S. at 460 n. 3, 101 S.Ct. at 2864 n. 3, 69 L.Ed.2d at 775 n. 3; see also State v. Lopez, 198 Ariz. 420, 10 P.3d 1207 (App.2000)
.
¶ 7 Taking Belton one step further, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a vehicle search conducted five minutes after an arrestee had been removed from both the automobile and the scene qualified as a search incident to arrest under Belton because the search had "occurred during a continuous series of events closely connected in time to the arrest." United States v. McLaughlin, 170 F.3d 889, 891 (9th Cir. 1999); see also United States v. Doward, 41 F.3d 789 (1st Cir.1994)
.
¶ 8 The state contends that the question of whether Belton applies to Gant's situation "appears to be a matter of first impression in Arizona."2 We agree and conclude that, not only are Belton and McLaughlin both factually distinguishable from this case, but also that the rationale underlying those cases does not extend to this situation. We further conclude, therefore, that the warrantless search of Gant's vehicle was not a lawful search incident to his arrest.
¶ 9 In Belton, an officer stopped the vehicle in which Belton was a passenger because the officer had seen the vehicle speeding. In McLaughlin, an officer stopped the vehicle because it had an illegally tinted rear window. Here, in contrast, the facts as summarized by the trial court do not show, nor can we infer, that Gant was or should have been aware either of the police presence at the residence as he approached it or of the light the officer shined into his vehicle. And if, as the state suggested at oral argument in this court, the trial court implicitly drew either inference, we conclude it erred in doing so because neither inference is reasonably suggested by these facts. What is clear from these facts, however, is that Gant voluntarily—that is, not in response to police direction—stopped his vehicle, exited it, and began to walk away from it. We believe that this factual distinction is significant and requires a different result than that in Belton and McLaughlin.
¶ 10 We agree with the holding of United States v. Strahan, 984 F.2d 155 (6th Cir. 1993), in which the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that Belton was inapplicable to a situation in which an arrestee had been apprehended approximately thirty feet from his automobile because the police had not initiated contact with him until that time and, therefore, he was not an occupant of the vehicle. The court instead held that the test outlined in Chimel applied. We further agree with the reasoning expressed in United States v. Fafowora, 865 F.2d 360 (D.C.Cir. 1989), in which the court held inapplicable the rationale underlying Belton's bright-line rule allowing police to search the entire passenger compartment of a vehicle—that it is, at least hypothetically, within the reach of its arrested occupant—to a case in which the police had first encountered the arrestee outside the automobile. In such cases, the court said, the twin concerns of officer safety and evidence preservation that justify, at least theoretically, the search-incident-to-arrest exception to the warrant requirement discussed in Chimel disappear because the vehicle's passenger compartment is not available to the arrestee at the time the police encounter or arrest the person. Other courts have expressed similar reasoning and have reached similar results. Lewis v. United States, 632 A.2d 383 (D.C.1993); Thomas v. State, 761 So.2d 1010 (Fla.1999); State v. Foster, 127 Idaho 723, 905 P.2d 1032 (Ct.App. 1995); People v. Stehman, 324 Ill.App.3d 54, 257...
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State v. Gant
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