State v. Smith
| Decision Date | 16 December 1977 |
| Docket Number | No. 47828,47828 |
| Parties | STATE of Minnesota, Appellant, v. Lucas Lee SMITH, Respondent. STATE of Minnesota, Appellant, v. Lyndon Lee SMITH, Respondent. |
| Court | Minnesota Supreme Court |
Syllabus by the Court
1. Police officers, whose primary motivation for their lawful entrance into an apartment was to retrieve a child wrongfully withheld from its mother and not to seize stolen items which mother had told them were present in dwelling, properly seized without a warrant items which they observed in plain sight when because of what they had been told and the unusual number of items and the way they were stored it was immediately apparent to the officers that the items were subject to seizure. Held, district court erred in suppressing the stolen items.
2. District court at omnibus hearing properly decided that gun and knife, earlier seized from defendant, were irrelevant to issues which would arise in prosecution for felonious theft. Held, district court did not err in suppressing the gun and knife.
Warren Spannaus, Atty. Gen., William B. Randall, County Atty., Steven C. DeCoster, Asst. County Atty., St. Paul, for appellant.
Charles A. Williams, Jr., Asst. County Public Defender, St. Paul, for Lucas Lee Smith.
James T. Hankes, Asst. County Public Defender, St. Paul, for respondent.
Considered and decided by the court en banc.
This is a pretrial appeal by the state, pursuant to Rule 29.03, Rules of Criminal Procedure, from an order of the district court suppressing physical evidence after an omnibus hearing in the prosecution of defendants for two counts each of felonious theft. Issues raised by the appeal relate to the plain-sight and the search-incident-to-arrest exceptions to the general rule prohibiting warrantless searches and seizures. We affirm the suppression order in part and reverse it in part, and remand the case for trial.
At 11:30 p. m. on February 22, 1977, two St. Paul policemen were dispatched to a high-rise apartment building to assist a young mother in a domestic matter. The woman, who talked with the officers outside the building, explained that she and her son had lived with defendants Lucas Lee Smith and his brother Lyndon Lee Smith in an apartment in the building for several months and that Lucas had regularly cared for her son when she was at work. She explained further that she and Lucas had had an argument and she had decided to leave but that he was refusing to let her take her son and had threatened to give the boy to someone else. She gratuitously informed the officers that the apartment was filled with stolen stereo equipment and warned them that Lucas had a gun which he had used to commit crimes in Minneapolis and which he kept under a mattress in the apartment.
Unable to get the people inside the apartment to open the door and return the boy to his mother and fearing a barricaded hostage situation, the officers called their supervisor, who with two other officers soon arrived at the scene. After repeated unsuccessful attempts to get the people to open the door, the officers forced their way in and made a rapid sweep through the apartment, searching primarily for people but also making a cursory protective search for weapons in the process. In one of the two bedrooms they found defendants and two other men, all of whom they escorted to the small combination living-dining room, where they were searched, handcuffed, and then ordered to sit on the floor. The officers also found the child, asleep and unharmed.
After neutralizing the situation, the officers continued looking for the gun which had been described. They found it and a knife under a mattress in the same room in which the four men were being held.
The officers then began an examination of a number of items which they had seen in plain sight when they made their initial sweep through the apartment. Specifically, they had seen an unusually large amount of stereo and telephone equipment in what was a sparsely furnished apartment. Some of this equipment, as well as an expensive camera, was partially covered with blankets or towels, as if someone hastily had tried to conceal its presence. Some of the equipment was stacked in a corner, much of it apparently was not being used. The postarrest examination of the items revealed that some of them had obliterated serial numbers or none at all. Others, for example the camera, had Operation Identification numbers of serial numbers which the officers fed into their computer via the telephone.
The officers seized, in addition to the gun and the knife, only a small portion of the items that were in the apartment that is, only the items which had obliterated serial numbers or no serial numbers or items which they were able to confirm through their computer as stolen. These items included 1 stereo receiver, 4 speakers, 1 camera, 1 automatic telephone answering set, 2 decor telephones in wood cases, and 1 adding machine. The record indicates that there were many stereo and telephone items which were not seized.
1. In suppressing the items of stolen property seized by the police, the district court reasoned that, although the police lawfully entered the apartment and saw the stolen items in plain sight during their sweep through the apartment, the items should not have been seized without a warrant because the occupants of the apartment were under arrest, the premises were secure, and the police could have gotten a warrant that night or at the latest during the regular hours of court Wednesday morning. In support of this reasoning the court cited Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971).
The district court's interpretation of the Coolidge case is contrary to the interpretation we have given the case, most notably in State v. Severtson, 304 Minn. 487, 232 N.W.2d 95 (1975). In Severtson the police, while lawfully executing a search warrant for marijuana in the house of a man who had sold marijuana to an undercover agent, discovered papers in plain sight which were immediately recognizable as evidence connecting defendant with drugs found there. Holding that it was unnecessary for the police to get a second warrant before seizing the papers, we stated as follows:
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