State v. Thomas

• Decision Date: 31 March 1975
• Docket Number: No. 55342,55342
• Citation: State v. Thomas, 310 So.2d 517 (La. 1975)
• Parties: STATE of Louisiana, Appellee, v. Aaron THOMAS, Appellant.
• Court: Louisiana Supreme Court

Page 517

310 So.2d 517

STATE of Louisiana, Appellee, v. Aaron THOMAS, Appellant.

No. 55342.

Supreme Court of Louisiana.

March 31, 1975.

Felix A. Dejean, III, Opelousas, for defendant-appellant.

William J. Guste, Jr., Atty. Gen., Barbara Rutledge, Asst. Atty. Gen., Morgan J. Goudeau, III, Dist. Atty., Robert Brinkman, First Asst. Dist. Atty., for plaintiff-appellee.

TATE, Justice.

The defendant Thomas was convicted of murder, La.R.S. 14:30, and sentenced to death. ¹ Some forty-seven bills of exceptions were reserved during the trial. Upon appeal, based upon those of the exceptions perfected, eight assignments of error are urged.

Context Facts

The defendants were charged with the murder of Leo Doucet at about 9:00 PM on February 2, 1970. He was a taxicab operator. The defendant Thomas and a co-defendant Batiste (whose conviction is not here appealed) had telephoned for a taxi. According to the state's evidence, they did so with the intent of robbing the driver.

After Thomas and Batiste had entered the cab and been driven away, they ordered the driver Doucet to pull over to the side and to give them his wallet. They were armed, Thomas with a .38 caliber pistol and Batiste with a butcher knife. They then drove Doucet to a deserted country area, where Doucet was murdered by repeated stabbing with the knife. Afterwards, they robbed, kidnapped, and murdered a service station operator (Joubert). See State v. Thomas, 290 So.2d 317 (La.1974).

On the evening of the following day they were arrested. Their arrest then, and a subsequent search of their vehicle which yielded the pistol, are attacked as illegal.

Motion to Suppress

The most serious issue of the appeal is raised by the defendant's bills taken to overruling of motions to suppress the .38 caliber pistol taken from his vehicle shortly after his arrest. (Bill Nos. 40 and 41). The serious issue concerns whether the pistol was improperly admitted as the result of an unconstitutional search and seizure.

The evidence (Tr. 358--396, 419--447, 1542--1582) shows:

At about 9:30 PM on the evening after the murders, the defendant Thomas showed up at the home of a faith healer and midwife in Eunice, about twenty-miles from Opelousas. He wanted help for a friend. He admitted his friend's implication in the two Opelousas robbery-murders then occasioning considerable television concern. The midwife, frightened, refused to help him. Thomas and his co-defendant Batiste then drove away in their old white Thunderbird. Her husband then called the police.

Sufficient probable cause for the arrest is properly based on the information then given the police: the husband's description of the automobile, the wife's photographic identification of one of the suspects, and the reported admission of Thomas to the wife that at least one of the two had been concerned in the brutal Opelousas robbery-killings then so much discussed on television and elsewhere. The police officers had reasonable cause to believe that the defendants had committed a felony, although not in the presence of the officers. La.C.Cr.P. art. 213(3).

Based on the information received, two policemen commenced patrolling Eunice and shortly thereafterwards located the described automobile. After a radioed appeal for other officers, the actual arrest for investigation of the murders was accomplished at a service station some three blocks from the local police headquarters. The arrest was made approximately an hour after the two suspects had appeared at the Eunice midwife's home.

The officers did not search or even look inside the defendant's vehicle at the time of the arrest. The suspects were asked to step out of the car. They were at once driven to the sheriff's substation about two and a half blocks away. One of the officers drove their vehicle and parked it on the side of the police headquarters, unattended.

Soon after the police and the suspects entered the building, one of the arresting police remembered that, as the police had come to the suspects' car at the service station, the passenger (Thomas) on the right side had leaned far forward, as if to put something under the seat. He and another officer therefore went to the car parked outside. Upon opening the unlocked door, they immediately saw a pistol on the floorboard, partly protruding from under the rear of the front seat. The pistol was discovered in the vehicle within ten to fifteen minutes after the arrest.

No search warrant was secured prior to the discovery of the pistol. (After its discovery, no further search of the vehicle was made until a search warrant was secured.) The basic constitutional rule is that 'searches conducted outside the judicial process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are Per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment--subject only to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions.' Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 445--56, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 2032, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971).

Quite similarly to the State's position in Coolidge, the State here relies upon three of these exceptions: (a) a search incident to a lawful arrest, (b) the search of an automobile based on a probable cause, and (c) the seizure of an object in plain view. For the reasons set forth in Coolidge and in State v. Hargiss, 288 So.2d 633 (La.1974), none of these traditional exceptions here apply:

( a) After the accused is in custody, the warrantless search of his car at another place is simply not incident to his arrest; (b) pretermitting whether there was probable cause to search, no exigent circumstances are shown to have justified by-passing the search warrant procedure before searching this vehicle, which was already in police custody; and (c) the observation of the object in plain view must be made by an officer who has a right to be where he is, either by reason of a lawful search or for some other lawful reason--that is, an otherwise unjustified invasion of an individual's person or property cannot be validated by the post-invasion discovery of an object otherwise not in plain view.

Nevertheless, but with some difficulty, we believe the present to concern a distinguishable situation in this shifting and uncertain 'quagmire' area of constitutional interpretation. ² Decisions on quite similar facts seem dissimilarly to validate or invalidate warrantless searches, with widely differing views suggested by the concurring and dissenting justices. ³ With some diffidence, we suggest that the present warrantless search did not violate the constitutional prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures because:

1. Unlike in Coolidge and our own decision in Hargiss, here the arresting officers had At the time of the arrest the legal right to look where they looked shortly afterwards and discovered the object. If they Had looked at the opened door of the vehicle at the time of the arrest, they would have seen the pistol protruding in plain view from under the front seat. Again, had the policeman driving the car to the station looked at the floorboard, as he was legally entitled to, he would have seen the pistol. Arguably, after the removal of the car to the police station, the opening of the door to look at the floor, some ten minutes after the arrest, was justifiable for reasons similar to those held justifying the warrantless search in Chambers v. Maroney, 399 U.S. 42, 90 S.Ct. 1975, 26 L.Ed.2d 419 (1970). Cf. also, Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U.S. 583, 94 S.Ct. 2464, 2469--72, 41 L.Ed.2d 325 (1974).

2. Again, unlike in Coolidge and our own decision in Hargiss, at the time of the arrest there was probable cause to make a warrantless search, In connection with the crime for which the arrest was made, at least if limited to unlocked portions of the automobile within reach of the front seats on which the defendants were riding. The polcie had probable cause to arrest the two occupants of the car for two robbery-murders committed nearby within twenty-four hours of their arrest, and the police believed them to be armed and possibly to have proceeds of the robberies with them. A search of the person of one arrested for a crime may be made at the time of the arrest, and also of immediately adjacent space within his immediate control, in order to remove any weapons as well as to secure any evidence of the crime within his immediate possession. Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 89 S.Ct. 2034, 23 L.Ed.2d 685 (1969); but see Note, 55 Minn.L.Rev. 1011, 1024--29 (1971). Such a search incident to an arrest is a recognized exception to the requirement for a search warrant.

3. At the time of the look into the automobile, the normal processes incident to arrest and custody were still in progress: The suspects had been brought to the police headquarters in Eunice for interrogation at the scene (they were afforded counsel and, in fact, refused to talk at that time), prior to transporting them to the parish jail at Opelousas, some twenty miles away. A majority of the United States Supreme Court has recently held not unreasonable a warrantless search and seizure closely related to the reason an accused was arrested, although subsequent to it, if made without unreasonable delay after the arrest and if the effects in his possession at the time of the arrest were subject to search and seizure as an incident of the arrest. United States v. Edwards, 415 U.S. 800, 94 S.Ct. 1234, 39 L.Ed.2d 771 (1974) (a clothing case, but partially relying upon the vehicle case of Cooper v. California, 386 U.S. 58, 87 S.Ct. 788, 17 L.Ed.2d 730 (1967)).

We cannot say, taking into consideration the factors noted, that the warrantless look into the automobile, ten minutes after the arrest and reasonably incident to it, was an unreasonable search and seizure such as is prohibited by our state and federal constitutions. If the police officers had looked at the vehicle more closely at the time they arrested the defendants at the service station, they would have...