State v. Walker

• Decision Date: 11 April 2007
• Docket Number: No. 2006-KK-1045.,2006-KK-1045.
• Citation: 953 So.2d 786
• Parties: STATE of Louisiana v. Keith WALKER.
• Court: Louisiana Supreme Court

953 So.2d 786

STATE of Louisiana v. Keith WALKER.

No. 2006-KK-1045.

Supreme Court of Louisiana.

April 11, 2007.

Charles C. Foti, Jr., Attorney General, Eddie J. Jordan, Jr., District Attorney, Matthew Brandon Derbes, Donna R. Andrieu, Assistant District Attorneys, for applicant.

Craig Evan Gibbs, New Orleans, for respondent.

CALOGERO, Chief Justice.

In a single bill of information, the defendant Keith Walker is charged with possession of heroin with intent to distribute, a violation of La.Rev.Stat. 40:966(A)(1), and possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, a violation of La.Rev.Stat. 40:966(A)(2). The defendant moved to suppress the evidence and, after conducting a hearing on August 26, 2005, the district court granted the motion. The state sought review in the court of appeal which found no error in the trial court's ruling. State v. Walker, 06-0411 (La.App. 4 Cir. 4/25/06). We granted the state's writ application to determine whether the conduct of the police leading to the seizure of the contraband, i.e., the officer's following the defendant into a third party's residence to effect an investigatory stop, did not require a warrant and was otherwise entirely reasonable. State v. Walker, 06-1045 (La.6/23/06), 930 So.2d 989. For the reasons set forth below, we vacate the district court's ruling granting the motion to suppress and remand the case to the district court for further proceedings.

DISCUSSION

The circumstances surrounding recovery of the evidence in the present case are straightforward. On the afternoon of March 9, 2005, three units of the New Orleans Police Department conducting a proactive "stacked patrol" of the Hollygrove area entered the 3400 block of General Ogden Street. From their vantage point in the lead vehicle, Officers Schnapp and O'Brien spotted the defendant and another man standing directly in front of the residence located at 3428 General Ogden. Officer Schnapp testified at the hearing on the motion to suppress that the defendant had his back to the street "and was displaying an object or objects to the second black male who was facing him that is his arms were bent at the elbow and his palms were facing up." When the two men observed the approaching police unit, they separated. As the other man walked away, the defendant tucked his opened hand into his pants pocket and entered the front yard of 3428 General Ogden through an open fence, heading for a center stairway which provided access to the porch of the residence.

The officers exited their patrol unit and asked the defendant to stop. The defendant instead walked up the stairs, pushed his way past an African-American woman standing at the doorway of the residence, and went inside. Officer Schnapp also walked past the woman in the doorway and into the residence. As he entered, the officer saw the defendant remove a yellow object from his pants pocket and walk through the front room of the residence into the kitchen, which also served as a laundry room containing a washer and dryer. The defendant discarded the object behind the dryer and then surrendered to the police. After handing defendant over to his partner, Officer Schnapp reached behind the dryer and retrieved a single plastic baggie containing eighteen foils of heroin and fifteen yellow bags of marijuana. The officer then spoke to the woman in the doorway who informed him that she knew the defendant "from the neighborhood but he was not allowed in her residence." The defendant made no statements to the officers on the scene but indicated at booking that he lived in the 3400 block of Hollygrove Street, an address around the corner from 3428 General Ogden.

Officer Schnapp testified at the suppression hearing that he decided to act based on his observation that the defendant held something in his hand as he stood outside the premises of 3428 General Ogden talking with the unidentified man and that "when he saw us[,] he began to move." Based on his seventeen years of experience in the field, Officer Schnapp concluded that he and his partner had interrupted a narcotics transaction. At the same time, the officer acknowledged that he did not hear what, if anything, the defendant may have said to the woman at 3428 General Ogden when he pushed past her through the front door. The officer further acknowledged that he said nothing to the woman before he followed the defendant into the home, that he did not know the residence belonged to someone else until after he retrieved the contraband discarded behind the clothes dryer and placed the defendant under arrest, and that he did not see what the defendant held in his hand until he followed his suspect across the threshold of the residence.

At the close of the suppression hearing, the district court agreed with the state that Officer Schnapp and his partner had formulated reasonable suspicion for an investigatory detention when they first directed the defendant to stop outside the residence at 3428 General Ogden.¹ However the district court ultimately found that, while Officer Schnapp had engaged in good police work, he lacked both probable cause to believe that the defendant had actual possession of any drugs before he entered the home and exigent circumstances for crossing the threshold of the premises without a warrant, i.e., that there was a reasonable probability that inside the residence the defendant would destroy any contraband. "I think what the officer did was reasonable," the district court observed, "but the question is, [wa]s it legal? . . . Can you run into somebody else's house after somebody and you don't know if he in fact does have drugs on him?"

Although the district court reached the wrong result under the particular facts of this case, it began with the correct legal premise. The Fourth Amendment applies "`to all invasions on the part of the government and its employ[e]es of the sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life.'" Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 585, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 1379, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980)(quoting Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630, 6 S.Ct. 524, 532, 29 L.Ed. 746 (1886)). Because the "`physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed,'" Payton, 445 U.S. at 585-86, 100 S.Ct. at 1379-80 (quoting United States v. United States Dist. Court (Plamondon), 407 U.S. 297, 313, 92 S.Ct. 2125, 2134, 32 L.Ed.2d 752 (1972)), absent exigent circumstances or some other well-recognized exception such as consent, the police must obtain a warrant before they enter the home to conduct a search or to seize a person and thereby intrude on an individual's reasonable and legitimate expectation of privacy. Payton, 445 U.S. at 599-602, 100 S.Ct. at 1387-88; see also Steagald v. United States, 451 U.S. 204, 101 S.Ct. 1642, 68 L.Ed.2d 38 (1981)(absent consent or exigent circumstances, a search warrant is required to enter the home of a third party to arrest an individual; thus, any evidence seized without a search warrant is inadmissible against the third party).

La. Const. art. 1, § 5 provides that any person adversely affected by a search or seizure in violation of the state constitution has standing to raise its illegality. Thus, the warrantless entrance and the seizure of an individual inside a third person's house may violate the third person's state constitutional guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures. In order to provide innocent third persons in such situations with a more perfect safeguard than the Fourth Amendment to be secure in their houses, the state constitutional delegates specifically considered and adopted the provision giving standing to raise the illegality to "(a)ny person adversely affected." See Documents of the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1973 Relative to the Administration of Criminal Justice, pp. 905-906, 1145-1146; Hargrave, The Declaration of Rights of the Louisiana Constitution of 1974, 35 La. L.Rev. 1, 23 (1974); and Jenkins, The Declaration of Rights, 21 Loy.L.Rev. 9, 29 (1975). Still, a Louisiana court must view the actions of the officer under the particular circumstances and determine whether his presence inside the home violated the defendant's privacy. "It is defendant's right to privacy, not a specific place, which is protected by the Fourth Amendment." State v. Nine, 315 So.2d 667, 671 (La.1975) citing Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967).

Nevertheless, even granting "the overriding respect for the sanctity of the home that has been embedded in our traditions since the origins of the Republic," Payton, 445 U.S. at 601, 100 S.Ct. at 1388 (footnote omitted), it has long been settled that a person may not frustrate an otherwise lawful arrest on probable cause which the police are entitled to make in a public place without a warrant, United States v. Watson, 423 U.S. 411, 96 S.Ct. 820, 46 L.Ed.2d 598 (1976), simply by stepping across the threshold of his home. United States v. Santana, 427 U.S. 38, 43, 96 S.Ct. 2406, 2410, 49 L.Ed.2d 300 (1976)("[A] suspect may not defeat an arrest which has been set in motion in a public place, and is therefore proper under Watson, by the expedient of escaping to a private place.").

The question seemingly raised by the instant case is whether the Santana rationale with regard to an arrest based on probable cause also provides a rationale for pursuing an investigatory stop, based on reasonable suspicion, begun in a public place and continued across the threshold of a home without a warrant. Santana generally stands for the proposition that "`when a citizen has knowingly placed himself in a public place and valid police action is commenced in that public place, the citizen cannot thwart that police action by then fleeing into a private place.'" See 4 Warren R. LaFave, Search and Seizure, § 9.2(d), p. 316 (4th ed. 2004)(quoting Edwards v. United States, 364 A.2d 1209, 1214 (D.C.App.1976), aff'd on...