State v. Wren, 16827

• Decision Date: 02 February 1989
• Docket Number: No. 16827,16827
• Parties: STATE of Idaho, Plaintiff-Respondent, v. Milton S. WREN, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: Idaho Court of Appeals

Page 1351

768 P.2d 1351

115 Idaho 618

STATE of Idaho, Plaintiff-Respondent, v. Milton S. WREN, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 16827.

Court of Appeals of Idaho.

Feb. 2, 1989.

Douglas L. Mushlitz and William H. Ball (Clark & Feeney), Lewiston, for defendant-appellant.

Jim Jones, Atty. Gen. by David R. Minert, Deputy Atty. Gen., Boise, for plaintiff-respondent.

BURNETT, Judge.

This appeal presents a narrow but important constitutional question. May police officers, in whose presence a nonviolent misdemeanor has occurred, pursue the alleged offender into his home and seize him there without an arrest warrant? We hold that they may not unless (a) the pursuit is triggered by flight from a lawful arrest outside the home, or (b) exigent circumstances, other than the pursuit itself, make it necessary to enter the home without a warrant.

The facts framing this issue are as follows. On February 11, 1986, police officers in Lewiston, Idaho, responded to a neighborhood complaint of noise at the residence of Milton S. Wren. Finding Wren in his back yard, the officers told him to "quiet down" or he would receive a citation for disturbing the peace. Wren walked into his house, but a few moments later he reappeared on the back porch. After directing some abusive language toward the officers, he began to reenter the house. The officers pursued him. The record is unclear as to whether the officers told Wren to stop, or announced that he was under arrest, while he was still on the porch. However, it is undisputed that the officers followed Wren into the house, pushing their way through the door and chasing him into the living room. There they subdued him by force and told him, possibly for the first time, that he was under arrest. During a search incident to the arrest, the officers found a small amount of marijuana in Wren's shirt pocket.

Wren ultimately was charged not only with disturbing the peace but also with resisting arrest, committing a battery upon an arresting officer, and possessing a controlled substance. Contending that the warrantless arrest had been improper, Wren moved to suppress the marijuana as well as any testimony regarding the struggle during the arrest. A magistrate denied the motion, holding that the arrest was valid. Wren filed an interlocutory appeal, by permission, from the magistrate's order. The district court affirmed. Today, for reasons explained below, we reverse the district judge's decision and remand the case for more particular findings by the magistrate concerning the location of the arrest and the existence of any exigent circumstances.

In Part I of today's opinion, we discuss four decisions by the United States Supreme Court, outlining the constitutional prohibition against nonconsensual, warrantless arrests in private residences. We note an exception for an arrest which is made in a public place but which culminates in a seizure within the home because the accused attempts to evade the arrest. We also note an exception for arrests made in the home under exigent circumstances. In Part II we examine these exceptions in greater detail. We hold that a warrantless arrest may be made while the accused is standing on a porch open to public view. We also hold that if an arrest is not initiated in a public place, but is made after a warrantless entry into the home, it may not be justified solely upon a theory of "hot" or "fresh" pursuit. Other exigent circumstances must exist. In Part III we apply these legal principles to the instant case, concluding that a remand is required for further findings. Finally, in Part IV we identify the evidence that must be suppressed if Wren's arrest ultimately is found to be invalid.

I

We begin with the axiom that an arrest is a seizure of the person within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. ¹ The Fourth Amendment provides as follows The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Perhaps because "persons" and "houses" are specifically enumerated in the Fourth Amendment, the United States Supreme Court has drawn a bright constitutional line against the warrantless arrest of a person in his home. The location of this line has been surveyed in four recent decisions. Chronologically, they are United States v. Watson, 423 U.S. 411, 96 S.Ct. 820, 46 L.Ed.2d 598 (1976); United States v. Santana, 427 U.S. 38, 96 S.Ct. 2406, 49 L.Ed.2d 300 (1976); Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980); and Welsh v. Wisconsin, 466 U.S. 740, 104 S.Ct. 2091, 80 L.Ed.2d 732 (1984). We will discuss the decisions in that order.

Watson is important, not so much for what the Supreme Court said, but more for what the Court implied, about arrests in private residences. The case arose from a warrantless arrest, made in a restaurant, for a felony. The defendant argued that any nonconsensual seizure, including a seizure of the person, requires a warrant. Unless a warrant exists, the defendant urged, the seizure is unreasonable per se under the Fourth Amendment, absent exigent circumstances. However, the Watson court declared that the Fourth Amendment was never intended to repeal entirely a common law rule that felony arrests could be made upon reasonable grounds at any time or place. The court held that arrests made in public places are not subject to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement:

We decline to transform [a] judicial preference [for arrest warrants] into a constitutional rule when the judgment of the Nation and Congress has for so long been to authorize warrantless public arrests on probable cause rather than to encumber criminal prosecutions with endless litigation with respect to the existence of exigent circumstances, whether it was practicable to get a warrant, whether the suspect was about to flee, and the like.

423 U.S. at 423-24, 96 S.Ct. at 828. In a concurring opinion, Justice Powell acknowledged that the Court's view on seizure of persons was not conceptually harmonious with prior decisions on searches and seizures of property. Nevertheless, he argued that the Fourth Amendment should be construed in accord with history rather than with logic. ²

The Watson court noted that at common law, an officer could make a warrantless arrest for any crime, whether a felony or a misdemeanor, committed in his presence. This authority eventually was codified in the laws of most states, including Idaho. See I.C. § 19-603(1); see generally Note, The Neglected Fourth Amendment Problem in Arrest Entries, 23 STAN.L.REV. 995 (1971) (hereinafter cited as Arrest Entries ). Thus, although Watson involved a felony, its historical analysis suggested that an officer could make a constitutionally valid arrest for a misdemeanor in a public place, without a warrant, if the offense was committed in his presence. However, Watson left unanswered the question whether such warrantless arrests could be made within private residences. As noted by Justice Stewart, in another concurring opinion, "[t]he Court does not decide, nor could it decide in this case, whether or under what circumstances an officer must obtain a warrant before he may lawfully enter a private place to effect an arrest." Id. at 433, 96 S.Ct. at 832.

The next case, United States v. Santana, supra, presented an issue similar to the question posed by Justice Stewart. There, the police were informed that a woman had just committed a felony by selling an illicit drug. As the officers observed the woman, she was holding a paper bag and "standing directly in the doorway of her home--one step forward would have put her outside, one step backward would have put her in the vestibule of her residence." 427 U.S. at 40, n. 1, 96 S.Ct. at 2408, n. 1. When the officers approached the house and shouted "police," the woman retreated into the home. The officers followed. As she tried to pull away, the bag tilted and "two bundles of glazed paper packets with a white powder" fell to the floor. Id. at 40, 96 S.Ct. at 2408.

The Supreme Court upheld the warrantless seizure of the woman, and the concurrent seizure of the physical evidence, inside the home. The Court said that the arrest had begun when the woman occupied a "public" place in the doorway of the house.

She was not in an area where she had any expectation of privacy. "What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own house or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection." ... She was not merely visible to the public but was as exposed to public view, speech, hearing, and touch as if she had been standing completely outside her house.... Thus, when the police ... sought to arrest her, they merely intended to perform a function which we have approved in Watson.

Id. at 42, 96 S.Ct. at 2409 (citations omitted). The Court also articulated a second rationale for its decision. The Court said that exigent circumstances were present because the police had "a realistic expectation that any delay would result in destruction of evidence...." Id. at 43, 96 S.Ct. at 2410. For this reason, the Court observed, the woman's retreat into the home had triggered a "hot pursuit." Id. ³

Thus, in Santana as in Watson, the Supreme Court implicitly acknowledged the special importance of private residences in applying the Fourth Amendment to arrests. A warrantless seizure would be upheld only if the arrest began outside the home or if it was made in the home under exigent circumstances. This limitation upon warrantless arrests in the home was confirmed by the Court in Payton v. New York, supra. There the Court held that the Fourth Amendment prohibits the police from making a warrantless, nonconsensual entry into a suspect's home in order to...