State v. York
| Decision Date | 14 July 1998 |
| Docket Number | No. 24477.,24477. |
| Citation | 506 S.E.2d 358,203 W.Va. 103 |
| Court | West Virginia Supreme Court |
| Parties | STATE of West Virginia, Plaintiff Below, Appellee, v. Paul D. YORK, Defendant Below, Appellant. |
Joseph C. Cometti, Charleston, for Appellant.
Darrell V. McGraw, Attorney General, Rory L. Perry, II, Assistant Attorney General, Charleston, for Appellee.
1
A jury found the appellant in this proceeding, Paul D. York, guilty of daytime burglary in violation of W.Va.Code 61-3-11, and the Circuit Court of Clay County sentenced him to from 1-10 years in the State Penitentiary.2 On appeal, Mr. York claims, among other things, that the circuit court improperly failed to suppress the admission of evidence obtained during a search of the trunk of the vehicle which he was driving immediately prior to his arrest.
On June 26, 1996, Gene King, who was the Chief of Police for the Town of Clay, West Virginia, observed the appellant, who was driving a white Ford Fairmont with a temporary Kentucky license tag, veer to the left across a double yellow line to pass a car which had slowed to make a right-hand turn. Chief King immediately pursued the appellant and pulled him over about four blocks away. The appellant stopped approximately two and one-half feet from the curb in front of a private residence on Route 16, the main road through Clay, West Virginia.
When Chief King asked to see the appellant's driver's license, the appellant, who was not a West Virginia resident, said that he had left the license with his wife at a motel room in Charleston, West Virginia. Shortly thereafter, he changed his story and stated that he had recently allowed his license to expire.
Chief King made a dispatch inquiry concerning the appellant, and that inquiry showed that the appellant's Georgia driver's license had expired in 1990. Upon learning this, Chief King decided to arrest the appellant and impound his vehicle. Chief King, therefore, immediately ordered that the dispatcher send a tow truck to tow the appellant's car for the impoundment. He then notified the appellant that he was under arrest and that the vehicle was going to be impounded.
Upon learning that the vehicle was going to be impounded, the appellant protested and stated that the vehicle belonged to his father who lived in Kentucky. Chief King nonetheless stated that it was his obligation to tow the vehicle and get it off the street.
The driver's side door of the vehicle was open, and a deputy who had appeared on the scene, noticed two small jewelry or "locket" boxes on the floor of the driver's side of the vehicle. The boxes contained jewelry, and independent of the discovery of these items, Chief King had determined that it was necessary to do an inventory search of the vehicle before it was towed.
During the subsequent inventory search, a number of items, including two VCRs, were discovered in the trunk of the vehicle. One of the VCR's had a white repair tag attached to it that contained the name and number of John Ramsey, who was an inhabitant of the town of Clay. Chief King was familiar with Mr. Ramsey and contacted him about the VCR. Mr. Ramsey shortly thereafter arrived at the scene and identified the VCR and told the authorities that it had been in his house that morning when he had left for work. Later that day, Mr. Ramsey learned that his house had been broken into and that his VCR had been stolen.
The appellant was subsequently indicted for daytime burglary in violation of West Virginia Code § 61-3-11.
Prior to the appellant's trial, his attorney moved to suppress the various items seized by the police during the inventory search, including Mr. Ramsey's VCR. A suppression hearing was subsequently held, and at that hearing, the trial judge ruled that the appellant had the burden of proof and the burden of going forward with the evidence. At the conclusion of the hearing, the court ruled that the initial stop of the appellant's vehicle was proper and that the offense of driving without a valid operator's license gave Chief King reasonable cause to arrest the appellant. The court also ruled that there was no reasonable alternative to impoundment of the vehicle since allowing it to remain where it was parked could have constituted a danger to the public who were using the highway. Additionally, the court ruled that the inventory search conducted pursuant to the impoundment was necessary to protect the appellant's property and protect the police from false claims. Since the search was appropriate, the court concluded that the discovery and seizure of Mr. Ramsey's VCR was lawful. The court, therefore, denied the motion to suppress the admission of the VCR into evidence.
The appellant's actual trial commenced on August 5, 1996. At that trial, John Ramsey testified that on the morning of June 26, 1996, he read the clock on his VCR as he was about to leave his home for a trip to Summersville. He also testified that sometime that afternoon, he was contacted and taken to the scene of the appellant's traffic stop in Clay, West Virginia. At the scene, Mr. Ramsey identified his VCR, and when he returned home, he saw that his back door had been kicked in.
During the trial, evidence was also introduced relating to the stop of the appellant, as well as the search which resulted in the discovery of the VCR. Finally, the VCR itself was introduced into evidence. The appellant chose not to testify, and the defense presented no witnesses. As previously indicated, at the conclusion of the trial, the jury returned a verdict of guilty.
After the jury returned its verdict, the appellant filed post-trial motions in which he claimed, among other things, that the trial court had erred in imposing upon him the burden of proof and burden of going forward with the evidence during the suppression hearing. He also claimed that the search of his vehicle had been conducted in violation of his constitutional rights and that the trial court had erred in refusing to suppress the admission of the VCR which had been discovered during that search. At the conclusion of the hearing on the post-trial motions, the trial court concluded that the appellant had, in fact, been erroneously charged with the burden of proof and the burden of going forward with the evidence at the suppression hearing. The court, therefore, ordered that the appellant be provided with a new suppression hearing. The court denied the other motions made by the appellant.
A second suppression hearing was conducted on January 23, 1997. At that second suppression hearing, Chief King explained that inventory searches were routinely conducted of impounded vehicles, and he suggested that he always conducted inventory searches when he impounded vehicles. He also suggested that such searches were necessary to protect the police and political subdivision from false claims relating to missing personal property. Additional evidence basically proceeded along the lines of the evidence adduced at the first suppression hearing.
During the suppression hearing, the appellant argued that he could have made other arrangements for the security of his vehicle prior to the impoundment and that under such circumstances the impoundment was unreasonable.
At the conclusion of the second suppression hearing, the trial court again ruled that the appellant was arrested and the court also concluded that the chief of police's decision to impound the vehicle was proper since there was no reasonable alternative to impoundment. Finally, the court ruled that the inventory search in the case was not pretextual and was conducted for the legitimate public purpose of protecting both the officer and the political subdivision for which the officer was employed from potential liability. The court accordingly denied the motion to suppress and declined to set aside the jury's verdict of guilty.
As previously indicated, in the present appeal, the appellant claims that the circuit court erred in refusing to suppress the evidence seized during the search.
This Court has held that a trial court's legal conclusions regarding the suppression of evidence seized in a search and seizure situation are reviewed de novo, while factual determination involving those legal conclusions are reviewed under a clearly erroneous standard. State v. Buzzard, 194 W.Va. 544, 461 S.E.2d 50 (1995). See also, State v. Lacy, 196 W.Va. 104, 468 S.E.2d 719 (1996)
.
As previously stated, the appellant in the present proceeding claims that the trial court erred in refusing to suppress the admission of evidence obtained during the search of the trunk of the vehicle which he was driving. The record rather clearly shows that this search was a warrantless search conducted pursuant to the so-called "inventory search" exception to the general rule that a properly-obtained search warrant is constitutionally required for the valid search of private areas of a vehicle such as the one involved in this case.
In State v. Goff, 166 W.Va. 47, 272 S.E.2d 457 (1980), this Court discussed at some length the prerequisites of the "inventory search" exception. The Court indicated that for a search to be constitutionally sustainable under the "inventory exception":
State v. Goff, 166 W.Va. at 49, 272 S.E.2d at 460. The Court believes that the "inventory search" in the present case fails on each of these four points.
As stated in State v. Goff, id.,
the first prerequisite to a valid inventory search is an initial lawful...
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State v. Jim
...that under Washington's Constitution, opening of locked trunk was not permitted absent manifest necessity); State v. York , 203 W.Va. 103, 506 S.E.2d 358, 363 (1998) ("[F]or an inventory search to be proper, the taking of the inventory itself must be prompted by a number of valuables in pla......
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State v. Noel
...and observance of routine, standardized procedures in the conduct of such searches. We made that clear in State v. York, 203 W.Va. 103, 506 S.E.2d 358 (1998), in which we reversed the circuit court's failure to suppress the evidence seized during an inventory search, where the chief of the ......