Argued
on application for leave to appeal April 24, 2019.
Syllabus
Jennifer
M. Hammerlund was charged in the Kent Circuit Court with
operating while intoxicated, third offense, MCL 257.625; and
failing to report an accident resulting in damage to
fixtures, MCL 257.621, for her involvement in a
single-vehicle accident that she did not report to the
police. Her abandoned vehicle was discovered by Officer Erich
Staman of the Wyoming Police Department, who searched the
vehicle, found that it was registered to defendant, and went
to her home. According to Staman, he stood on her porch while
she remained inside, approximately 15 to 20 feet away from
the front door, and they had a short conversation during
which defendant admitted to driving the car that caused the
damage. When Staman asked defendant to produce her
identification, she passed a card to him through a third
party in the home. After verifying her information, Staman
offered the identification card back to defendant. According
to Staman, when defendant came to the door and reached out to
take the card, he grabbed her by the arm and attempted to
take her into custody for having failed to report her
accident. Staman stated that when defendant pulled away, the
momentum took him inside the home, where he handcuffed
defendant and completed the arrest before taking her to jail.
Breath tests administered at the jail indicated that
defendant had a blood alcohol content over the legal limit.
Defendant filed a pretrial motion to suppress evidence and
dismiss the charges, arguing that Officer Staman had violated
her Fourth Amendment rights by arresting her inside her home
without a warrant and that the evidence gathered following
the arrest was subject to the exclusionary rule. The trial
court, Paul J. Sullivan, J., denied the motion, ruling that
the arrest was constitutionally valid because defendant had
voluntarily reached out of her open doorway, which was a
public place for Fourth Amendment purposes under United
States v. Santana, 427 U.S. 38 (1976). After a jury
trial, defendant was convicted as charged, and she was
sentenced to five years' probation and four months in
jail for having violated MCL 257.625 and to a concurrent term
of 60 days in jail for having violated MCL 257.621. Defendant
appealed, challenging the trial court's denial of her
motion to suppress evidence. The Court of Appeals, Murray,
P.J., and Sawyer and Markey, JJ., affirmed, holding that the
arrest was constitutional under Santana and that the
trial court had not erred by denying defendant's motion.
People v. Hammerlund, unpublished per curiam opinion
of the Court of Appeals, issued October 17, 2017 (Docket No.
333827). Defendant sought leave to appeal in the Supreme
Court, which ordered and heard oral argument on whether to
grant the application or take other action. 501 Mich. 1086
(2018).
In an
opinion by Justice Cavanagh, joined by Chief Justice
McCormack and Justices Viviano, Bernstein, and Clement, the
Supreme Court, in lieu of granting leave to appeal,
held:
Defendant
was not subject to public arrest because she remained inside
her home, where she maintained her reasonable expectation of
privacy. Defendant's act of reaching out to retrieve her
identification card did not expose her to the public as if
she had been standing completely outside her house under
Santana, and the circumstances were insufficient to
justify the hot-pursuit exception to the warrant requirement.
Because the arrest was completed across the Fourth
Amendment's firm line at the entrance of the home, it was
presumptively unreasonable, and the prosecution failed to
overcome this presumption. The Court of Appeals judgment was
reversed and the case was remanded to the trial court to
consider whether evidence should be suppressed under the
exclusionary rule.
1. The
Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution provides
that 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. In order to be reasonable, an
arrest must be justified by probable cause to believe that an
offense has been or is being committed. Even when based on
probable cause, however, a warrantless search or seizure
inside a suspect's home is presumptively unreasonable,
absent exigent circumstances. Warrantless arrests that take
place in public upon probable cause do not violate the Fourth
Amendment.
2. The
officer had probable cause to arrest defendant for failing to
report an accident that caused damage to fixtures under MCL
257.621(a), which is a misdemeanor. While probable cause
alone may justify a warrantless public arrest, the same is
not true when it comes to arresting a suspect in the
suspect's home. Under Payton v. New York, 445
U.S. 573 (1980), an officer must obtain a warrant or identify
exigent circumstances that excuse the warrant requirement
before entering a home to make an arrest. In this case, there
was no dispute that defendant's arrest was completed
inside her home. The lower courts erred by relying on
Santana to conclude that defendant's Fourth
Amendment rights remained intact because-unlike the defendant
in Santana, who was standing in her open doorway
when officers arrived-defendant was not "exposed to
public view, speech, hearing, and touch, as if she had been
standing completely outside her house." Defendant was
never in a public place, and she possessed a reasonable
expectation of privacy inside her home that she maintained
throughout the encounter. It was unnecessary to determine how
far defendant extended her arm or hand over the threshold
because a Fourth Amendment analysis does not focus on such
arbitrary calculations; the focus remains on determining
whether a person sought to preserve his or her reasonable
expectation of privacy. Defendant did not surrender her
reasonable expectation of privacy when some portion of her
hand or arm crossed the threshold to retrieve her property.
Instead, her actions manifested an intent to stay inside, and
Staman was aware of that intent. Defendant's expectation
of privacy within her home was reasonable, and her action of
reaching out over the threshold and retrieving her
identification did not relinquish that reasonable
expectation.
3. When
officers have probable cause and exigent circumstances exist,
it is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment for officers to
enter a home without a warrant. Exigent circumstances exist
when an emergency leaves law enforcement with insufficient
time to obtain a warrant. While hot pursuit of a fleeing
felon is one recognized example of exigent circumstances,
there was a not a legitimate hot pursuit in this case. It is
unclear whether an officer with probable cause to arrest a
suspect for a misdemeanor may rely on the hot-pursuit
exception to make a warrantless home entry, and there was no
suggestion of any emergency that would have entitled the
police to enter defendant's home throughout the
conversation up to the point when defendant reached out to
retrieve her identification. Accordingly, the seizure in this
case, which occurred beyond the "firm line at the
entrance of the house," was prohibited under
Payton because it was accomplished without a
warrant, without consent, and without any exigent
circumstances.
Court
of Appeals judgment reversed; case remanded for further
proceedings.
Justice Zahra, joined by Justice Markman, dissenting, would
have held that Santana was on point, applicable, and
not meaningfully distinguishable from the facts presented in
this case, given its holding that the doorway of one's
residence is considered a public space for purposes of Fourth
Amendment analyses. He stated that under Santana,
when the arrest was initiated after some part of
defendant's person had extended beyond the
constitutionally protected bounds of her home, defendant was
"as exposed to public view, speech, hearing, and touch
as if she had been standing completely outside her
house." He also stated that because the arrest was
supported by probable cause, initiated in a public place in
accordance with Santana, and properly completed
inside defendant's home under the hot-pursuit exception
to the warrant requirement, he would have affirmed
defendant's convictions. He further reasoned that if the
warrantless entry into defendant's home and subsequent
arrest were improper, the established facts were sufficient
to hold that exclusion of the evidence obtained after the
arrest would not be appropriate under the United States
Supreme Court's decision in New York v. Harris,
495 U.S. 14 (1990). Thus, he would have decided this issue in
the name of judicial efficiency.
Chief
Justice: Bridget M. McCormack Chief Justice Pro Tem: David F.
Viviano Justices: Stephen J. Markman Brian K. Zahra Richard
H. Bernstein Elizabeth T. Clement Megan K. Cavanagh
BEFORE
THE ENTIRE BENCH
OPINION
CAVANAGH, J.
In this
case we must decide whether defendant's constitutional
right to be free from unreasonable seizures was violated when
a police officer entered her home to complete her arrest for
a misdemeanor offense. The Court of Appeals concluded that
defendant exposed herself to public arrest when she reached
out her doorway to retrieve her identification and that when
she pulled her arm back into her home the officer's entry
was lawful as a "hot pursuit." We disagree.
Defendant did not surrender her Fourth Amendment rights when
she interacted with law enforcement at her doorway because
she consistently maintained her reasonable expectation of
privacy throughout the encounter, and further, the entry was
not justified under the "hot pursuit" exception to
the warrant requirement. The warrantless arrest was
unreasonable under Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573;
100 S.Ct. 1371; 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980). We reverse the Court
of Appeals judgment and remand this case to the trial court
for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
I.
BACKGROUND
Defendant,
Jennifer Marie Hammerlund, was involved in a single-vehicle
accident in the early morning hours of September 30, 2015, on
a highway exit ramp in Wyoming, Michigan. According to
defendant, another driver cut her off, causing her to
overcorrect and lose control of her car. Her vehicle scraped
a cement barrier and left a dent on a metal guardrail.
Defendant suffered only minor injuries; however, the car was
no longer drivable. She attempted to call her insurance
company and then used a rideshare service to get home. She
did not report the accident to police.
Soon
after, Officer Erich Staman of the Wyoming Police Department
was dispatched to the scene of a reported abandoned vehicle
on the shoulder of the highway off-ramp. After observing the
damage to the vehicle, as well as the guardrail and cement
barrier, Officer Staman requested a tow truck and conducted
an inventory search. He discovered that the vehicle was
registered to defendant and that it contained paperwork
bearing defendant's name, so he requested that officers
from the Kentwood Police Department go to defendant's
home to perform a welfare check.
In the
meantime, according to defendant, she returned home, found
that she was "really shaken up," and drank some
alcohol. She then went into her room and went to bed. Only a
few minutes later, the Kentwood officers arrived and told her
roommate that they wished to speak with defendant. Defendant
initially declined to leave her room; however, after her
roommate spoke to the officers and reported back to defendant
that the police would take her into custody and arrest the
roommate for harboring a fugitive if she did not appear,
defendant came to the door. After that, Officer Staman
arrived at the home to "make contact" with
defendant.
Officer
Staman testified that when he arrived at defendant's
home, he stood on her porch while she remained inside,
approximately 15 to 20 feet away from the front door. He
acknowledged that it "didn't appear that [defendant]
wanted to come to the door . . . ." And, when asked
whether defendant "made it pretty clear that she
wasn't coming out of the home," he agreed, stating,
"It seemed that she wasn't going to come out."
During their short conversation, defendant admitted to
driving the car that caused the damage. When he asked
defendant to produce her identification she was
"reluctant" to give it to him so she passed it to
him through a third party in the home. Officer Staman
testified that defendant told him that she "thought
[Officer Staman] might be trying to coax her out of the
house."
After
verifying her information, Officer Staman offered the
identification card back to defendant. He explained:
And then I had to give the I.D. back to her, so I made sure I
gave it back to Ms. Hammerlund. In doing that she came to the
door where I was standing and reached out to get the I.D. as
I gave it back to her, at which point I grabbed her by the
arm and attempted to take her into custody . . . [f]or the
hit and run that she just admitted to.
He said
that when defendant pulled away he grabbed her again and
"the momentum" took him inside the home two to
three steps where he handcuffed defendant and completed the
arrest.
Following
the arrest, Officer Staman placed defendant into the back of
his patrol car. After she was advised of and waived her
Miranda[1] rights, defendant provided further details
about the crash, which she described to the officer as
possibly a "road rage situation." Officer Staman
detected a smell of intoxicants that was "moderate at
best" and asked defendant if alcohol played a role in
the crash. She opined that it had not, but did acknowledge
drinking alcohol earlier in the night after finishing her
shift as a bartender and later indicated that she thought her
blood alcohol level may have been over the legal limit. When
asked if she had any alcohol to drink after the
accident, defendant replied, "Absolutely not." Once
transported to the county jail, defendant was given two
successive breath tests, which indicated a blood alcohol
content over the legal limit at .22 and .21, respectively.
Consequently, defendant was charged with operating while
intoxicated (OWI), third offense, MCL 257.625, and failing to
report an accident resulting in damage to fixtures, MCL
257.621.
Defendant
filed a pretrial motion to suppress evidence and dismiss the
charges. In the motion, she argued that Officer Staman had
violated her Fourth Amendment rights by arresting her inside
her home without a warrant and that all the evidence gathered
following that arrest was subject to the exclusionary rule.
The trial court denied the suppression motion, concluding
that the arrest was constitutionally valid pursuant to
United States v.. Santana, 427 U.S. 38; 96 S.Ct.
2406; 49 L.Ed.2d 300 (1976). Specifically, it found that
defendant was "in the middle of a consensual discussion
with Officer Staman" when she "voluntarily
approached him" and "voluntarily reached out of her
door." Therefore, the court concluded that Officer
Staman "was legitimately in that area and it did not
violate the constitution for him to effectuate an arrest by
grabbing her arm when she reached out of her doorway."
The fact that the officer stepped inside defendant's home
to complete the arrest did not change the result, according
to the trial court, because the officer was "clearly in
pursuit for the arrest at that point . . . ."
The
case proceeded to trial. Defendant's theory of the case
was that she became intoxicated only after the accident.
However, she acknowledged that she did not tell any of the
officers that she drank when she got home. Defendant's
statements made to Officer Staman in his patrol car, as well
as her blood-alcohol-content test results, were admitted at
trial. After a jury trial, defendant was convicted as
charged, and she was sentenced to five years' probation
and four months in jail for violating MCL 257.625 and to a
concurrent term of 60 days in jail for violating MCL 257.621.
Defendant
appealed, continuing to challenge the trial court's
denial of her motion to suppress. The Court of Appeals, like
the trial court, concluded that the arrest was constitutional
under Santana, 427 U.S. at 42, and that the trial
court had not erred by denying defendant's motion.
People v.. Hammerlund, unpublished per curiam
opinion of the Court of Appeals, issued October 17, 2017
(Docket No. 333827). Defendant sought leave to appeal in this
Court, and we ordered oral argument on the
application.[2]
II.
STANDARD OF REVIEW
We
review a trial court's findings of fact at a suppression
hearing for clear error. People v. Williams, 472
Mich. 308, 313; 696 N.W.2d 636 (2005). We examine the facts
as they were presented to the trial court at the time of the
suppression hearing, not as supplemented by evidence
presented at trial. People v. Kaigler, 368 Mich.
281, 288; 118 N.W.2d 406 (1962). Our review of the trial
court's application of Fourth Amendment principles,
however, is de novo. People v. Slaughter, 489 Mich.
302, 310; 803 N.W.2d 171 (2011).
III.
LEGAL BACKGROUND
The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution
provides:
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. [US Const,
Am IV.][3]
The
touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness.
Brigham City, Utah v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398, 403; 126
S.Ct. 1943; 164 L.Ed.2d 650 (2006); see also People v.
Mead, 503 Mich ___; ___ N.W.2d (2019) (Docket No.
156376); slip op at 5 ("The Fourth Amendment demands
nothing more or less than reasonableness."). In order to
be reasonable, an arrest must be justified by probable cause.
Dunaway v. New York, 442 U.S. 200, 208; 99 S.Ct.
2248; 60 L.Ed.2d 824 (1979). "Probable cause to arrest
exists where the facts and circumstances within an
officer's knowledge and of which he has reasonably
trustworthy information are sufficient in themselves to
warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief that an
offense has been or is being committed." People v.
Champion, 452 Mich. 92, 115; 549 N.W.2d 849');">549 N.W.2d 849 (1996).
Even
when based on probable cause, however, a warrantless search
or seizure inside a suspect's home is presumptively
unreasonable. Payton, 445 U.S. at 586. In fact, the
United States Supreme Court has recognized that
"physical entry of the home is the chief evil against
which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed."
Id. at 585 (quotation marks and citations omitted).
To protect against unreasonable intrusions into the home, a
warrant is required to "interpose the magistrate's
determination of probable cause between the zealous officer
and the citizen." Id. at 602. In other words,
"the Fourth Amendment has drawn a firm line at the
entrance to the house," which "[a]bsent exigent
circumstances . . . may not be reasonably crossed without a
warrant." Id. at 590; see also Kirk v.
Louisiana, 536 U.S. 635, 638; 122 S.Ct. 2458; 153
L.Ed.2d 599 (2002) ("As Payton makes plain,
police officers need either a warrant or probable cause plus
exigent circumstances in order to make a lawful entry into a
home."). The burden of overcoming the presumption of
unreasonableness attached to a warrantless entry rests on the
prosecution. People v. Oliver, 417 Mich. 366, 380;
338 N.W.2d 167 (1983).
Warrantless
arrests that take place in public upon probable cause do not
violate the Fourth Amendment. United States v.
Watson, 423 U.S. 411, 423-424; 96 S.Ct. 820; 46 L.Ed.2d
598 (1976). In Michigan, this standard applies when probable
cause exists for a misdemeanor. See People v.
Hamilton, 465 Mich. 526, 533; 638 N.W.2d 92 (2002)
("[P]robable cause to arrest for a felony is
not required; rather, probable cause that a crime (felony or
misdemeanor) has been committed is the constitutional
requirement for an arrest."), overruled in part on other
grounds by Bright v. Ailshie, 465 Mich. 770 (2002).
IV.
ANALYSIS
As
noted, the Fourth Amendment permits an arrest without a
warrant in a public place as long as the police officer
making the arrest possesses sufficient probable cause.
Watson, 423 U.S. at 423. The officer in this case
had probable cause to arrest defendant for failing to report
an accident that caused damage to fixtures. MCL 257.621(a).
He personally observed damage to the guardrail and cement
barrier near defendant's abandoned vehicle. Further,
defendant admitted to him that she was driving the car that
caused the damage and that she did not report the accident to
law enforcement. This information was more than adequate to
provide the officer with probable cause to believe that the
misdemeanor offense had been committed.[4] Defendant does
not argue otherwise.[5]
While
probable cause alone may justify a warrantless public arrest,
the same is not true when it comes to arresting a suspect in
her home. Under Payton, law enforcement must obtain
a warrant or identify exigent circumstances that excuse the
warrant requirement before entering a home to make an arrest.
Payton, 445 U.S. at 590. In this case, there is no
dispute that Officer Staman completed defendant's arrest
inside her home. Instead of viewing this as a straightforward
Payton violation, the lower courts relied on
Santana to find that defendant's Fourth
Amendment rights remained intact because of her own actions
before the arrest.
In
Santana, undercover officers who had probable cause
to believe the defendant had just been involved in an illegal
purchase of heroin drove to the defendant's house and saw
her standing in the doorway holding a brown paper bag.
Santana, 427 U.S. at 40. According to one officer,
the defendant was "standing directly in the doorway-one
step forward would have put her outside, one step backward
would have put her in the vestibule of her residence."
Id. at n 1. The officers pulled up within 15 feet of
the defendant and got out of the vehicle while shouting
"police" and displaying their identification.
Id. at 40. The defendant retreated into her home,
and the officers followed her inside and arrested her,
discovering drugs in the bag and marked money on her person.
Id. at 40-41. Before trial, the defendant
successfully moved to suppress the evidence after the trial
court ruled that a warrant was necessary to enter her home.
Id. The United States Supreme Court reversed,
concluding that (1) the arrest began in a public place, and
(2) the police were in lawful hot pursuit when they entered
the defendant's home because there was a realistic
expectation that she would destroy the evidence. Id.
at 43. Therefore, the arrest was constitutional because
"a suspect may not defeat an arrest which has been set
in motion in a public place . . . by the expedient of
escaping to a private place." Id.
A.
PUBLIC ARREST
In our
view, Santana is distinguishable from the instant
case. Unlike the defendant in Santana, in this case
defendant was not "exposed to public view, speech,
hearing, and touch, as if she had been standing completely
outside her house." Id. at 42. Defendant was
never in a public place and possessed a reasonable
expectation of privacy inside her home that she maintained
throughout the encounter. The lower courts erred by holding
otherwise.
Initially,
we do not agree with the Court of Appeals' conclusion
that defendant "went further" than the
Santana defendant to expose herself to the public by
approaching the doorway and "extending her arm beyond
the threshold" to retrieve her identification.
Hammerlund, unpub op at 5. The Santana
defendant stood squarely in the middle of her doorway. Here,
the circuit court found only that defendant "reached out
of her door" to retrieve her property. According to the
record, all that breached the threshold was some portion of
defendant's arm or hand.[6]
But the
fact that some portion of defendant's arm or hand crossed
the threshold does not tell us the constitutional
significance of this fact. Should we consider her to be in
public if her whole arm was outside the threshold? What if it
was only her wrist or a couple of her fingers? Fortunately,
an attempt to determine how far defendant extended her arm or
hand over the threshold and what that might mean is an
unnecessary exercise.[7] Our Fourth Amendment analysis does not
focus on such arbitrary calculations; our focus remains on
determining whether a person sought to preserve her
constitutionally protected reasonable expectation of privacy.
See Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351; 88
S.Ct. 507; 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967).
It is
beyond clear that defendant had a reasonable constitutional
expectation of privacy within her home. Payton, 445
U.S. at 587 ("Freedom from intrusion into the home or
dwelling is the archetype of the privacy protection secured
by the Fourth Amendment.") (quotation marks and citation
omitted). Answering a knock at the door or speaking with
officers does not destroy an occupant's right to maintain
a reasonable expectation of privacy from unreasonable
intrusion. Kentucky v. King, 563 U.S. 452, 470; 131
S.Ct. 1849; 179 L.Ed.2d 865 (2011) ("[E]ven if an
occupant chooses to open the door and speak with the
officers, the occupant need not allow the officers to enter
the premises and may refuse to answer any questions at any
time.").[8] The only question is whether
defendant's expectation of privacy remained intact when
some portion of her hand or arm crossed the threshold to
retrieve her property or if, by doing so, she somehow
surrendered that expectation.
The
lower courts compared this case to Santana to
conclude that defendant did not have a reasonable expectation
of privacy because she exposed herself to public arrest. See
Hammerlund, unpub op at 5. Santana is
distinguishable. In that case, the defendant was voluntarily
standing in the middle of her open doorway before the police
encounter even began; by doing so, she exposed herself to the
public "as if she had been standing completely
outside" and she did not have any reasonable
expectation of privacy from the very beginning of the
encounter. Santana, 427 U.S. at 42. In contrast,
defendant began this encounter inside her home-inside her
bedroom-emerging only when she and her roommate were
threatened with arrest, and then remaining 15 to 20 feet away
from the doorway. When asked to provide her driver's
license, she had her roommate pass it to Officer Staman while
she remained away from the door. Defendant manifested an
intent to stay inside, and Officer Staman was aware of that
intention. Given her actions, she did not voluntarily and
knowingly expose herself to the public as if she had been
standing outside her house. Defendant's actions made
clear that she was carefully preserving her expectation of
privacy.
Nonetheless,
the Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court's
application of Santana to this case because it
reasoned that defendant exposed herself to public arrest by
approaching the door and reaching out to retrieve her
identification. Hammerlund, unpub op at 5. But there
is a fundamental difference between the reasonable
expectation of privacy of a person who voluntarily stands in
an open doorway and the reasonable expectation of privacy of
a person who remains inside the confines of her home,
approaching the doorway only briefly and momentarily breaking
the plane of the doorway with some portion of her arm or
hand.[9] In other words, defendant did not
surrender her expectation of privacy because she did not
expose herself to public view, speech, hearing, and touch
as if she had been standing completely outside.
Santana, 427 U.S. at 42.
Defendant
manifested an intent to remain fully within her home by
carefully standing several feet away from the door. She
continued to manifest this intent when she approached the
doorway briefly and only broke the plane of the doorway with
some portion of her arm or hand. We think that society would
recognize defendant's behavior as preserving a reasonable
expectation of privacy. In fact, we would venture that what
society would not view as reasonable is exactly what
occurred in this case-that a person suspected of a minor
misdemeanor could be subjected to a warrantless arrest inside
her home in the middle of the night.
To
recap, defendant's expectation of privacy within her home
was reasonable, and her action of reaching out over the
threshold and retrieving her identification did not
relinquish that reasonable expectation. Defendant was not
exposed to public arrest, and accordingly, Santana
is inapplicable to the facts of this case.
B.
EXIGENT CIRCUMSTANCES
Beyond
the fact that Santana does not apply because
defendant did not leave the confines of her home or otherwise
subject herself to public arrest, Santana is still
inapplicable because there was no hot pursuit or need for
immediate police action. When officers have probable cause
and exigent circumstances exist, it is reasonable under the
Fourth Amendment for officers to enter a home without a
warrant. Payton, 445 U.S. at 590. Exigent
circumstances exist when an emergency leaves law enforcement
with insufficient time to obtain a warrant. Michigan v.
Tyler, 436 U.S. 499, 509; 98 S.Ct. 1942; 56 L.Ed.2d 486
(1978). "Hot pursuit" of a fleeing felon is one
recognized example of exigent circumstances.
Santana, 427 U.S. at 42-43. Unlike the lower courts,
we do not believe that there was a legitimate hot pursuit in
this case.
To
begin, application of the hot-pursuit doctrine under the
instant circumstances is suspect. See Welsh v.
Wisconsin, 466 U.S. 740, 750; 104 S.Ct. 2091; 80 L.Ed.2d
732 (1984) ("Our hesitation in finding exigent
circumstances, especially when warrantless arrests in the
home are at issue, is particularly appropriate when the
underlying offense for which there is probable cause to
arrest is relatively minor."). In fact, it is far from
well settled that an officer with probable cause to arrest a
suspect for a misdemeanor may rely on the hot-pursuit
exception to make a warrantless home entry. Stanton v.
Sims, 571 U.S. 3, 6, 10; 134 S.Ct. 3; 187 L.Ed.2d 341
(2013) (recognizing that the federal circuits are sharply
divided on whether a necessary component of the hot-pursuit
doctrine is the pursuit of a fleeing felon and that
its own precedent was "equivocal" on the
matter).[10]
However,
even were we to characterize what occurred as a
"pursuit," that pursuit would be far from a
"hot" one. "What makes the pursuit
'hot' is 'the emergency nature of the
situation,' requiring 'immediate police
action.'" Smith v. Stoneburner, 716 F.3d
926, 931 (CA 6, 2013) (citation omitted). In
Santana, immediate action was necessary both because
police were pursuing a fleeing felon and because there was a
reasonable fear that the defendant would destroy evidence if
they did not act quickly. Santana, 427 U.S. at
42-43. Here, defendant was suspected of a 90-day misdemeanor
and there was no evidence of that crime that she could
destroy. Indeed, all the elements of the crime were already
known to the police. There is no suggestion that any
emergency existed that would have entitled the police to
enter defendant's home throughout the conversation up to
the point when defendant reached out to retrieve her
identification. We fail to see how defendant's
interaction at the doorway created any kind of emergency, let
alone one that would outweigh her expectation of privacy in
her home.
The
Court of Appeals held that, under Santana, the
officer's pursuit of defendant was legitimate because he
acted lawfully by attempting to grab her arm when she
extended it beyond the threshold of her home.
Hammerlund, unpub op at 6. As we have explained,
critical to Santana's holding was the fact that
the defendant in that case was voluntarily in full public
view when she first interacted with the police and before she
retreated into her home. But, as previously discussed,
defendant was not voluntarily exposed to public arrest at any
point in the encounter. Therefore, unlike in
Santana, when defendant pulled her arm away from the
officer she did not thwart an "otherwise proper
arrest" that had been "set in motion in a public
place." Santana, 427 U.S. at 42-43.
C.
PAYTON
Because
Santana is inapplicable, we return to
Payton, which prohibits entry into a suspect's
home without a warrant in the absence of an emergency
situation. Payton, 445 U.S. at 590. Defendant did
not expose herself to public arrest or relinquish her
reasonable expectation of privacy throughout the encounter
and there was no hot pursuit, but Officer Staman conceded
that defendant's arrest was completed inside her home.
Since the seizure occurred beyond the "firm line at the
entrance of the house," it was ...