Colorado Court of Appeals People v. Brunsting 09SC323

Decision here.

   This is a strange decision, in that the court was feeling mysterious.  The supreme court case recounts half the facts, and if you want to know what else happened you have to read the court of appeals decision (which they conveniently link to in the footnotes).  Or you could just read my summary.  It has spoilers.

   Randy Tanner called the sheriff's department to report that his van had been stolen, and that he had found it in front of a particular house.  He also reported that he thought the guy who had stolen it was named Lance (later determined to be Lance Brunsting, the defendant), that Lance had a gun, and that Lance and his friends were dangerous people who were involved with drugs.  And also more guns.  Did I mention they were dangerous?

   Because of all the OMG-ish stuff that Tanner was telling dispatch, they sent five deputies and a sergeant to the call.  When they got there, and while Tanner was telling them his story, a woman came out of the house.  She claimed to own the house, admitted that someone named Lance also lived there, denied knowing anything about the van in the driveway being stolen, and denied the deputies consent to enter.  She also spoke unnaturally loudly, as though she were trying to alert someone to the presence of the police.  They asked her to lower her voice a couple times, and finally just detained her further away from the house.  At some point during this exchange, deputies noticed that the front of the house was wired up with surveillance cameras, and that the stereo and speakers had been stripped from the van.

   Tanner got impatient with the deputies, and told them that if they didn't hurry up and knock on the door then he would (at this point, I'd have been really tempted to pull chocks and let the tweakers sort it out amongst themselves).  The deputies tried to get ahold of the occupants of the residence by phone, and then decided to knock on the door.

   In light of everything Tanner had said, and the woman's behavior, and the surveillance cameras, the deputies recognized that they were potentially exposing themselves to ambush by these armed & dangerous suspects.  In order to prevent that, the sergeant assigned a deputy to cover the left and right sides of the house while the others knocked on the front door.

   Deputy Carroll was assigned to cover the side of the house near the driveway.  As he was heading to his assigned position, he saw that there was a security camera pointed right at where he would need to be.  In order to avoid that, he instead took up a position just inside the fenced back yard.  And this is where the supreme court's telling of the story ends... they just say that this was followed by "a rapid series of events."

   The rapid series of events was that Carroll saw someone poke their head around the corner, so he followed them further into the backyard, and handcuffed and searched them.  He also saw other people in the back door, and ordered them out of the house at gunpoint.  One of them was later found to have dropped a gun.  Another deputy, hearing Carroll's orders, jumped the fence into the backyard to go help.  On his way, he saw some meth cooking gear through a window.  The deputies then entered the house and found Brunsting hiding inside.  While searching him, they found some meth and paraphernalia.  The drug task force was called to the scene, they got a search warrant, and found meth precursors.  Brunsting was charged with (and eventually convicted of) manufacturing a controlled substance, possession of a controlled substance, and POWPO.

   Brunsting appealed his conviction, arguing that the deputies' behavior was rife with constitutional violations, beginning with Carroll's trespass into the back yard.  The court of appeals held that Carroll's entry into the back yard was unlawful, and ordered the suppression of everything that followed (thereby reversing Brunsting's conviction).  The prosecution appealed.

   The Colorado Supreme Court recognized that the deputies had probable cause to search the house for evidence related to the theft of Tanner's van, as well as for the suspect in that theft.  The question was whether or not the warrantless search was justified by exigent circumstances.  The court describes three different situations where exigent circumstances exist: 1- when the police are engaged in hot pursuit of a fleeing suspect, 2- when there is a risk of immediate destruction of evidence, and 3- when there is a colorable claim of emergency threatening the life or safety of another.

   Regarding #3, the court held that it doesn't matter whose life and safety is being threatened.  It could be the responding officer's or some other person's, and either way it means there's exigent circumstances.  The two important questions are: 1- whether or not there's an objectively reasonable basis for believing that there is an immediate need for the police to protect themselves or someone else, and 2- whether or not the manner and scope of the search are reasonable.

   Reasonableness depends on a broad set of factors, none of which are the be-all and end-all.  It's the totality of the circumstances.  One of the factors that the courts may consider is the degree of intrusion for a search.  A minimal or negligible intrusion is easier to justify.  In this case, Carroll simply standing on the other side of the fence from where he normally would be allowed to stand was held to be a minimal intrusion (especially when weighed against his safety reasons for doing so: standing in front of the camera would have been too dangerous, and abandoning his post would have left other officers vulnerable to ambush).  So the appelate court's decision was reversed, and Carroll's initial entry into the back yard was held to be reasonable.

   But that, again, is where the Supreme Court's narrative stops.  They didn't decide if all that other shit that Carroll did after entering the back yard was reasonable.  They only decided that he was good up to that point, and sent the case back to the court of appeals to decide whether or not the other alleged constitutional violations should lead to a suppression of the evidence.