Colorado Court of Appeals People v. Taylor 09CA2681

Decision here.

   Undercover narcotics investigators watched Taylor make gestures which they later testified were consistent with trying to initiate drugs sales.  So they asked him for a hook up (specifically crack).  He told them that he doesn't sell drugs, but offered to call a dealer for them.  He made the call, and a female showed up and sold the cops some crack.  Both the dealer and Taylor were arrested after the sale.  Incident to the arrest, a sergeant checked Taylor's cell phone call log.

   Taylor was convicted of conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance (and acquitted of actually distributing said controlled substance).  He appealed his conviction on several grounds: he argued that the search of his cell phone was unlawful, that the court should have given the jury an entrapment instruction, and that the court improperly denied one of his juror challenges (I won't be summarizing the juror challenge issue, but the appellate court didn't buy it).

   As far as entrapment goes, in Colorado entrapment is an affirmative defense which the defendant has to present some evidence of in order to  claim.  The court held that since Taylor was contesting the allegations, he couldn't claim the defense.  The court also explained that nothing in the record would have supported an entrapment defense anyway (the fact that the police initiated contact with Taylor and asked him to sell them drugs wasn't the sort of action that would induce someone to commit a crime they were not already predisposed to, so it wasn't entrapment).

   But most of the decision deals with the search of the cell phone.  The trial court apparently held that the search was admissible as a search incident to arrest, and alternately that it was admissible based on exigency or on plain view (I have no idea what facts could possibly support either conclusion, but the court of appeals didn't address either one).  The court of appeals observed that the authority to search incident to arrest is based on the authority to arrest, and does not depend on any independent suspicion of weapons or contraband.  And although over time the courts have frequently modified police authority to search the area within a suspect's control, the authority to search a suspect's person has remained constant.  The court held that in this case, searching the phone's call log incident to arrest was valid.

Tenth Circuit US v. Strandlof

   This decision upholds the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a crime to falsely claim to have received military honors.  The facts of the case are pretty much what you would expect them to be.

   The Tenth Circuit held that under current SCOTUS case law, the First Amendment does not protect knowingly false statements of fact where either the statute is specific enough to not have a chilling effect on other categories of speech which are protected (for example, a law against making false statements about a public official could have a chilling effect on political discourse unless the elements of the crime included malice), or where the law in question reaches no farther than is necessary to protect a compelling government interest.

Colorado Supreme Court People v. Unruh 84SA299

Decided 1-21-86.

   A police officer drove past three guys who were attempting to conceal something large and heavy in the trunk of a car.  When he came back, the car was abandoned, and the object in question turned out to be a safe.  One of the suspects was apprehended, and admitted to burglarizing a nearby house.  This suspect also claimed that the safe contained cash and drugs.  Another detective found a house nearby that appeared to have been broken into (the door had been broken open).  Officers searched the house, and found drug paraphernalia.  Unruh came home confirmed that his safe was stolen, and was informed that it had been taken to the police station and that he could get it in a day or so.

   While the safe was still at the station, officers had a K9 sniff the exterior of the safe.  The K9 alerted, indicating the presence of drugs.  Police obtained a search warrant, and found a lot of cocaine and marijuana in the safe.  Unruh was charged and convicted, and appealed his conviction on the grounds that evidence against him should have been suppressed.

   The Colorado Supreme Court recognized that other courts had already held that a dog sniff was not a search under the fourth amendment, but decided to afford greater protection against searches under the Colorado Constitition.  So the court ruled that a dog sniff was in fact a search, but that because of the minimal intrusion involved, it could be justified on the basis of reasonable suspicion.  Unruh also argued for suppression on the basis that the search of his house was unreasonable.  The court held that the search of his house was valid under the emergency exception (police officers may enter private property without a warrant where there is a reasonable belief that the premises have been or are being burglarized in order to secure the premises and to search for suspects and victims), and that although impermissibly expanded the search beyond the scope of the exception (they looked in dresser drawers, apparently they were looking for very small suspects), the paraphernalia was found in a place where they had authority to search.  So the warrant was good, and the conviction was upheld.

US Supreme Court New York v. Belton 80-328

Decided July 1, 1981.

   This case had already been overturned when I started this website, but I'm including it because it's referred to so often in other cases that I've added, so I thought it'd be worth reading.

   An officer stopped a car for speeding, found that none of the four occupants owned the car, and smelled burnt marijuana from inside the car.  He noticed an envelope in the car that said "supergold," which he associated with marijuana (different world in the 80's huh?).  He ordered all four occupants out of the car and arrested them for possession of marijuana.

   He searched the car incident to arrest, found that the envelope did in fact contain marijuana, and found a jacket belonging to Belton (one of the passengers), which had cocaine in the pocket.  He took all four occupants to jail.  Belton took a plea bargain after the court refused to suppress the cocaine, but he reserved the right to appeal that judgment.  And appeal he did.

   So here's where it really gets funny.  Before ruling that an officer could search the entire passenger compartment after the arrest of a recent occupant of the car (holding that the passenger compartment was under the control of any given occupant), this is what they said: "Fourth Amendment doctrine, given force and effect by the exclusionary rule, is primarily intended to regulate the police in their day-to-day activities and thus ought to be expressed in terms that are readily applicable by the police in the context of the law enforcement activities in which they are necessarily engaged. A highly sophisticated set of rules, qualified by all sorts of ifs, ands, and buts and requiring the drawing of subtle nuances and hairline distinctions, may be the sort of heady stuff upon which the facile minds of lawyers and judges eagerly feed, but they may be `literally impossible of application by the officer in the field....[a] single familiar standard is essential to guide police officers, who have only limited time and expertise to reflect on and balance the social and individual interests involved in the specific circumstances they confront." (emphasis added)

   In other words, we had the Belton bright-line rule because the Supreme Court of the early 80's figured that cops were too dumb to deal with anything more complicated!  Now, I'm all about keeping things as simple as possible (even though that often isn't very simple at all), but this just made me laugh.

   It seems that court has stepped up its expectations of public servants somewhat.