People v. HarrisPeople v. Harris
Lead Opinion
Appeal from a judgment of the County Court of Chemung County (Keene, J.), rendered October 21, 2013, convicting defendant upon his plea of guilty of the crime of criminal possession of a controlled substance in the third degree.
When police officers responded to a call regarding a disturbance at an apartment, they arrived at the door and heard the sоunds of a physical altercation inside. The officers opened the unlocked door, entered the apartment and broke up a fight between two male residents. The perceived aggressor was restrained, handcuffed and placed in a sitting position on the floor in the hallway next to the living room while the apparent victim was asked to sit on the сouch while both were questioned. Defendant emerged from the bathroom and also sat on the couch at the request of the officers, who continued their questioning regarding the incident. The officers then heard the sounds of another person and, when asked, defendant indicated that his wife was in the back bedroom, which the victim said was rented to defendant. While the other officers remained in the living room, one of the officers conducted a sweep of the apartment. After looking in the bedrooms that opened directly into the living room, the officer proceeded into the kitchen where he knocked on defendant’s locked bedroom door and directed defendant’s wife to “open the door.” Aftеr indicating that she had to get dressed, she emerged and complied with the officer’s request to go into the living room to join her husband and the victim on the couch. At that point, the officer
Defendant was indicted on charges of criminal possession of a controlled substance in the second degree, unlawful manufacture of methamphetamine in the third degree and criminal possession of a controlled substance in the seventh degree. Following a suppression hearing, County Court (Hayden, J.) denied defendant’s motion to suppress both the physical evidence and his statements to police. Defendant thereafter accepted a plea agreement pursuant to which he pleaded guilty under the top count of the indictment to the lesser included offense of criminal possession of a controlled substance in the third degree, and he was sentenced, as a second felony offender, to the agreed-upon prison term of 3V2 years with three years of postrelease supervision.
On appeal, defendant contends that County Court erred in denying his motion to suppress the physical evidence and his statements to police. Specifically, with regard to the evidence recovered from his bedroom, defendаnt argues that the entry into and search of his bedroom were illegal and, thus, the police were not lawfully in his bedroom when they made the observations that formed the basis for the search warrant application, requiring that the evidence be suppressed. We agree.
While warrantless searches of a home are presumptively unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment (see US Const 4th Amend; Kentucky v King,
Here, the suppression testimony established that the officers responded to a general disturbance call at 7:30 a.m. and immediately stopped a fist fight between two male roommates. The officers subdued and cuffed the aggressor and placed the victim on the couch, bringing the situation under their control. While thе two continued to argue, they made no further aggressive moves. No guns or weapons were observed, no blood or serious injuries were noted and no one was seen or heard fleeing when police entered the apartment. When asked at the outset, the victim asserted only that the aggressor had hit him and should be arrested. When defendant exited the adjacent bathroom, he did not run out of the apartment or to his bedroom but, rather, he was compliant, provided his name and did as requested. When asked, defendant disclosed that his wife was in his bedroom. No one present reported that others had been involved in the altercation and no facts were alleged by the officers to support a belief that а third person had been involved or was hiding in the apartment and posed a danger to those present. Significantly, no one was patted down for weapons until after the search of defendant’s bedroom.
Although the officers were informed that defendant’s wife
The concurrence notes that, in gauging the safety of the situation, the officer who conducted the protective sweep was not limited to information provided by the occupants of the apartment, but could make his own assessment based on the totality of the circumstances. While we agree with this as a general statement, we cannоt agree with the suggestion that the officer’s observation of a glass pipe and suspected narcotics in the aggressor’s bedroom provided articulable facts that warranted the belief that an individual in the back bedroom posed a danger to those in the living room. In our view, the facts known to the officer — prior to the entry and search of defendant’s bedroom — do not support a belief that there was any such threat. Rather, the altercation had been subdued and the situation was no longer volatile. In short, the record lacks the requisite articulable facts that would lead a reasonably prudent officer to believe that, once defendant’s wife had exited the bedroom and prior to the offiсer’s entry into it, there was anything within that posed a danger to the others at the scene so as to justify a protective sweep of that room (see id. at 334; People v Harper,
Accordingly, we must agree with defendant that his motion
Since we are vacating defendant’s guilty plea and remitting for further proceedings, we address defendant’s contention that County Court also erred in denying his motion to suppress his statements to police. Beginning with defendant’s oral statements to police in the apartment, the suppression testimony established that, after the officer exited defendant’s bedroom and reported the discovery of the meth lab, police investigatоrs were called and the occupants were patted for weapons. One of the investigators, who had been advised of the drug-related discovery, questioned defendant in the living room about the meth lab, eliciting incriminating admissions from him. No Miranda warnings were provided. The questioning was not merely investigatory but, rather, an interrogation designed and likely to elicit an incriminating response (see People v Paulman, 5 NY3d 122, 129 [2005]). While defendant was not handcuffed or restrained and the questioning lasted only a few minutes, given the discovery of a meth lab in his bedroom and the police-dominated atmosphere, we cannot conclude that “a reasonable person in defendant’s position would have believed that he or she was free to leave” and, therefore, wе find that the questioning was custodial and Miranda warnings were required (People v Cade,
Following those improper unwarned statements, defendant was taken into custody and transported to the police station where he signed a Mirandized written statement. To determine whether those late Miranda warnings were effective in protecting defendant’s rights or whether the subsequent written statement was part of a “single continuous chain of events” requiring its suppression, courts look to numerous factors, “including the time differential between the Miranda violation and the
The testimony addressing the foregoing factors was cursory. The second investigator to question defendant testified that he provided Miranda warnings to defendant in an interview room at the police station approximately three hours after police had responded to the apartment. There was a change in the location of the interrogation and the police personnel involved, defendant was not placed in restraints and he had indicated some willingness to speak with officers at the apartment prior to the Miranda violation. However, the record is devoid of testimony regarding the circumstances under which defendant was transported to the police station, whether any questioning occurred during his transport, or the nature, atmosphere or duration оf the questioning at the station. Given that defendant heavily incriminated himself when questioned by the first investigator at the apartment in violation of his Miranda rights, we do not find that the People established at the hearing that there was a “pronounced break in [the] interrogation adequate to justify a finding that the defendant was no longer under the sway of the prior [unwarned] questioning when the warnings were [subsequently] given” (People v Guilford,
Concurrence Opinion
(concurring). We respectfully disagree only with respect to the majority’s determination to suppress all the physical evidence found in the bedroom. From our perspective, there were articulable facts that would warrant a reasonably
In our view, the situation at hand, which had spilled into several rooms, was volatile and aptly described by the officer as “hostile.” This context, coupled with the evidence of illegal drugs and the proximity of the back bеdroom, provided a reasonable basis for the officer to extend the protective sweep to that bedroom (see People v Gibson,
While the protective sweep of the bedroom was justified, as the majority explained, such a sweep is “narrowly confined to a cursory visual inspection of those places in which a person might be hiding” (id. at 327; see People v McAllister,
Concurrence Opinion
concurs. Ordered that the judgment is reversed, on the law, grant defendant’s motion to suppress the physical evidence found in the bedroom, the oral statements defendant made to police at the apartment and defendant’s written statement, and matter remitted to the County Court of Chemung County for further proceedings not inconsistent with this Court’s decision.