People v. Summers

86 Cal. Rptr. 2d 388, 73 Cal. App. 4th 288

• Court: California Court of Appeal
• Decided: July 13, 1999
• Docket: G021972
• Status: Published

Opinions

Opinion

CROSBY, Acting P. J .

Richard Arnold Summers lived in a small trailer.¹ When Anaheim police officers approached it to serve him with an arrest warrant, they encountered Selena Poer on the way out. She said she lived there with Summers and another man who was in the nearby trailer park laundromat. She agreed to accompany the officers while they talked to Summers.

Inside the trailer the officers found Summers sleeping. They awakened him, and he identified himself. Told they had a warrant for his arrest, he stood up, put on his pants, and was handcuffed. As one officer put the cuffs on, the other kept an eye on Poer and watched for the possible return of the absent male occupant of the trailer.

One officer escorted Summers toward the door while the other patted down the bed where he had been sleeping. As he moved the pillow, he saw a sawed-off shotgun between the mattress and the headboard. No one was certain whether Summers was just inside or just outside the trailer door when the shotgun was first observed, but he was roughly 10 feet away.

Of course, finding the shotgun — contraband in itself in its sawed-off condition — considerably upped the ante on the service of the warrant. Concerned for their safety, the officers held Summers and Poer outside a minute or two while they awaited backup. Then police were dispatched after the man Poer said shared the trailer. They found him 50 to 100 feet away in the trailer park laundromat.

Satisfied he was not armed and that their safety had been assured, they went back into the trailer, and photographed, fingerprinted and seized the shotgun. Roughly 10 minutes elapsed between Summers’s arrest and the seizure of the illegal shotgun.

Our concurring colleague views the issue here as a relatively momentous one. We do not. This is a simple Chimel v. California (1969) 395 U.S. 752 [89 S.Ct. 2034, 23 L.Ed.2d 685] case to our way of thinking. When discovered, the gun was within the immediate area of the still-being-removed arrestee, there was a female present who was not previously known to the officers, and there was another male roommate somewhere nearby whose presence away from the immediate premises had not yet been confirmed.

We think the logic of Chimel is contrary to several of the decisions Justice Bedsworth espouses. The justification for Chimel searches is officer safety, not officer opportunism, i.e., a postarrest license to embark on a general search. (See, e.g., U.S. v. Blue (2d Cir. 1996) 78 F.3d 56 [search under mattress not lawful where two suspects in one-room apartment handcuffed prone on the floor two feet from the bed].) That is to say, where there is no threat to the officers because the suspect has been immobilized, removed, and no one else is present, it makes no sense that the place he was removed from remains subject to search merely because he was previously there.

That said, though, we hasten to add this: This was not a cold arrest scene with a long-gone suspect. He was still being removed from the cramped premises; one roommate was present and free of police control, and another was unaccounted for when the weapon was chanced upon. This was a fluid situation in close quarters; and a court could properly find, as we do, that the circumstances justified reasonable precautions for the safety of everyone involved. As Professor LaFave’s collection of cases in the area illustrates, the search that turned up this weapon would have been upheld in virtually all jurisdictions. (See 3 LaFave, Search and Seizure (3d ed. 1996) Entry and Search of Premises, § 6.3(c), p. 308.) The warrantless seizure of the weapon a few minutes later while the premises were still under the lawful control of the officers was similarly lawful.²

Judgment affirmed.

Rylaarsdam, J., concurred.

1 Summers pleaded guilty to various criminal offenses after Ms motion to suppress was denied.

2 How we have “missed an opportunity to clarify an area of the law whose uncertainty could have tragic consequences” (cone, opn., post, at p. 298) is beyond us. We approve the direct seizure of this shotgun without any need to engage in the convoluted logic our profession is often reviled for, and deservedly so. The officers acted in a perfectly reasonable manner here. But our concurring colleague wants more. Assuming they had not found the shotgun when they did, his reasoning would allow them to return to the trailer after defendant was transported to the police station and tear his bed apart — without warrant, without reason, and in utter disregard for the Constitution of the United States.

Translated into law talk, the “tragic consequences” phrase impliedly pinned on our opinion by our colleague means that by not giving police a license to search when Chimel and the Fourth Amendment simply do not permit it, we “force” them to expose themselves to unnecessary danger by retaining the suspect in a particular location in order to use him as a pretext to search. In other words, the suggestion is by approving the search in this case we are encouraging the police to violate the law. Go figure.