State v. Anderson

136 P.3d 406, 281 Kan. 896, 2006 Kan. LEXIS 355
CourtSupreme Court of Kansas
DecidedJune 9, 2006
Docket92,580
StatusPublished
Cited by53 cases

This text of 136 P.3d 406 (State v. Anderson) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Kansas primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
State v. Anderson, 136 P.3d 406, 281 Kan. 896, 2006 Kan. LEXIS 355 (kan 2006).

Opinion

The opinion of the court was delivered by

Beier, J.:

This appeal arises on the State’s petition for review of a Court of Appeals decision suppressing drug evidence against defendant Billy D. Anderson. State v. Anderson, 34 Kan. App. 2d 375, 119 P.3d 1171 (2005). We must decide whether probable cause supported Anderson’s warrantless arrest or, in the alternative, whether an oral arrest and detain order for violation of conditional release was sufficient to take Anderson into custody under K.S.A. 2005 Supp. 75-5217(a).

The largely undisputed and legally relevant facts are the following.

A Wichita police officer, conducting nighttime surveillance from an unmarked car, observed Anderson driving a rental truck to an Amoco convenience store/gas station known as a hub of illegal drug activity. Anderson was wearing gang colors, and his passenger was a known gang member. After 5 minutes inside the store, Anderson and his passenger left the store and drove away. The officer followed their truck to the parking lot of an apartment complex, where four men briefly approached the truck. The truck then left the parking lot and returned to the store.

Anderson went into the store again and emerged with a different passenger, Cornell Golston. Again, the officer followed the truck as it exited the store. The officer observed Anderson commit two traffic violations, and the officer radioed his partner in a marked car to make a traffic stop.

Three officers initially participated in the stop. One of them had stopped Anderson on two previous occasions, suspecting drugs but finding none after Anderson refused permission to search the vehicle. That officer also was aware that narcotics officers were in *898 vestigating Anderson’s activities, and, on an earlier stop, had discovered he was carrying $4,000 cash. One of the two other officers approached the truck on the driver’s side, asked for identification from both Anderson and Golston, and ran their driver’s licenses through the Wichita Police Department’s Special Police Information Data Entiy Retrieval (SPIDER) system. While waiting for a response, he wrote out a citation.

SPIDER advised that both men were “signal 33,” meaning documented gang members; it also advised that Anderson was on supervised conditional release. Neither Anderson nor Golston had a warrant, however, and Anderson’s driver’s license was valid. The officers decided to radio for backup and a K-9 unit to search the truck.

About 35 minutes after the initial stop, two more officers arrived and a police captain arrived. The officer who had written the citation then returned to the truck, asked Anderson to step out, and performed a pat-down search for weapons. Finding nothing, the officer issued a speeding citation and returned Anderson’s and Golston’s identifications.

After Anderson signed the citation, the officer sought consent to search the truck. Anderson refused it. The officer then informed Anderson that a K-9 unit was on its way and that he and Golston were not free to leave and would have to wait outside the truck. When the officer removed Golston from the vehicle and patted him down, he saw a plastic bag sticking out of Golston’s shoe. Golston admitted the bag contained marijuana, and he was arrested. The officer then discovered pills in Golston’s other shoe and $1,300 cash in his pocket.

When the K-9 unit arrived, at least one of the officers believed the dog alerted on the truck. An exhaustive search of the truck followed, but it uncovered no additional drugs. During the dog sniff and search, Anderson was kept 30 to 40 feet away from the truck.

The officers then attempted to reach the Kansas Department of Corrections to determine if they could arrest Anderson for violation of his conditional release. After several unsuccessful attempts, the officers roused Richard Sacldxoff at home. The officers told *899 Sackhoff, a special enforcement officer for the Department of Corrections, that Anderson was a gang member on parole who was with another gang member in possession of marijuana. Sackhoff gave the officers oral permission to arrest Anderson based on that information; he said he would issue a written arrest and detain order and would place a copy of it inside the front door of his home so that an officer could pick it up. Sackhoff did so, but die written order was dated the next day.

Armed with Sackhoffs oral permission, the officers attempted to arrest Anderson, who ran. Anderson tried to hide baggies containing pills or powder near a dumpster during flight, but he was quickly apprehended and the baggies found. In die course of Anderson’s subsequent successful arrest, the officers also discovered a baggie of pills and powder in one of his shoes. These and the baggies he had tried to hide were later determined to contain methylenedioxymethamphetamine, also known as MDMA or Ecstasy.

Anderson moved to suppress the drug evidence. The district judge heard evidence about the stop and arrest and stated:

“It’s undisputed that there was no D and A, detain and arrest warrant. There’s no question in my mind that Mr. Sackhoff as a special enforcement officer could issue an order to arrest and detain, even though he was not Mr. Anderson’s parole officer. He certainly had the authority to do so based upon the information he was provided with.
“Factually, there’s no dispute that the drug sniffing dog came out. The dog’s handler . . . says the dog made a hit on the vehicle. A search of the vehicle discovered no drugs in the vehicle.
“It was at that point that the officers began to contact a parole officer to get an arrest and detain order. And they obtained one. . . .
“I don’t have any problem with an oral and I don’t think there’s any problem in the law with an oral authorization, that it exists, once it exists for Mr. Sackhoff to give an oral authorization to the officers to arrest and detain.
“As I say, the real legal question is whether or not the officers who made the car stop and who had the suspicion can rely on that arrest and detain warrant to arrest Mr. Anderson and then search him.
“I find factually that [one] officer had a reasonable suspicion to believe that Mr. Anderson was in violation of his parole once he got the information back from SPIDER that Mr. Anderson was on parole. And I find as a matter of law, the fact that there was no . . . arrest and detain order in existence at the time of the stop *900 does not make it unreasonable for [the officer] to have held Mr. Anderson until such an order existed.
“And I’ll overrule the motion to suppress based on that.”

When defense counsel asked the judge to clarify whether probable cause to arrest was necessary, die judge continued:

“Does not require probable cause, although, if you go to the arrest and detain, there’s probable cause for that.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
136 P.3d 406, 281 Kan. 896, 2006 Kan. LEXIS 355, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/state-v-anderson-kan-2006.