California Supreme Court
- Brown, 61 C4 968, 190 CR3 583, 353 P3 305 (15):
You’re sitting in a car when a law enforcement vehicle pulls up behind you and puts on its emergency lights. Would you, being a reasonable person, feel free to drive away?
That was the question in this case. A deputy sheriff was dispatched to investigate a reported fight. He saw Brown’s car coming toward him and yelled at Brown, asking if he saw anything. Brown didn’t respond and drove on.
Which raised the deputy’s suspicions. After leaving the scene, the deputy saw Brown’s car parked a short distance away. He activated his overhead emergency lights and pulled up behind the car. He approached and talked to Brown, who admitted to drinking and being involved in the fight. Brown was charged with DUI.
Brown moved to suppress evidence of his physical condition, statements, and breath test results as the fruits of an unlawful detention. Denied.
The Court of Appeal affirmed Brown’s conviction. The California Supreme Court took on the question of whether the flashing of the overhead emergency lights constitutes a detention. The question is, would a reasonable person in that situation feel free to just take off?
The Court of Appeal held that “when a vehicle is already stopped, without police action, merely activating emergency lights on a police vehicle, without more, does not constitute a seizure within the Fourth Amendment.”
Nay, not so, says the Supreme Court of California:
In People v. Bailey (1985) 176 Cal.App.3d 402 an officer stopped behind the defendant’s parked car and activated his emergency lights. (Id. at p. 404.) Applying the test from United States v. Mendenhall (1980) 446 U.S. 544, 554, the court concluded a detention had occurred because “[a] reasonable person to whom the red light from a vehicle is directed would be expected to recognize the signal to stop or otherwise be available to the officer. Any reasonable person in a similar situation would expect that if he drove off, the officer would respond by following with red light on and siren sounding in order to accomplish control of the individual.” (Bailey, at pp. 405-406.)
The court, however, adds a little wrinkle to the mix:
To be clear, we do not adopt a bright-line rule that an officer’s use of emergency lights in close proximity to a parked car will always constitute a detention of the occupants. “[A]ny assessment as to whether police conduct amounts to a seizure implicating the Fourth Amendment must take into account ‘ “all of the circumstances surrounding the incident” ’ in each individual case.” (Chesternut, supra, 486 U.S. at p. 572, quoting Delgado, supra, 466 U.S. at p. 215.) As an example, a motorist whose car had broken down on the highway might reasonably perceive an officer’s use of emergency lights as signaling that the officer has stopped to render aid or to warn oncoming traffic of a hazard, rather than to investigate crime. Ambiguous circumstances may be clarified by whether other cars are nearby or by the officer’s conduct when approaching. (See Wilson v. Superior Court (1983) 34 Cal.3d 777, 791 & fn. 11; People v. Garry (2007) 156 Cal.App.4th 1100, 1110-1112.) Here, no circumstances would have conveyed to a reasonable person that Deputy Geasland was doing anything other than effecting a detention. Under the totality of these circumstances, Brown was detained when Geasland stopped behind the parked car and turned on his emergency lights.
So that’s the rule. Now the question becomes were there reasonable grounds for this particular detention? The court holds there were.
The circumstances here include a reliable citizen’s report of a violent fight potentially involving a firearm, the deputy’s very quick response time, and Brown’s presence near the scene of the fight in the otherwise vacant alley. These facts justified this brief detention.
The Stephanie Lazarus S-Ws Supported by Probable Cause, Good Faith
- Lazarus, 238 CA4 734, 190 CR3 195 (15):
In December of 2004, members of LAPD’s cold case unit decided to re-opened a murder case. Back in 1986 a woman named Sheri Rasmussen was killed by a couple of slugs from a .38. No one was ever arrested for the murder. But the coroner did manage to preserve some DNA which came from a bite mark on the victim’s arm.
LAPD conducted a new DNA test, produced a profile, fed it into a national database, and got bupkis. A detective then went through all the potential suspects who were interviewed, and lo and behold, one of them was a fellow LAPD detective, working, in fact, right across the hall – Stephanie Lazarus.
Detectives surreptitiously got a discarded drinking cup and straw, ran a test, and bingo—Lazarus’ DNA matched the bite mark DNA.
Now what? The detectives did not rush in and arrest her. They wanted more. And didn’t want her to know she was a suspect. So they took a couple of weeks to rehearse their interrogation of her, then used a ruse. They asked her to come to an official interview room for a sit down, claiming they needed her art-theft expertise on a case. The real reason for the request was so she would (as all cops must) give up her gun before entering the interview room.
Once there the interrogation unfolded, getting more pointed as it went along. Lazarus did not realize she was a suspect until well along in the interview. She was never in custody, was always free to leave.
This interrogation, by the way, can be viewed on YouTube. Lazarus walked out of the interview room, stating she needed to talk to a lawyer.
Two search warrants were issued for Lazarus’ residence. The first warrant sought electronically and digitally stored material, documents, and records related to the homicide, including letters, diaries, journals, writings, newspaper articles, books, correspondence, greeting cards, photographs. The second warrant gave permission to search the “computers, storage media, computer hardware and digital evidence” seized pursuant to the first warrant, including “[email], internet browsing histories, cached information, partially deleted files, records, receipts, screen captures, photographs, logs, [and] printouts.”
Lazarus moved to suppress, based on stale info in the affidavits and overbreadth. The Court of Appeal, per Manella, J., affirmed.
The warrants were supported by probable cause and were not overbroad, based on the nature of the crime and the probabilities of finding evidence thereof. For good measure, the court held that the Good Faith exception would apply here, as a reasonably well-trained officer would not have occasion to distrust the magistrate’s finding of probable cause.