Mr. Steele was driving a rented Jeep on a rural dead-end road. Steele was following an SUV whose owner had a felony arrest warrant. Steele pulled into a driveway behind the SUV. A police car pulled behind Steele with emergency lights on. The police were there to execute the arrest warrant. As the police approached the SUV, they first contacted Steele. Steele's car smelled of weed and one policeman saw weed in the backseat.
Eventually Steele's car was searched and found to contain bags of marijuana and methamphetamine. Steele moved to suppress the drugs as the fruit of an unlawful seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The trial court denied the motion, finding the encounter was not a detention, rather a consensual encounter. After his motion was denied, Steele pleaded guilty to possession of methamphetamine for sale and was sent to prison for six years. Steele appealed.
The Third District affirms, but disagrees with the trial court on the issue of whether the police detained Steele. The panel finds that Steele was detained, but that the detention was lawful, and because the police saw and smelled marijuana during a lawful detention, the resultant search was legal under the automobile exception to the warrant requirement.
The result is probably correct. However the analysis is irritating and likely to encourage trial courts to stray from a proper disciplined approach to Fourth Amendment questions and instead substitute the Delphic circumlocution used here.
The accepted and disciplined approach, endorsed by the United States Supreme Court and the California Supreme Court, is that warrantless seizures are per se illegal, unless one of the recognized exceptions to the warrant requirement apply. This means the first question is always, "was there a warrant?". If the answer is "yes", the question is whether the challenged search or seizure was pursuant to the warrant. If the answer is "no", the question is whether the search or seizure was justified by one of the recognized "warrant exceptions". This approach can be difficult, but by enumerating the categories of warrantless searches and seizures that pass Constitutional muster has the benefit of insuring that any new distinct and substantial extension of police power comes from the High Courts.
When a difficult case comes before a lower court, there is a temptation to eschew the proper "warrant-exception" analysis and replace it with the "balancing" analysis. The "balancing" analysis is quite easy and convenient and thus like most short-cuts, resists most extermination attempts. Under the balancing method, first you misstate that all that is required of you is to find the government action "reasonable". Second, you state that "reasonableness" only requires that the government's interests accomplished by the police action in question outweigh the resultant intrusion into the individual's liberty. Third, you describe the governmental interest using grandiose and flowery adjectives (such as "weighty" and "compelling")and use minimizing and genteel language to describe the effect on the individual (like "minimally intrusive" and "brief"). Then you declare the government the winner and go home. This approach was the favorite of the late egotist William Rehnquist, but thankfully never caught on. The individual never wins the game under these rules.
However the ease of this method still holds utility for justices confronted with a novel situation and unfortunately (as here) intermediate appellate courts are not immune to its charms. Steele attempts to get the panel to play by the rules arguing that there was no reasonable suspicion to detain Steele, reasonable suspicion being one of the exceptions to the warrant requirement. Presented with this challenge, the panel fearfully flees from the accepted rubric and cleaves to the "balancing approach", citing to a Colorado case before pronouncing the government the winner.
This is a shame because the panel could have gotten to their desired result using a proper analysis. And it actually cited the case that would have gotten it there, Michigan v. Summers. In Summers, the police had a search warrant to search a house. When arriving to execute the warrant, a man was exiting the house. The police detained him and had him wait inside the house while they searched the house. The U.S. Supreme Court held that the authority of a search warrant carries with it the authority to detain the occupants of the property while the search is conducted to make sure the execution of the warrant is done efficiently and safely. This places such detentions within the warrant, meaning there is no need to craft an additional "warrant exception" within the accepted framework. To the initial question of "was the seizure pursuant to the authority of a warrant?", the answer is "yes".
Because the owner of the lead car in this case had a felony arrest warrant, it is not an unreasonable conclusion that within the authority of that warrant existed the right to briefly detention those in the immediate area to make sure the arrest warrant is executed safely and efficiently. This places the detention within the warrant. This is not a new idea, plenty of cases have held that an arrest warrant carries with it the authority to briefly detain those nearby. Such an analysis is superior in that it results in a holding that is narrow and does not result in an intermediate state appellate court creating a new exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement.
The opinion as it stands, does nothing other than confuse lower courts as to the proper method of Fourth Amendment analysis and tempt them to substitute the unbounded and meretricious "balancing test". California's Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is the worse for the order to publish this opinion.
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