Got drugs in your car? Don't pass out in it while blocking traffic. Things won't end well.

Davis v. United States, No. 13-CM-817 (decided February 26, 2015)

Players:  Associate Judges Glickman and Thompson, Senior Judge Pryor.  Opinion by Judge Thompson.  Trial judge John McCabe. 

Facts:     Mr. Davis moved to suppress evidence found in his car by a police officer who had entered the car in order to move it after Mr. Davis had been removed from the car by emergency medical technicians.  The case began when the property manager of an apartment building flagged down the police, reporting that there were two unconscious people in a car  in the apartment building parking lot.  The car was running and was parked in the middle of the lot, blocking other cars.  The windows were rolled down and the officer saw a woman asleep in the front passenger seat and appellant, who appeared to be unconscious (open eyes, slumped over the steering wheel, and apparently not breathing) in the driver’s seat.  The police called for an ambulance.  When it arrived, the woman “woke up” and left the car and the EMT’s assisted appellant – who had started to come to – out of the car in order to attend to him.  The police officer testified that he then went into the running car both because he needed to find ID and because he needed to “secure” the car because it was blocking other vehicles.  While Mr. Davis testified to a different version of events at the hearing, the trial judge credited the police officer, specifically finding that he went into the car in order to move it out of an area where it was blocking traffic.  He then saw drugs in plain view. 

Issue:  Whether the police officer violated the Fourth Amendment by entering Mr. Davis’s car.  

Held:  Mr. Davis had a protected privacy interest in the car even though he had left it unattended when the EMTs escorted him to the ambulance.  The police officer’s warrantless entry, however, was justified by the community caretaking exception to the warrant requirement.  The trial court credited the police officer’s testimony that he got into the car to move it out of the way of traffic, not to search for drugs -- a factual finding supported by the record.  Therefore, the entry was “divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to the violation of a criminal statute,” Cady v. Dombrowski, 413 U.S. 433, 441 (1973), and justified under the community caretaking exception.  JF.

Read full opinion here.