Smith's Criminal Case Compendium
Smith's Criminal Case Compendium
Table of Contents
Smith's Criminal Case Compendium
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This compendium includes significant criminal cases by the U.S. Supreme Court & N.C. appellate courts, Nov. 2008 – Present. Selected 4th Circuit cases also are included.
Jessica Smith prepared case summaries Nov. 2008-June 4, 2019; later summaries are prepared by other School staff.
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The defendant was convicted of four counts of first-degree murder and other charges and appealed. He argued the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress, his motion to dismiss, and in admitting certain evidence. The Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed.
The offenses occurred in 2005, although the defendant was not tried until 2017. As a part of the investigation into the homicides and other crimes, law enforcement obtained an order authorizing the use of a pen register to obtain 60 days of cell-site location information (“CSLI”) on a phone connected to the defendant in 2005. Law enforcement acted under G.S. 15A-262, requiring a showing only of “relevance” to an investigation, and did not obtain a search warrant. The defendant alleged this violated U.S. v. Carpenter, __U.S. __, 201 L. Ed. 2d 507 (2018). Rejecting this argument, the court first noted Carpenter’s scope: “Carpenter only established the government must obtain a warrant before it can access a phone company’s historical CSLI; it did not extend its holding to the issue of government acquisition of real-time or prospective CSLI.” Here, the State sought both types of data, and it was unclear which category of information was used to actually locate the defendant. Carpenter would only control as to the historical data (but did indeed apply to that category of data, despite having been decided 13 years after the events in question, since Carpenter was decided while this matter was on direct appeal).
Here, it was unnecessary to decide the extent of protections for real-time or prospective CSLI, given that the evidence was sufficiently attenuated from any illegality (an alternative ground found by the trial court to justify the search). “Evidence is admissible when the connection between unconstitutional police conduct and the evidence is remote or has been interrupted by some intervening circumstance, so that ‘the interest protected by the constitutional guarantee that has been violated would not be served by suppression of the evidence obtained.’”
The Supreme Court has identified three factors to aid in determining whether there was a sufficient intervening event to break the casual link between the government’s unlawful act and the discovery of evidence: (1) the ‘temporal proximity’ of the unconstitutional conduct and the discovery of evidence, (2) the ‘presence of intervening circumstances’, and (3) ‘particularly, the purpose and flagrancy of the official misconduct.’
Here, three days had passed between the court order authorizing the CSLI and law enforcement locating the defendant. That amount of time was not substantial and weighed in favor of suppression. However, the intervening circumstances here weighed heavily in favor of attenuation—the defendant was found with guns and ammo, threatened to shoot at officers when they attempted to apprehend him, and actually fired a gun at officers during the course of his arrest. “[T]his constituted an intervening circumstance sufficient to attenuate the connection between any unconstitutional police conduct and the discovery of evidence.” Finally, the purpose of the exclusionary rule would not be served by suppression here because the misconduct was “neither purposeful nor flagrant.” Officers acted according to the law and common understanding of pen registers in 2005 and no reasons existed at the time to believe those procedures were unconstitutional. The trial court did not therefore err in denying the motion to suppress.
In an assault on a law enforcement officer inflicting serious bodily injury case, the trial court did not err by denying the defendant’s motion to suppress evidence of his attack on the officer, alleged by the defendant to be proper resistance to an unlawful arrest. The court concluded: “Even if a police officer’s conduct violates a defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights, evidence of an attack on an officer is not fruit of a poisonous tree subject to suppression.” It elaborated:
“The doctrine of the fruit of the poisonous tree is a specific application of the exclusionary rule[,]” providing for the suppression of “all evidence obtained as a result of illegal police conduct.” However, this doctrine does not permit evidence of attacks on police officers to be excluded, even “where those attacks occur while the officers are engaging in conduct that violates a defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights.” Thus, where a defendant argues an initial stop or subsequent arrest violated “his Fourth Amendment rights, the evidence of his crimes against the officers would not be considered excludable ‘fruits’ pursuant to the doctrine.” (citations omitted).
Here, the defendant sought suppression of evidence of an attack on a police officer. The court concluded: “Defendant seeks the suppression of evidence of an attack on a police officer. Since evidence of an attack on a police officer cannot be suppressed as a fruit of the poisonous tree, the evidence Defendant sought to suppress cannot be suppressed as a matter of law.”
In an assault on an officer case, the court rejected the defendant’s argument that evidence of his two assaults on law enforcement officers should be excluded as fruits of the poisonous tree because his initial arrest for resisting an officer was unlawful. The doctrine does not exclude evidence of attacks on police officers where those attacks occur while the officers are engaging in conduct that violates a defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights; “[a]pplication of the exclusionary rule in such fashion would in effect give the victims of illegal searches a license to assault and murder the officers involved[.]” (quotation omitted). Thus the court held that even if the initial stop and arrest violated the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights, evidence of his subsequent assaults on officers were not “fruits” under the relevant doctrine.