Posted on 06/21/2002 3:56:37 PM PDT by Wolfie
JUSTICES SAY RIGHTS VIOLATED, TOSS DRUG CONVICTION
Drug task force detectives violated the constitutional rights of a Decatur man convicted of manufacturing methamphetamine, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled Thursday in tossing out the conviction.
James Patrick Keenom's appeal of the 2001 conviction, for which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, contended that Benton County Circuit Judge Tom Keith should have granted Keenom's motion to suppress evidence obtained by the detectives.
Keenom said they violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure by authorities. The high court's 5-2 decision agreed.
Keenom was arrested the night of March 7, 2001, by two detectives working for the 19th Judicial District Drug Task Force. The arrest was prompted when detective David Jones observed Keenom shopping at the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Bentonville. Jones later testified that he thought Keenom looked suspicious because he had long hair and a beard and was pushing a shopping cart containing various chemicals that could be used to make methamphetamine.
Jones followed Keenom to his car in the parking lot, wrote down the car's license plate number and using this information learned Keenom's name and address. Jones contacted fellow detective Tony Noblin and they decided to go to Keenom's residence to perform a "knock and talk," to see if they could get consent from Keenom to search his home and thereby catch him in the act of making methamphetamine.
The two detectives were accompanied by Decatur police. Keenom met the officers outside his trailer before they could knock on the door. Jones asked for permission to search the trailer, and Keenom refused, suggesting they come back in 10 minutes. The officers said they couldn't do that and continued to question Keenom.
Keenom testified that it was cold and raining and he was wearing only a pair of jeans, but the officers refused to let him go back inside his house and threatened to confiscate all his belongings if he tried to go inside. After more questioning, Keenom acknowledged that he had a quarter gram of methamphetamine inside the trailer.
Jones testified that Noblin then advised Keenom of his Miranda rights because he had begun to implicate himself in criminal activity. Keenom denied he was advised of these rights. Responding to a question from Jones, Keenom said he had accepted payment from friends to allow them to make methamphetamine in his trailer.
By this time, after 20 to 45 minutes of questioning ( the accounts of prosecution witnesses differed on the length of questioning ), the detectives arrested Keenom for conspiracy to manufacture methamphetamine, and later denied that they ever took him into custody before that point.
Jones obtained a search warrant from a magistrate, who specified that the search warrant couldn't be served until daybreak the next morning. The search netted weapons, drug paraphernalia and lab materials, and Keenom was charged with manufacturing methamphetamine and possession of both drugs and firearms.
The Supreme Court in its Scott v. State decision this year set the standard for determining when a "knock and talk" becomes a seizure under the Fourth Amendment: "when a reasonable person would not feel free to leave."
The detectives' "persistence in the face of [Keenom's] efforts to terminate the encounter and his request that the officers leave, resulted in his being seized in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights," Justice Ray Thornton wrote in Thursday's ruling. "Such prolonged questioning, leading as it did to [Keenom's] unsuccessful attempts to return to the safety and solitude of his house, would surely lead a reasonable person to believe that he could not ignore the officers."
Justices Tom Glaze and Robert L. Brown issued separate dissenting opinions. Glaze wrote that he would have affirmed Keith's ruling not to suppress, because the evidence indicated that Keenom wasn't precluded from ending his conversation with police.
Brown wrote that the police conduct was "highly questionable" but reasonable under the Fourth Amendment because the search wasn't actually performed until after a search warrant had been obtained.
So now a person who has a beard loses his 4th Amendment rights?
Would he have been "suspicious" if he had "chemicals" but was clean-shaven?
There's still a Fourth Amendment? Wow! Learn something new everyday.
Right, sure you read him his Miranda rights...lying SOB. Cops don't have to Mirandize unless they are taking someone into custody. If they denied taking him into custody, why would they Mirandize?
One step forward, I'm sure tomorrow we take two steps back.
That's SOP for government. Has been for over a century. The fox is guarding the hen house. People continue to vote for the lesser of two evils expecting to get something other than evil? Cognitive dissonance big time.
But haven't you heard that the adults are in charge now?
And Bush is better than Gore and a real conservative can't get elected and...and...other stuff!
I don't care who's in office in any of the three branches. The standard operating procedure for 99% of them is two-steps-forward-one-step-backward. It's like raise taxes twice and to settle down the people they reduce taxes once. Then start the cycle over. That happens in congress and virtually every alphabet agency/bureaucracy.
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