Because the police had reasonable grounds to believe that a burglary might be in progress, but no probable cause to arrest Currie. Which is why he wasn’t arrested. He was detained, which only needs reasonable suspicion, which the police had based on the facts that the neighbor said she did not recognize him, and his ID indicated that he did not live there (despite what he claimed). The fact that he claimed to be a child of the homeowners but did not appear in any of the pictures on display added to the suspicion.
He was detained while they contacted the homeowners, since they could not otherwise verify his story and thus resolve the reasonable suspicion. Unfortunately Currie became obstreperous and assaultive, so they pepper sprayed him in order to subdue and cuff him.
IOW the police had legal justification for everything they did, from entering the residence to requiring identifying information from a suspicious stranger, and detaining him while investigating, and finally for pepper spraying him in order to subdue him while being detained.
I disagree here. And if even if I agreed, the reasoning is totally different in both cases.
Furthermore, and this seems to be a fundamental disagreement here, and what I was trying to get at with my hypothetical above involving clearly flawed warrants; I don’t think that it’s reasonable to look at a situation and say “well, side A made a big mistake which caused the situation in the first place, therefore we don’t even bother CONSIDERING whether side B made mistakes, because since A made mistakes first, B is the aggrieved victims period paragraph end of story”.
If cops are supposed to serve a warrant at 123 Elm street, and go to 125 Elm street instead, and the homeowners there see the cops knocking on the door, realize that they are cops, are crazy fringe extremist militia guys with stupid views about sovereign right to their land, and ambush and kill the cops with their large collection of firearms, they should clearly be tried for murder, even though the cops idiotically screwed up the warrant in the first place.
That is totally irrelevant. This is the Currie, we’re discussing the Currie incident.
Had he (Currie) cooperated he would have been informed. But that’s not the path he took is it?
With respect to Currie, **That’s exactly what they were trying to do.
**
How many times to people here have to explain this to you before you get it?
Well, you’re right to assign a heavy burden to the police actions. Warrantless entry into a home is presumptively unreasonable. The burden falls to the police to demonstrate that their actions fall within a recognized exception to the warrant requirement.
But… in cases that involve a reported burglary, the courts have generally found such an exception to exist.
We discussed US v. Langley above, in which the report came to the police of a suspected burglary because a rental truck was parked in the driveway. The police entered the home without a warrant.
In Carroll v. State of Maryland, 646 A.2d 376 (1994), officers observed a rear apartment screen door open and a pane of glass missing from the door’s window. The door itself was approximately two inches open. I mention this case because the opinion upholding the warrantless entry was remarkable in that it supplied a veritable parade of decisions from around the country holding similarly:
Your instinct on that hypothetical is good, I think. If Currie had come to the door and showed them that he was a resident, then probable cause would no longer exist.
But remember: probable cause exists when the facts and circumstances within the officer’s knowledge, and of which he has reasonably trustworthy information, alone are sufficient to warrant a person of reasonable caution to believe that an offense has been or is being committed.
This means all the facts and circumstances.
So if the police chose to approach the situation more non-confrontationally, a brief investigation (asking for ID at the door) would reveal additional facts, and the balance of known facts and circumstances would then shift away from believing an offense was being committed.
But while this is almost certainly true, it’s not something that the Fourth Amendment requires.
The police entry to investigate the reported burglary was, at the instant it happened, justified by a well-recognized exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. It’s true that additional investigation would most likely have dispelled that exception. But the Fourth Amendment does not mandate that extra investigation.
But the same evidence didn’t implicate Currie to the same degree. In other words, a burglary could be in progress AND Currie could be an innocent resident. As to Currie, the police had reasonable suspicion, justifying a brief investigative detention. As to the burglary itself, they had probable cause.
What **Bricker **said. Or what I said - “The evaluation of the two different actions are not the same. Conflating the two would be an error on your part.”
If your legal analysis requires either an all knowing being, the ability to read minds, or a time machine then I would suggest the analysis is not quite complete.
Okay, I went back to the report. According to Lane:
But then Taylor says
But then Stancil describes the whole incident without any questioning of Currie whatsoever.
So we have three different versions. According to Stancil, I’m right: he was never asked these questions. According to Lane, he was asked one of these questions. According to Taylor–the one whose report varies most markedly from the others and who sprayed Currie–he was essentially asked both these questions.
According to none of them did they say anything like, “We’re trying to figure out what’s going on,” or, “There’s been a report of a robbery, have you seen anyone suspicious in the house,” or anything else that would de-escalate.
I don’t believe Currie has denied that a neighbor reported him, that his ID did not match the address, that he did not appear in any of the pictures in the house, that the police detained him, or that he was pepper sprayed. Or that he became irate during the course of the investigation - his foster mother says he “snapped” when police questioned him as to whether he lived at the address. (She wasn’t there when it happened, but it is near-contemporaneous).
This corresponds to the testimony of all the police officers, both the officer who sprayed him as well as Lt. Gatham, who arrived very shortly after the spraying who reported that Currie was still profane and screaming.
So Currie’s statements don’t really contradict what the police and EMS people say, or what his mother says - it seems to be more outrage at “How dare they pepper spray me - I live here!” without mentioning that they didn’t pepper spray him until after he snapped.
Stancil wasn’t in the room when Currie lost it during questioning - he was upstairs securing the rooms when he heard Taylor spray him. Stancil did report Currie “shouting and acting aggressively” while being cuffed.
Stancil was there during all the questioning I quoted from the other cops–all those questions supposedly occurred before anyone went upstairs. Taylor does not describe any questions occurring after the others went upstairs; if Currie lost it during questioning, he lost it while everyone was downstairs.
The reason we make cops jump through certain hoops before entering a home and detaining someone is because the law understands such invasion is so provocative it can incite someone to act out in fear and defensiveness. So yes, it makes perfect sense that we focus on side A’s conduct to the exclusion of side B’s.
The only evidence that Currie acted violently comes from cops who have an incentive to lie and stretch the truth. You seem to accept with little question the wrongness of the GA grandfather’s killing. It makes sense to question the cops’ self-serving excuse for why that guy needed to be shot. But with Currie, you’re accepting his alleged “mistakes” as irrefutable just because the same cops who maced him are making that claim.
When you come up with analogies, it would help if you make the salient conditions equivalent to Currie’s situation. There was no warrant, no knock at the door, no heads up announcement that cops intended to enter his house before they crossed the threshold. He just looked up and saw them standing their like home invaders in uniform.
I’m curious. Did you actually read the Brown opinion you cited?
Here’s some quotes: “This and other circuits have held that an officer may lawfully enter a residence without a warrant under the exigent circumstances exception when the officer reasonably believes a burglary is in progress. United States v. Estese, 479 F.2d 1273, 1274 (6th Cir.1973) (holding warrantless search of residence was justified because there was probable cause to believe burglary was in progress); see also Johnson, 9 F.3d at 509 (noting that several other circuits “have upheld warrantless searches conducted during burglary investigations under the rubric of exigent circumstances”) (citing cases). When probable cause exists to believe a burglary is in progress, officers are presented with exigent circumstances justifying their warrantless entry into the residence “because `*t would defy reason to suppose that [the officers] had to secure a warrant before investigating, leaving the putative burglars free to complete their crime unmolested.'” Johnson, 9 F.3d at 510 (quoting United States v. Singer, 687 F.2d 1135, 1144 (8th Cir.1982)”
and
“the activation of an alarm in conjunction with additional information supporting the possibility of a break-in is sufficient to support police officers’ determination that an exigency exists. … Because it would be reasonable for an officer in Edmonds’s shoes to believe a burglary was in progress, exigent circumstances existed that justified the warrantless entry.”
So, you cite to a case that actually held the warrantless entry into a home based on an alarm and a slightly open door was legal for the proposition that the warrantless entry into a home based on a neighbor’s call and an open door was illegal.
Yeah–I should say that even stipulating Taylor’s version (which I find highly suspect, given the inconsistencies noted above), the officers behaved very poorly. I’m pretty suspicious about Taylor’s account especially.
When do the neighbor and the mom and “everyone else” say Currie threatened and assaulted the cops (“snapped” is not a synonym for “threatened and assaulted”)? And how would they know?