The state trial court handed down its ruling in People v. Mangione, on whether to suppress part of all of the contents of the backpack Luigi Mangione was carrying at the time of his arrest in the state prosecution against him. In the federal case against Mangione, the federal court back in January denied the motion to suppress the contents of the backpack. But today the state court suppresses some of the contents for the state court prosecution (in particular, the magazine, cellphone, passport, wallet and computer chip) and allows the government to use other contents (in particular, the red notebook).
I found the new opinion a little odd. There’s a part I was expecting that wasn’t addressed. I thought I would explain what it is. [UPDATE: See below for what appears to be the explanation, rooted in New York state constitutional law.]
First, the opinion. The court begins by concluding that the relevant law is the federal Fourth Amendment and the New York Constitution, even though the actions were those of Pennsylvania police in Pennsylvania. So the heightened restrictions of New York law apply to the Pennsylvania officers, even though they presumably didn’t know (and maybe couldn’t know) they would be governed by New York state search and seizure law.
Second, the court concludes that New York search and seizure law settles what I have called the “moving property problem”: If someone has a backpack, and it is moved away from a person, New York law says it can’t be searched incident to arrest because the exigency is gone and the backpack is no longer in the area of the suspect’s control.
Third, the court turns to the search at the police station, where the items in the backpack were searched. This search was fine, the court says: although the search at the McDonalds can’t be allowed as an incident-to-arrest search, the search at the police station was valid as an inventory search. In particular, this allows admission of the notebook found in the backpack that wasn’t searched at the McDonalds.
Fourth, the court says that the warrant the government obtained later that today to search the backpack does not make the contents admissible under the independent source doctrine, as this wasn’t an independent source.
Beyond the part about New York law applying—a matter of the scope of New York law that I don’t have a view of myself—I’m puzzled as to why there’s no inevitable discovery argument based on the inventory search. That’s the main argument that the federal court rested on in denying the motion to suppress, based on the same facts: the police were going to inventory everything anyway and find everything anyway, so everything they found in the backpack was going to be discovered anyway in the inventory, regardless of whether they initially searched it lawfully or not.
As far as I can tell, the state court does not address this argument, although I would think it’s the key argument to address. Did the state not raise it? Or is there something about New York state law that makes that an improper argument? I don’t know, as I haven’t followed the case closely enough to say.
UPDATE: A New York lawyer writes in that it’s an issue of New York law, where the inevitable discovery exception is a lot narrower than it is under federal law. See People v. Stith, 69 NY2d 313, 318–19 (1987):
When the inevitable discovery rule is applied to secondary evidence, as in Payton, Fitzpatrick and Nix, the effect is not to excuse the unlawful police actions by admitting what was obtained as a direct result of the initial misconduct. It is not the tainted evidence that is admitted, but only what was found as a result of information or leads gleaned from that evidence. The rationale is that when the secondary evidence would have been found independently in any event, “the prosecution [should not be] put in a worse position simply because of some earlier police error or misconduct” (Nix v Williams, supra, at 443; emphasis in original). In contrast, when the inevitable discovery rule is applied to primary evidence, as was done here, the result is quite different. It is the tainted evidence itself and not the product of that evidence which is saved from exclusion. Permitting its admission in evidence effects what amounts to an after-the-fact purging of the initial wrongful conduct, and it can never be claimed that a lapse of time or the occurrence of intervening events has attenuated the connection between the evidence ultimately acquired and the initial misconduct. The illegal conduct and the seizure of the evidence are one and the same.
In the case before us, the suppression court and the Appellate Division, in holding that the illegally seized weapon should not be suppressed, hypothesized that the gun would inevitably have been discovered through a source that was independent of the initial taint. Viewing the situation at the moment of the illegal seizure, the courts below simply assumed the chain of events which would customarily have been set in motion following defendant Newton’s failure to produce a registration certificate: that a radio check would have revealed that the truck was stolen, defendants would have been arrested, the truck would have been impounded and the gun would have been found in an inventory search.
We hold that applying the inevitable discovery rule in these circumstances, and effecting what would amount to a post hoc rationalization of the initial wrong (see, Nix v Williams, supra, at 448), would be an unacceptable dilution of the exclusionary rule. It would defeat a primary purpose of that rule, deterrence of police misconduct (see, People v Bigelow, 66 N.Y.2d 417, 427, supra). 320*320As noted by the Oregon Court of Appeals in State v Crossen (21 Ore App 835, 838, 536 P2d 1263, 1264), in declining to apply the inevitable discovery rule to primary as distinguished from secondary evidence, failing to exclude wrongfully obtained primary evidence “would encourage unlawful searches in the hope that probable cause would be developed after the fact” (see, United States v Massey, 437 F Supp 843, 852-854; Stokes v State, 289 Md 155, 423 A2d 552; State v Williams, 285 NW2d 248, 256-257 [Iowa]; contra, Clough v State, 92 Nev 603, 555 P2d 840; for a discussion of the distinction between primary and secondary evidence, see, 3 LaFave, Search and Seizure § 11.4, at 620-628).
So here the decision to apply the limits of New York state constitutional law to the Pennsylvania search ends up being critical, not only because it answers the moving property issue but also because it limits inevitable discovery.
I have thought about writing an article on the extraterritorial application of state constitutional search and seizure rules, as it presents a fascinating issue. But it comes up so rarely that I couldn’t find much on it. This is a particularly interesting application of the issue.
The post The Missing Part of the State Court <i>Mangione</i> Suppression Ruling? appeared first on Reason.com.
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