OR: Assuming emergency entry for overdose in living room, entry into bedroom wasn’t justified

Officers were called to a house where an estate sale (sounded like a yard sale) was going on in the yard and the house because there were reports of a man overdosed in the living room and nobody else attending to the estate sale. They found the overdosed man with his needles and drugs. They heard the sound of a person snoring and they went to investigate. The bedroom door was ajar less than an inch and they couldn’t see in, but they went in and pulled the covers off the sleeping defendant (who didn’t live there). They saw drugs in plain view. The entry into the bedroom was unjustified by the emergency or its implied authority. State v. Danielson, 260 Ore. App. 601, 2014 Ore. App. LEXIS 92 (January 23, 2014):

… Assuming for argument’s sake that the police officers’ entrance into the home was permissible by implied consent or to render emergency aid, there is no support for the state’s argument that there was implied consent for the officers to enter the bedroom. The police officers left the areas of the home that had sale items and where the man was passed out on the couch and proceeded to the back of the home. The door to the bedroom in which defendant was sleeping was ajar only slightly—about half an inch—and the officers could not see defendant or the evidence they later seized. It was not until they opened the door and entered the bedroom that they found the evidence. At that point, their search was not made from a lawful vantage point. Although the police officers may have had the implied consent to approach the trailer home as “reasonably undertaken to contact” its resident, the entrance into the bedroom was not such an approach.

The implied consent exception is limited, and even if it was lawful for the officers to be in one part of the home (a determination we have not made here), that would not mean that they had implied permission to explore the rest of the trailer. Indeed, a bedroom with a door almost completely shut is more private than areas outside a home like a greenhouse or an offshoot of a driveway, the exploration of which we have held were trespasses. The intrusion into a closed bedroom without an invitation was not conduct that we would consider in keeping with “social or legal norms of behavior.” Accordingly, the police officers’ observations were a result of an unlawful search in violation of Article I, section 9, and, therefore, the trial court erred in denying defendant’s motion to suppress evidence.