AK: Officer sticking foot in the door to keep it from closing crosses the threshold and is a Fourth Amendment entry

Officers went to a house looking for a probation absconder who had apparently disconnected his GPS. When they knocked, defendant opened the door, and the officer stuck his foot in the door. Perceiving defendant to be fidgety and nervous, they asked about weapons, and he had a knife and gun [it’s Alaska for God’s sake; who doesn’t?]. Sticking a foot in the door to keep it from closing crosses the threshold and is a Fourth Amendment entry. Siedentop v. State, A-11085 (Alaska App. August 8, 2014):

The primary question in this appeal is whether the officer acted unlawfully when he stuck his foot across the threshold to prevent Siedentop from closing the front door of the residence. The answer to that question is yes.

In Payton v. New York, the United States Supreme Court declared that “physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the … Fourth Amendment is directed” — and that the Fourth Amendment “draw[s] a firm line at the entrance to the house”. Absent exigent circumstances, the police may not cross the threshold of a home without a warrant.

And in Steagald v. United States, the Supreme Court clarified the Payton rule by holding that, even when the police have an arrest warrant for a suspect, the police need a separate search warrant if they wish to enter the house of a third party to execute that arrest warrant.

Although there is no Alaska appellate decision on point, many federal and state courts have held that an officer’s act of placing a foot across the threshold of a home constitutes an entry for Fourth Amendment purposes.

The State does not dispute this rule. Nor does the State seek to defend the superior court’s ruling that the officer’s action was justified by safety concerns. Instead, the State suggests two other reasons why Siedentop should not be entitled to suppression of the evidence, even though the officers entered the house without permission. First, the State contends that the entry into the house was justified because the officers were attempting to serve an arrest warrant for Antonio Mendez. Alternatively, the State contends that even if the entry was not justified, the evidence against Siedentop was not the fruit of this unlawful entry. We address these two contentions in turn.