DC: Feigning being a shooting victim made defendant’s clothes in ER reasonably subject to seizure

Defendants were convicted of a murder in D.C. When one defendant was in the hospital, he feigned that he was the shooting victim, and that made the seizure of his clothing in a red biohazard bag as reasonable and in plain view. They could thus be tested for DNA. Sheffield v. United States, 2015 D.C. App. LEXIS 92 (March 12, 2015). The court made this observation:

Courts most often decide Fourth Amendment questions by a traditional method of matching the facts of previously reported decisions with facts of the pending case. This is true whether the pending decision favors the defendant or the government. Such an approach, like a river course or electricity, is one of taking the path of least resistance. While case matching may be helpful in deciding reasonableness of police conduct, when we have so many published decisions going both ways on similar questions of reasonableness, it seems that judges often decide which ones to follow based on subjective, rather than objective, reasonableness. But we cannot avoid recognizing that reasonableness is the overarching and underlying principle for these decisions. In this opinion we do a fair amount of case matching, but on these unique facts (feigning victimhood, discovery of its falsity, plain view of the tell-tale pants, and convergence of inter-police department investigations) we find nothing unreasonable in the police reaction to any or all of what was done. In sum, the search and assumed seizure of Butler’s clothing did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights.