ID: Where hotel room occupant consented to search, no apparent authority shown for backpack that belonged to another in the room

Officers came to a motel room to arrest a person named in an arrest warrant they suspected was inside. After 30 minutes of surveillance, they went to the door and a lady answered and said she’d rented the room. Inside asleep in the back bedroom was the person wanted. Another person was there, too. The lady’s consent to enter the room to arrest and then search the room did not include searching a backpack belonging to another. No apparent authority shown. State v. Westlake, 2015 Ida. App. LEXIS 44 (May 28, 2015):

Here, the detectives’ belief that Gallagher had authority to permit a search of the motel suite was undoubtedly reasonable because she is the person who answered their knock and, when asked, she said it was her room. The circumstances gave the officers no reason to doubt Gallagher’s responses. The issue presented, however, is not Gallagher’s apparent authority to consent to a search of the motel suite but her apparent authority to consent to a search of one particular container in the suite. Like homes, personal effects are expressly protected from unreasonable search and seizure by the Fourth Amendment, and an individual’s expectation of privacy in an effect is not automatically forfeited whenever that item is temporarily located within an area over which a third party has authority. …

When determining whether the person with apparent authority to consent to a search of an area also has apparent authority over a specific container in that area, the nature of the container is significant. In most cases, an officer would hardly be expected to pause before searching a trash bin or a kitchen canister in a home where a resident has granted permission to search, for these containers are not places where one individual’s personal and private effects are usually kept to the exclusion of others. But, as stressed in United States v. Block, 590 F.2d 535, 541 (4th Cir. 1978), certain containers such as “valises, suitcases, footlockers, strong boxes, etc. … are frequently the objects of [one’s] highest privacy expectations,” and these “expectations may well be at their most intense when such effects are deposited temporarily … in places under the general control of another.” Other examples of these types of private containers (backpacks, purses, luggage, duffel bags, wallets) are addressed in the cases cited above. Here, the district court correctly reasoned that the nature of the searched item, a backpack, was significant because it is a type of container commonly used as a private repository for personal items.