D.N.M.: Warrant not required to enter curtilage to arrest defendant on his own porch

A search warrant is not required to arrest a suspect on his front porch, clearly curtilage. United States v. Soza, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 23352 (D.N.M. Feb. 24, 2016). The court agonizes and discusses all the possibilities for 60+ pages over how to decide this case:

Having thought long and hard about how to approach this problem, the Court is convinced that the right result is to deny Defendant’s motion to suppress and recognize a limited exception to the warrant requirement for front porch detentions. The Court believes this is the best reading of the case law for several reasons. First and most importantly, granting Defendant’s motion to suppress would contradict the Supreme Court ruling in Santana. While the Court is sensitive to the erosion of Santana’s underpinnings, Santana remains on-point, controlling authority that this Court is not free to ignore. When a Supreme Court decision “has direct application in a case,” the district court must follow the decision questionable as it may be, “leaving to th[e] [Supreme] Court the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.” Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S. 203, 237, 117 S. Ct. 1997, 138 L. Ed. 2d 391 (1997). In other words, [*60] even where a Supreme Court case — like Santana — “appears to rest on reasons rejected in some other line of decisions,” lower courts should not assume it has been implicitly overruled. Id.; see also Cressman v. Thompson, 719 F.3d 1139, 1156 (10th Cir. 2013) (“Circuit courts should be very careful to suggest the Supreme Court has implicitly reversed itself.”). Thus, the Court must take seriously Santana’s decision to uphold a warrantless front porch arrest. The only way the Court sees to do so is to recognize a narrow exception to the warrant requirement for front porch detentions.

Even aside from Santana, the Court believes there are good reasons to allow warrantless front porch detentions as a practical corollary to the “knock and talk” exception. Under the “knock and talk” exception, officers are permitted to enter a suspect’s porch to initiate a consensual encounter. Defendant concedes as much. However, he argues that officers should not be permitted to enter a porch to initiate a detention as part of an officer’s investigation, of a recently committed, nearby crime, that might exonerate the person on the porch. The Court is concerned that this distinction is not workable. Imagine a case where (1) an officer approaches an individual on a porch to ask if the individual knows anything about a nearby crime, (2) after the officer steps onto the porch, the officer sees that the individual is in possession of an item tying this individual to the crime, (3) because probable cause now exists and the officer is legally on the porch the officer forcibly arrests the suspect. From the point of view of the officer, he complied with all Fourth Amendment requirements. However, from the point of view of the suspect, the officer stepped onto the porch and immediately arrested him. In a case like this, there is a very fine line between constitutional conduct — entering the porch for a chat and then responding appropriately to new information — and purportedly unconstitutional conduct — entering the porch to arrest the suspect.

Moreover, it is not clear that there is an important Fourth Amendment interest at stake in preventing officers from arresting suspects who are standing on their front porches. When a suspect places himself in such an area, he is opening himself up to being accosted by possibly unwelcome members of the public (for example, a zealous girl scout looking to push cookie sales or an insistent cult member wanting to convert his neighbors). Although an arrest is certainly more intrusive than a request to talk, this added intrusion is slight given law enforcement interest in having clear, workable Fourth Amendment standards. Additionally, Fourth Amendment reasonable suspicion and probable cause requirements already shield people from unreasonable detentions. It is not obvious to the Court that added protections are necessary to protect property owners from investigatory front porch detentions. This is significant, because the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is always reasonableness. Florida v. Jimeno, 500 U.S. 248, 250, 111 S. Ct. 1801, 114 L. Ed. 2d 297 (1991). Defendant has not convinced the Court that the intrusion onto his front porch should be considered unreasonable under the circumstances presented. The Court will deny Defendant’s motion to suppress.