Three bail bond bounty hunters arrived at defendant’s house to take defendant’s brother into custody. Getting no response at the door, they called police for backup. Officers arrived and confirmed that they had a warrant for defendant’s brother and agreed that he might be living there, but they declined to participate other than to secure the perimeter if he fled. The bounty hunters kicked in the door and didn’t find him. They did, however, find drugs which they photographed and showed the police. The officers used that to obtain a search warrant and arrest defendant. The bounty hunters were private actors, and the police directed nothing. Whether the bounty hunters were acting within their rights isn’t even a material issue at this point. State v. Hedstrom, 2017 ND 156, 2017 N.D. LEXIS 160 (June 29, 2017):
[*P11] The district court found that the bounty hunters were not acting as government agents and accordingly concluded that they had conducted a private search that did not run afoul of the U.S. Constitution. It reached this conclusion by finding that (1) although law enforcement officers were present and acquiesced to the search, they did not direct the bounty hunters to search Hedstrom’s home; (2) the bounty hunters acted in their own interests rather than the officers’; and (3) the officers secured a perimeter for the purpose of ensuring safety.
[*P12] The parties argued at length over whether the bounty hunters had a legal right to enter Hedstrom’s home. Our decision does not depend on resolving that question. The officers believed the bounty hunters had legal authority to do what they did. The dispositive issue is whether any action by the officers converts the bounty hunters’ private search into a warrantless government search. Because resolving the issue of the bounty hunters’ authority would amount to an advisory opinion, we decline to address whether they had a legal right to enter Hedstrom’s home. Estate of Nohle, 2017 ND 100, ¶ 17, 893 N.W.2d 755.
[*P13] The district court’s denial of Hedstrom’s motion to suppress turned on its finding that the bounty hunters were not acting in response to government agents. The district court found that although the officers acquiesced to the search, they did not direct the bounty hunters to perform the search. Although an officer testified they secured the perimeter around Hedstrom’s home in hopes of catching the fugitive if he tried to escape, the officer also testified they secured the perimeter for safety purposes. The district court found the perimeter was established for safety purposes, not to assist or cooperate with the bounty hunters’ search. The testimony supported the district court’s findings that the officers did not ask the bounty hunters to enter the home and the bounty hunters did not act at the request of the officers. The officers arrived at the request of the bounty hunters and remained at a distance to protect against bodily injury if a confrontation developed. We are not left with a definite and firm conviction that a mistake was made in finding that the officers did not order, encourage, or otherwise participate in the bounty hunters’ search. The district court’s findings are supported by sufficient competent evidence in the record and are not contrary to the manifest weight of the evidence. The district court’s findings support its conclusion that the bounty hunters’ search was a private search, not a government search, and thus there was no Fourth Amendment violation.
by John Wesley Hall
Criminal Defense Lawyer and
Search and seizure law consultant
Little Rock, Arkansas
Contact: forhall @ aol.com / The Book www.johnwesleyhall.com
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced."
—Williams
v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold,
J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws,
or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp
v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that
bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the
police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater
than it is today."
— Terry
v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their
property."
—Entick
v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have
frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And
so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his
case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth
Amendment."
—United
States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated
here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth."
—Chapman
v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the
bottom of a turntable."
—Arizona
v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly
exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth
Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in
an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."
—Katz
v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to
protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born
to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men
of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
—United
States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted
intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by
government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose
it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.”
—United
States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want /
But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need."
—Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
"In Germany, they first came for the communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for
the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came
for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration
camp]
“You know, most men would get discouraged by
now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!”
---Pepé Le Pew
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers,
is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which
reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that
those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being
judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting
out crime."
—Johnson
v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)
