N.D.Ind.: The smaller the place, the more likely the whole place can be swept under Buie

“Immediately adjoining” area for a protective sweep under Buie permitted sweep of kitchen when defendant was arrested in the adjoining room and even though the officers had no individualized suspicion that somebody else was present. The smaller the place, the more likely the whole place can be swept. Also, defendant asked the officer to get pants for him to wear to jail, and that sent the officer through the kitchen. United States v. Brookshire, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1140 (N.D. Ind. January 8, 2009):

Because the Defendant focuses on the second type of Buie sweep, he does not specifically address the area that he considers the place of his arrest or dispute that the kitchen was immediately adjoining the hallway in which he asked a deputy to go to get his pants. The D.C. Circuit rejected a defendant’s narrow construction of his place of arrest and corresponding adjoining spaces and held that “[i]f an apartment is small enough that all of it immediately adjoins the place of arrest and all of it constitutes a space or spaces from which an attack could be immediately launched, … then the entire apartment is subject to a limited sweep of places where a person may be found.” United States v. Thomas, 429 F.3d 282, 287-88 (D.C. Cir. 2005) (brackets, quotations marks, and citations omitted) (upholding search of bedroom that was a straight shot down the hallway even though it was fifteen feet away from the area of apprehension); see also United States v. Lauter, 57 F.3d 212 (2d Cir. 1995) (upholding precautionary sweep of second room of a two-room apartment, which was immediately adjacent to room where the defendant was arrested); United States v. Ford, 56 F.3d 265, 270 (D.C. Cir. 1995) (finding that a bedroom immediately adjoining a hallway in which the defendant was arrested was within the scope of a precautionary Buie sweep). Although the Seventh Circuit has not directly addressed the meaning of “immediately adjoining” in the context of the confined quarters of a small house or apartment, in dicta it characterized Buie as allowing police to “walk through rooms adjacent to the one in which they make an arrest, to ensure that no danger lurks within,” and that the “officers need not demonstrate any danger; they may simply look as a precaution.” United States v. Brown, 64 F.3d 1083, 1086 (7th Cir. 1995) (using the Buie scenario as an example of the kind of intrusion that is justified by a lower degree of suspicion).