DC: Penile DNA swab 7 hours later was still exigent

Seven hour delay between alleged offense and officer obtaining a penile DNA swab did not show dissipation of the exigency. Time was still of the essence because of the evanescent nature of the evidence and its ability to disappear. Kaliku v. United States, 994 A.2d 765 (D.C. 2010):

We are convinced that the trial court properly denied the motion to suppress the penile swab evidence by applying the exigent circumstances doctrine to this case. In response to cross-examination questions, Officer Strong, who gave instructions to Mr. Kaliku and Mr. Matthews about how to obtain the penile swab samples, testified that he did not seek a court order or transport the appellants to a hospital where the sample could have been taken because “[e]vidence could have been wiped away … [or] contaminated … [or] rubbed away at any time.” Because of the delicate nature of the DNA evidence in this case and the area in which it was located, it could easily have disappeared. Therefore, there was an urgency to its collection which justified the officer’s reliance on exigent circumstances, rather than seeking a court order. Schmerber, supra, 384 U.S. at 770 (“The officer … might reasonably have believed that he was confronted with an emergency, in which the delay necessary to obtain a warrant, under the circumstances, threatened the destruction of evidence”) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted).

Officers did not violate the Fourth Amendment by seeing defendant through the open door and then entering. Oxner v. United States, 995 A.2d 205 (D.C. App. 2010)*:

These principles govern the present case. The police did not conduct an unreasonable search or seizure in contravention of the Fourth Amendment merely by knocking on the door of appellant’s apartment and looking in from the hallway after the door was opened. At that point, before they crossed the apartment threshold without a warrant or consent, the officers saw a man matching the detailed description of the seller standing inside the apartment from which, only minutes earlier, the seller had emerged with the drugs. That correspondence of description, time and location provided at least reasonable suspicion to justify an investigative detention of the man–appellant–for purposes of a show-up identification (as the trial judge concluded), if not probable cause to arrest him then and there. Appellant therefore was in legal custody when he was shown to Officers Washington and Turner, and their identifications of him were not excludable as the fruit of the warrantless and nonconsensual entry into his home, even if that intrusion was not supported by exigent circumstances.