CA7: Entry with PC to maintain status quo was a “straight-forward application of Segura”

In a “straight-forward application of Segura,” the police could enter the defendant’s apartment with probable cause to freeze the situation to preserve evidence and then get a search warrant. United States v. Etchin, 614 F.3d 726 (7th Cir. 2010):

The fact that police behaved illegally does not mean that the remedy of excluding evidence is necessarily appropriate. Herring v. United States, 129 S. Ct. 695, 172 L. Ed. 2d 496 (2009). In this case, a straight-forward application of Segura leads us to two conclusions: first, Detective Reitzler’s four-hour occupation of Etchin’s apartment did not add anything to the violation of the Fourth Amendment that had already occurred with the entry; and second, the drugs later found were admissible.

1. The Seizure of Etchin’s Apartment. Segura holds that officers who enter and seize a home to preserve the status quo while waiting for a search warrant do not commit an independently sanctionable violation of the Fourth Amendment as long as they had probable cause at the moment of entry and the seizure is not unreasonably long. 468 U.S. at 798. The Court reasoned that “the home is sacred in Fourth Amendment terms not primarily because of the occupants’ possessory interests in the premises, but because of their privacy interests in the activities that take place within,” and so a police occupation (which infringes on possession) is permitted even when a search (which implicates privacy interests) would be unreasonable. Id. at 810. The second of the Court’s concerns–duration–is not at issue here, as the seizure here was shorter than the one upheld in Segura. We therefore focus exclusively on the question whether the probable cause criterion was satisfied.

Defendant contended that the entry into his apartment based on the alleged exigency of his missing girlfriend whom he had beaten nearly to death and stuffed in a storage barrel to die violated the Fourth Amendment. Considering the victim survived and testified against him in his kidnaping and interstate domestic violence trial, any possible error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. United States v. Larsen, 615 F.3d 780 (7th Cir. 2010).*