S.D.Tex.: Officers’ encounter with def two hours after a shooting wasn’t exigency for home entry

The government failed to prove any exigency for the entry into defendant’s house. He was encountered outside two hours after a shooting, and it was apparent nobody was in any need of assistance, including him. United States v. Curtis, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 178963 (S.D. Tex. Sept. 29, 2020):

With that understanding, numerous facts undermine support for urgency or immediacy here. For instance, the encounter began when Curtis rode up to his own home on a bicycle. This was at a point in time nearly two hours since the reported shooting. And that shooting hadn’t occurred in or near Curtis’s home, but rather, at a location several miles away. Curtis had already bandaged his wounds, albeit improperly. The wound to his arm wasn’t actively bleeding, and the wound to his cheek appeared to be a graze only. Curtis easily remained upright, able to express his intentions and walk about under his own power. He was in fact in the officers’ presence upon arrival until entry into his home for nearly three minutes.

It is also apparent that no medical aid was rendered or requested outside the home. And so to the extent the professed concern was Curtis’s need for medical attention, a countervailing line of authority establishes a general liberty interest to refuse such treatment. See Sama v Hannigan, 669 F3d 585, 591 n 13 (5th Cir 2012) (collecting cases and considering in Eighth Amendment context); see also United States v Husband, 226 F3d 626, 632 (7th Cir 2000) (considering same in Fourth Amendment context). This requires a balancing of Curtis’s liberty interests in this regard against relevant state interests. Sama, 669 F3d at 591.

For his part, Curtis rejected medical attention at several points outside his home, most notably when he twice walked away from the ambulance despite offers of help from HFD and EMT personnel. He had a right to refuse such medical attention. But it created no circumstance permitting an emergency intrusion into his home to render the aid that had been rejected and not rendered to him outside his home. As for interests of the state, this assertion concerning the need for emergency aid is unrelated to control of the situation at the home or the gathering of evidence of a crime. Compare Husband, 226 F3d at 631-33 (regarding forcible extraction of evidence from a suspect’s mouth). The officers simply wanted to provide medical care. This is admirable, but it doesn’t present a situation where Curtis was alone or dependent upon the officers and other government personnel as his only source of aid. His sister, his cousin, and a friend were present and expressed concern on his behalf. His cousin even offered to take him to the hospital. And that offer was made after Curtis replied, “Yeah,” when Officer D’Avila directly asked him, “You want your people to come take you?” The presence of family and their willingness to assist Curtis, together with Curtis’s own preference for them to take him to the hospital, lessened any need for the officers to render immediate aid. Curtis’s general liberty interest to refuse medical treatment is thus paramount here.

The totality of circumstances answering this question must also include what occurred once everyone actually entered Curtis’s home. If his injuries were objectively believed to be severe, one would think that aid would have been rendered immediately to him inside the house. It wasn’t. To the contrary, even after the officers searched and then handcuffed Curtis, they neither had an EMT administer care to him in his living room,