Defendant came to the Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) in downtown Minneapolis having been shot in the leg. He refused to let them remove his pants to treat the wound. A hospital protection officer was holding him down, and he figured out defendant was armed and told the others. A sheriff’s deputy came over and participated and frisked him for the gun. Even if the public hospital’s staff were governed by the Fourth Amendment, the search was reasonable under the circumstances here. Defendant showed at the ER and became agitated and threatened to leave which might have killed him. Finally, the exclusionary rule should not be applied here. United States v. Conley, 2023 U.S. App. LEXIS 13932 (8th Cir. June 6, 2023):
Applying this balancing test here, we conclude that the HCMC protection officers’ seizure of Conley in the stabilization room was objectively reasonable under the circumstances. We start with “the government’s interest in the officers’ actions.” Harris, 747 F.3d at 1018. A noninvestigatory seizure can be justified by an officer’s reasonable belief “that an emergency exists requiring the officer’s attention.” Graham, 5 F.4th at 885; cf. Caniglia v. Strom, 141 S. Ct. 1596, 1599 (2021) (reiterating that warrantless intrusions onto private property are reasonable if there is a “need to render emergency assistance to an injured occupant or to protect an occupant from imminent injury” (cleaned up)). Here, the government underscores that the protection officers seized Conley “to allow medical staff to safely and effectively evaluate his gunshot wound and potentially render life-saving medical treatment.” And the district court’s factual findings establish that the officers were confronted with what appeared to be a medical emergency requiring an immediate response: Conley had a fresh gunshot wound in his thigh; medical staff worried that Conley was suffering from internal bleeding that needed immediate attention; and Conley’s refusal to remove his clothes prevented medical staff from providing potentially life-saving treatment.
Additionally, once Conley became agitated on the gurney, the protection officers had a strong interest in ensuring the safety of the medical staff trying to treat him. See Graham, 5 F.4th at 885 (“[W]hen officers act in a noninvestigatory capacity, they may briefly detain an individual to ensure her safety and that of the officers or the public ….”). Indeed, the need to preserve a safe environment is particularly acute in a hospital emergency room, where medical professionals are expected to make quick decisions while treating patients who present with urgent medical needs. And Conley’s conduct forced the protection officers to “make a split-second decision in the face of an emergency”—namely, “to either stand idly by, permitting a dangerous situation to continue uninterrupted, or act, addressing the potential danger” in order to protect medical staff. Harris, 747 F.3d at 1017. When faced with such circumstances, “we have reasoned that officers are expected to act.” Id. at 1017–18.
Weighed against these interests is Conley’s “right to be free from government intrusion.” Id. at 1018. But Conley voluntarily brought himself to HCMC’s emergency room to seek treatment for a gunshot wound that medical staff considered potentially life-threatening. Given those circumstances, Conley should have reasonably expected the sort of intrusions that are inherent to the provision of emergency medical care, including the removal of one’s clothes to facilitate treatment and—if compelled by the need to maintain a safe environment—even temporary physical restraint. Cf. Buckley, 9 F.4th at 762–63 (concluding that “[i]t was not objectively unreasonable” for HCMC paramedics to sedate a patient “who needed medical intervention” and whom the paramedics perceived to be “dangerously agitated”). To the extent Conley’s reluctance to receive medical treatment factors into our reasonableness analysis, it arguably would have been unreasonable for HCMC staff to have allowed Conley to leave the emergency room without first taking steps to at least stabilize him. See id. at 762 (“[Paramedics would face a kind of Catch-22[:] treat the [patient] or don’t treat him, but face a lawsuit either way.” (cleaned up) (quoting Thompson v. Cope, 900 F.3d 414, 423 (7th Cir. 2018)).
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)