{"id":4811,"date":"2011-01-11T18:44:39","date_gmt":"2010-10-25T00:15:16","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-10-23T12:46:57","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=4811","title":{"rendered":"TX: Officers serving a SW are not precluded from investigating further when they think they found stolen property, limiting 1987 case"},"content":{"rendered":"

Officers on the premises with a search warrant who see things that they determine before they leave are criminal evidence are legally able to seize that evidence. Any further investigation into the nature of those items did not entail an additional and unjustified search of, or unduly prolonged police presence on, the premises, for the seizure of those items, and it was permissible under the Fourth Amendment. White v. State<\/a>, 729 S.W.2d 737 (Tex. Crim. App. 1987) is disapproved. State v. Dobbs<\/a>, 323 S.W.3d 184 (Tex. Crim. App. 2010), revg State v. Dobbs, 2009 Tex. App. LEXIS 1857 (Tex. App.–Dallas March 18, 2009) (unpublished):<\/p>\n

The further investigation that the officers undertook in this cause did not involve any search of the premises that was not already authorized by the search warrant. So the appellee\u2019s privacy interest was not compromised. Nor were the golf clubs and shirts actually seized until after the officers, still legitimately on the premises, developed probable cause to believe they were stolen, by conducting further investigation that did not involve an unjustifiedly incremental search of the actual premises. So the appellee\u2019s possessory interest was compromised–but legitimately so, even without an additional warrant. It does not serve the interests of the Fourth Amendment to construe the \u201cimmediately apparent\u201d aspect of the plain-view doctrine to prohibit this kind of further investigation because it does not impact either the privacy or the possessory rights of the defendant beyond the encroachment already legitimized by the warrant.<\/p>\n

To appreciate the sensibleness of this understanding of the plain-view doctrine, suppose the facts were slightly altered. Suppose that at the instant the officers executing the search warrant had originally come across the golf clubs and shirts, they had thought nothing of it and conducted no further investigation of those items. Then suppose an officer in the burglary division had called one of the searching officers to inform him to be on the lookout for stolen golf clubs and shirts on the premises, describing them with particularity, because of probable cause the burglary division had just developed, independently of the officers executing the warrant, to believe these items were stolen. What was not \u201cimmediately\u201d apparent to the searching officers would now be readily apparent, while the officers are still on the premises and legitimately conducting their search. They would now have probable cause to seize the stolen items. Under these circumstances, it makes no more sense to require an additional warrant to justify seizing the items than it would to require a warrant to seize apparent contraband that is found in a public place. Moreover, it should make no difference that the searching officers generated their own probable cause while still on the premises, so long as their investigation did not entail any greater intrusion on the premises (from which the defendant’s privacy interest, after all, derives) than the intrusion already legitimately underway.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4811\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}