The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the suppression of evidence seized from Michael Young’s hotel room at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco. Young was a guest in room 13575 at the Hilton. Hilton staff accidentally gave him the key to room 13572. The guest in room 13572 claimed that his room was burglarized. The staff of the hotel assumed that Young was the thief even though there was some question as to whether the theft occurred prior to Young getting the wrong key.

Hotel security searched Young’s room while he was out. None of the items allegedly stolen from Room 13572 were found. But they did find a gun. It was against hotel rules to have guns on the property but Young had not been told the rule. They temporarily locked the room and when Young returned late that night they called the police. Officer Koniaris was outside the building and he responded. He spent 20 to 30 minutes talking to Young. Young told Koniaris that Young had a state prison record. Koniaris handcuffed Young to a bench in the security office. He called his sergeant who told him that he could not search Young’s room without a search warrant. Instead of getting a search warrant he watched while hotel security searched the room and showed him the gun. He then seized the gun and arrested Young.

The search of the room and the seizure of the gun was clearly illegal. Like a house, a search warrant is absolutely necessary to search a hotel room. There was some question about the Hilton’s policy in evicting guests. But it was not the policy to evict people found with guns. The guns were to be kept in a secure place. While it may have been the policy to evict people who committed crimes at the hotel, there is no evidence that he was evicted and while he had been temporarily locked out of the room his property was still in the room. There seems to be little question that at the time of the search Young still had a legitimate expection of privacy in the room.

The remaining question is whether the gun would been seized despite Koniaris’ illegal seizure of the weapon. The dissent by Judge Ikuta argues that the inevitable discovery exception to the exclusionary rule applies. However the inevitable discovery exception does not apply when the evidence could only have been seized legally if a search warrant had been obtained and the police did not get the search warrant. The purpose of the exclusionary rule is to act as a disincentive to police overreaching and the police should not be able to benefit from the failure to comply with the Fourth Amendment’s search warrant requirement. Therefore the majority upheld the District Court’s suppression of the gun found in Young’s room.