Los Angeles Police Department Detective Todd Hankel was surveilling a suspected stash house in Pacoima, California. ¹ He observed a man later identified as Jesus Antonio Ramos Cervantes approach in a truck. Cervantes got out of the truck, went into the residence and came out carrying a large white box. LAPD officers followed him to a house on Polk Street using a indirect route. He left the residence with another man in a BMW. They returned and Cervantes left the house in the truck. Hankel asked two officers to find a legal way to stop and arrest Cervantes. Cervantes did not have a driver’s license so the officers searched his vehicle and arrested him.

After Cervantes was arrested his attorney made a motion to suppress the evidence found in the vehicle. The prosecution argued that under the automobile exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement there was probable cause to believe that evidence of criminal activity would be found in the automobile and that under the community caretaker exception the search was a valid inventory search.

The District Court accepted the prosecution’s arguement but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected it and reversed the conviction. Under the automobile exception to the Warrant requirement police officers may search the interior of a vehicle if they have probable cause to believe that evidence of a criminal act will be found therein. The Circuit Count found that the only evidence of criminal activity involving the vehicle is that a box was removed from the residence and that Cervantes did not take a straight route to the Polk Street residence. The court held that probable cause did not exist. While Hankel assumed that the box removed from the alleged stash house contained contrabrand, he provided no facts supporting his allegation that the residence was a stash house or that the box contained contraband. The failure to take a straight route to the Polk Street residence could be caused by many thing. In fact Cervantes stopped at a liquor store and made a purchase. Considering all of the evidence the appellate court could not say that there was probable cause to search the vehicle.

As to the community caretaker exception there was no evidence that the car was impeding traafic or that it was threatening public safety or convenience. Therefore the inventory search was improper and evidence found in the vehicle must be suppressed.

Lawrence Ray was going through a difficult divorce. He had custody of his daughter. His wife arrived at his house to pick up their daughter for visitation. She could see a man inside the house but no one answered the door when she knocked on the door. She called the police. They arrived but the man still did not answer the door. The officers called the local judge who wrongly issued an arrest warrant and told the officers that they could enter the house. They forced the door open. Mr. Ray’s father was the only one in the house. He said his son and granddaughter would be home soon. Lawrence Ray made contact with the cops and promised to deliver his daughter to the police station for the visitation.

Ray sued the police and the township for violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. The defendants were granted summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the District Court’s decision. Qualified Immunity is granted when a plaintiff’s constitutional rights are violated by law enforcement officers and it was clear at the time of the violation that the rights were violated.

The defendants argued that their entry into the residence and search of the house was justified by an exception to the warrant requirement. They claimed that the community caretaking exception justified their actions. The community caretaking exception was developed by the Supreme Court in Cady v. Dombrowski. In Cady, a 1972 case, the Supreme Court allowed the search of a vehicle for weapons after police officers left the vehicle on the street following the arresting its driver. The search was not carried out as part of a criminal investigation but rather to prevent someone from finding the gun and injuring someone else. But the Supreme Court only applied the community caretaking exception to automobiles. It pointed out that automobiles are highly regulated. To the contrary residences are at the very core of Fourth Amendment protection and the the Third Circuit like most other circuits refused to apply the community caretaking exception to residences.

But the Third Circuit upheld the grant of qualified immunity to the defendants since their is a split among the circuits over whether to apply the community caretaking exception to residences and at the time of the search of Ray’s home the Third Circuit had not ruled on whether the community caretaking exception applied to residences. Therefore a reasonable police officer, at the time of the search could have believed that the search was legal.