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Haskins v. Municipality of Anchorage5/4/2001
No. 1738
On the evening of January 22, 1999, two Anchorage police officers were on their way home at the end of their shift when they heard their dispatcher report a hit-and-run. The two officers were close to the location of the accident, so they drove to the scene. When they arrived to investigate, witnesses told one of the officers that the suspect vehicle, a Chevrolet Suburban, had just pulled into a driveway.
The officers discovered that this was the driveway of Michael W. Haskins's house. When the two officers knocked on the door of the Haskins residence, they were met by his wife. One of the officers, James Triplett, had attended high school with Ms. Haskins. Triplett told her about the hit-and-run, and he asked her if she had been driving the Suburban. Ms. Haskins told Triplett that she had not been driving, but she indicated that her husband had just arrived home.
Triplett then asked if he and his fellow officer could talk to Haskins. Ms. Haskins told the officers to come into the entryway of their split-level home. She said that her husband was downstairs, and she started down the stairs. Triplett and his fellow officer followed her. The officers found Haskins in a downstairs bedroom. Based on Haskins's statements to the officers, based on Haskins's physical condition, and based also on the officers' observations of Haskins's vehicle, the officers arrested Haskins and charged him with driving while intoxicated.
Haskins asked the district court to suppress all of the Municipality's evidence stemming from the officers' entry into his home. Haskins conceded that his wife had invited the officers inside, but he claimed that the officers exceeded the scope of that consent by coming downstairs. District Court Judge James N. Wanamaker held an evidentiary hearing into this matter, and he ultimately denied the suppression motion. Haskins then entered a Cooksey plea , reserving the right to pursue the suppression issue on appeal.
When we conducted our initial review of this case, we realized that Judge Wanamaker had failed to resolve a material conflict in the testimony. As already explained, Haskins conceded that his wife gave the officers permission to enter the front door. The Municipality argued that Ms. Haskins then implicitly invited the officers to follow her downstairs - by turning around, proceeding down the stairs, and allowing the officers to follow her, knowing that they had come to interview her husband. But in her testimony, Ms. Haskins declared that she expressly told the officers to wait in the entryway while she went to get her husband.
Because we believed that proper resolution of the suppression motion might turn on this disputed factual issue, we directed Judge Wanamaker to make supplemental findings. See Criminal Rule 12(d).
In his supplemental findings, Judge Wanamaker found that Ms. Haskins invited the two officers to come through the door and into the entryway, out of the cold, but then she directed them to go upstairs while she went downstairs to fetch her husband. Judge Wanamaker concluded that, although the officers initially began to go upstairs, they then "reversed their course and came back down to the landing and [then] followed Mrs. Haskins into the basement."
Judge Wanamaker concluded that the two officers "realized [that they] were not invited into the basement", but they decided to go downstairs anyway so that they could keep an eye on Ms. Haskins (and ultimately, Haskins himself) as a safety precaution. The judge further found that the officers positioned themselves far enough behind Ms. Haskins that she was not aware that they were following her as she descended
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