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State v. Macelman9/2/2003
The defendant, Cory MacElman, appeals his conviction in the Lebanon District Court (Cirone, J.) for possession of controlled drugs, RSA 318-B:2 (Supp. 2002). He argues that the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress based upon the exigent circumstances exception to the warrant requirement. We affirm.
The following facts were found by the trial court or are evident from the record. On October 4, 2001, at around 8:00 p.m., the Lebanon police department received an anonymous call reporting that "there was a vehicle behind [the defendant's] residence, potentially looking like he was about to go over the embankment" and fall onto Interstate Highway 89. After receiving this report from a dispatcher, Officer Steven St. Louis, along with an officer in training, drove to the defendant's residence to investigate. As they pulled into the driveway of the residence, Officer St. Louis saw the exterior brake or tail lights, and interior dome light, of a car parked in the back yard behind the house, close to a small fence that marked the boundary between the property and the embankment. The officer noted that somebody appeared to be inside the car. The officer's view, however, was obstructed by a tree in front of the car and by darkness.
The officers first tried to alert any residents inside the house by "knocking on the [side] door loudly" and yelling inside the open front door. After receiving no response, the officers approached the car in the backyard. Officer St. Louis testified that his motive was to "find out if there was anybody in the vehicle that needed some assistance, if they were . . . about to go over the embankment or not," and "[t]o make sure that [the car's occupants] were safe and didn't need any assistance." He testified that when he reached the back bumper of the car:
[A]ll at once I saw the vehicle wasn't in distress, it was still on the flat part of the yard, on the proper side of the fence; I could see that there was a dome light on in the car and that there were three people inside it.
I saw that there was - it was filled with a white smoke, um, and I saw the driver passing an item back to the passenger in the back seat who immediately put it up to his mouth and smoked it, and I could see that it then was a pipe commonly used for smoking marijuana.
At that point, based upon his observation that the occupants were "obviously . . . using something that was illegal," the officer approached the car and subsequently arrested the defendant, who was one of the car's occupants.
The State charged the defendant with possession of marijuana and underage possession of cigarettes. The defendant moved to suppress all evidence seized by the officer, arguing that the discovery of the drug evidence was the fruit of an illegal search of the defendant's property. The court, relying upon the "exigent circumstances exception" in State v. Theodosopoulos, 119 N.H. 573 (1979), denied the motion, finding that the officer's entry onto the property was warranted because the situation was "sufficiently urgent and potentially dangerous that he had reasonable grounds to believe that there was an emergency at hand." On appeal, the defendant argues that the totality of the circumstances did not justify the intrusion. "When reviewing a trial court's ruling on a motion to suppress, we accept the trial court's findings unless they lack support in the record or are clearly erroneous. Our review of the trial court's legal conclusions, however, is de novo." State v. Plch, 149 N.H. ___, ___ (decided June 30, 2003).
We first address the defendant's claim under the State Constitution. State v. Ball, 124 N.H. 226, 231 (1983). We have held that a warrantless search is p
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