Opinion
Court of Appeals No. A-9339.
October 19, 2006.
Appeal from the District Court, First Judicial District, Craig, Kevin G. Miller, Judge. Trial Court No. 1CR-04-195 Cr.
Samuel A. McQuerry, Assistant Public Defender, Ketchikan, and Quinlan Steiner, Public Defender, Anchorage, for the Appellant.
Carolyn Perkins, Assistant District Attorney, and Stephen R. West, District Attorney, Ketchikan, and David W. Márquez, Attorney General, Juneau, for the Appellee.
Before: Coats, Chief Judge, and Mannheimer and Stewart, Judges.
MEMORANDUM OPINION
In this appeal, we are asked to decide whether a state trooper needed a search warrant to enter a bunkhouse that was temporarily occupied by only two people: the owner of the property and his friend, Mark A. Christopherson.
A state trooper traveled to the town of Naukati on Prince of Wales Island to serve legal papers on Christopherson. At that time, Christopherson was living in a bunkhouse as a guest of the owner, his friend Robert Prefontaine.
This bunkhouse was a long, one-story group residence containing eight individual sleeping rooms, a communal bathroom, and a communal laundry room, all connected by a central corridor. At each end of the central corridor, the bunkhouse had a main door for egress and ingress. Each individual sleeping room had a lock on its door, but the main doors at either end of the building remained unlocked (if the bunkhouse was occupied).
The trooper entered one of the main doors of the bunkhouse and walked down the corridor. One of the individual rooms — Christopherson's room — had its door open, and the trooper could see Christopherson standing inside the room with a drink in his hand. Christopherson told the trooper that it was a "mixed drink" — i.e., an alcoholic beverage.
The trooper knew that Christopherson was on bail release from a pending criminal charge, and that Christopherson's conditions of release required him to abstain from alcoholic beverages. The trooper therefore directed Christopherson to take a portable breath test, and the result was .144 percent blood alcohol.
Based on this evidence, Christopherson was charged with violating the conditions of his release. Christopherson asked the district court to suppress the evidence against him, arguing that the trooper needed a search warrant before entering the main door of the bunkhouse and walking down the corridor. The district court ruled that no warrant was required because the trooper had done no more than any member of the public would if they desired to make contact with a resident of the bunkhouse.
AS 11.56.757(a).
In this appeal, Christopherson renews his claim that the trooper needed a warrant to enter the main door and walk down the central corridor.
When the police wish to make contact with a person living in a residence, the police need no warrant if they confine themselves to the "normal means of ingress [that are] impliedly open to [members of the public] desiring to speak to [the] occupants". Pistro v. State, 590 P.2d 884, 887 (Alaska 1979). And, as we noted in Mathis v. State, "it is generally accepted that the unlocked common hallways of multi-unit buildings are open to [members of] the public" who wish to make contact with residents of the building.
778 P.2d 1161, 1165 (Alaska App. 1989).
Here, as explained above, the main doors at either end of the bunkhouse were left unlocked, and people could come and go down the central corridor. Residents of the bunkhouse had the option of locking the doors to their individual sleeping rooms if they wished privacy. It would therefore seem that, in the present case, the trooper needed no warrant to enter the main door at the end of the bunkhouse and to walk down the central corridor.
Christopherson points out, however, that the bunkhouse was not actually being used by any work crew when the trooper made his visit. Rather, only two people were living in the bunkhouse: the owner of the property (Robert Prefontaine) and Christopherson.
Based on the fact that only Prefontaine and Christopherson were living at the bunkhouse, Christopherson argues that the bunkhouse should no longer have been considered a multi-resident building. That is, even though members of the public might have freely entered the shared corridor of the bunkhouse when it was occupied by a work crew, Christopherson argues that the character of the building changed (for Fourth Amendment purposes) when no work crew was renting the facility and only two of the sleeping units were occupied. Christopherson contends that, given this change in the number of people living there, the bunkhouse should have been treated as a single residence with two occupants — and that the trooper therefore needed a warrant before entering the building through either of the main doors at the ends of the central corridor.
The question, however, is not how many people were currently occupying the bunkhouse. Rather, as explained in Pistro, the question is whether a reasonable person approaching the bunkhouse would have perceived the main doors at the ends of the corridor as a "normal means of ingress [that were] impliedly open to [members of the public] desiring to speak to [the] occupants".
District Court Judge Kevin G. Miller concluded that, under the circumstances, the trooper reasonably believed that the central corridor of the bunkhouse was impliedly open to members of the public who wished to make contact with the occupants of the bunkhouse. Christopherson has not convinced us that Judge Miller's conclusion was wrong, even though the work crews had left the bunkhouse and only two people were living there at the time.
Obviously, if Christopherson and Prefontaine had desired more privacy when the work crews left, they might have locked the main doors to the building, or they might have posted signs telling people not to enter the main doors of the building without permission, or they might have done something else to notify people that the character of the bunkhouse had changed.
But in the absence of these or similar efforts, members of the public — including the state trooper in this case — would be entitled to rely on the normal purpose and physical layout of the building when deciding what would constitute reasonable, non-intrusive efforts to make contact with the people residing there. Under the facts presented here, it would be reasonable and non-intrusive to enter through the main doors at the ends of the building and then walk down the central corridor to knock on the door of an individual resident's sleeping room.
Christopherson argues that, even though he and Prefontaine made no effort to secure the main doors after the work crews left, they believed that such an effort was unnecessary — that even without locks or signs prohibiting entry, their privacy was guaranteed by the fact that the bunkhouse was in a remote rural location, making it unlikely that they would receive visitors.
But again, Christopherson's argument hinges on subjective expectations of privacy that were not communicated to the general public by any outward change in the building or the surrounding property. It may well have been true that, once the work crews left, there was a much smaller chance that visitors would arrive seeking contact with any resident of the bunkhouse. But if one did arrive — such as the state trooper in this case — that visitor would be entitled to rely on the objectively manifested character of the premises when deciding whether it was proper to enter through the main door and walk down the central corridor to make contact with that resident.
We acknowledge that some courts have been wary of construing the rule for multi-unit residences so broadly as to validate the warrantless entry of boarding houses or rooming houses. See, e.g., State v. Titus, 707 So.2d 706 (Fla. 1998) (listing cases). In general, see Wayne R. LaFave, Search and Seizure: A Treatise on the Fourth Amendment (4th ed. 2004), § 2.3(b) — (c), Vol. 1, pp. 566-570 and 579-587.
But Christopherson has not asserted that the temporarily under-filled bunkhouse should be viewed as a boarding house or a rooming house within the meaning of those court decisions. Indeed, Christopherson has not cited the legal authority referred to in the preceding paragraph, nor has he argued that the reasoning of those cases should apply to the circumstances of his case.
For these reasons, we uphold the ruling of the district court that the trooper did not need a search warrant to enter the bunkhouse and walk down the central corridor.
The judgement of the district court is AFFIRMED.