On 2/13/2007 the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, handed down another decision regarding the "fruit of the poisonous tree." In this case the police officers went to a house to conduct a drug investigation and a "well-being check." Upon knocking at the front door a radio message was sent to the officers at the scene that someone was going out the back door. Upon arriving in the back yard an officer noticed the defendant leaning against the outside of the house with his hands in his pockets. After ordering the defendant to remove his hands from the pockets, the office requested that he be allowed to do a pat down search of the defendant. The defendant agreed and two knives were found upon his person. He was arrested and charged with unlawful use of a weapon. The trial court sustained the defendant's motion to suppress the evidence because the defendant was not in a public place when the police approached and there was no reasonably articulable reason for the stop; any information obtained a a result of the stop was illegally obtained and subject to suppression. The state appealed the ruling on the ground that the defendant did not live at the house and, therefore, did not have standing to object to the seizure. The appellate court did not agree with this argument. It stated that the Fourth Amendment applied to people, not places and that the defendant had an expectation of privacy. The court further stated that due to the circumstances of the stop, the defendant was "seized" by the officer and there was no reasonable, objective grounds for doing so.
The state also argued that the seizure was lawful because the defendant consented to the search. The appellate court did an analysis of the fruit from the poisonous tree to see whether the consent was sufficiently independent from the illegal stop to purge it of that taint. Because the consent was made immediately after the stop and there were no intervening circumstances between the two, the court found that the taint was not purged. It affirmed the trial court's suppression of the evidence.
Source: State v. Gabbert, WD66350, (Mo. App. W.D. 02/13/2007)
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