Appeals court upholds conviction after top court rules arrest illegal

Six months ago, a North Bay man who was pursued into his garage by police scored a rare defense victory in the U.S. Supreme Court, which limited officers’ authority to enter a suspect’s home without a warrant.

That meant the entry into Arthur Lange’s garage was illegal — but because the officer couldn’t have known that in advance, Lange’s drunken-driving conviction was valid, a state appeals court ruled Monday.

The decision by the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco was the latest in a long line of state and federal rulings to find exceptions to the “exclusionary rule,” which prohibits prosecutors from using evidence obtained in illegal searches. The U.S. Supreme Court established that rule in a 1961 case but the court, and lower courts, have substantially limited its impact since then, allowing evidence when police acted illegally but in “good faith” based on their reasonable understanding of the law.

Lange, a retired real estate agent, was driving home on Highway 12 in an unincorporated area of eastern Sonoma County one evening in October 2016 when a California Highway Patrol officer heard him honking his horn and decided to follow him. The officer did not turn on his light or siren, however, until Lange drove into a residential area, stopped in front of his home and pushed a button to open his garage door.

After Lange drove into his garage, the officer got out, put his foot under the door to keep it from closing and entered the garage, where he questioned Lange and smelled alcohol on his breath. Lange later pleaded no contest to misdemeanor drunken driving and was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

State courts upheld his conviction, but the Supreme Court took up Lange’s case and set new standards for the authority of officers to chase fleeing suspects into their homes. While police in “hot pursuit” of a felony suspect can enter a home without a judicial warrant, the court ruled 7-2 that when the suspected crime is only a misdemeanor, a relatively minor offense punishable by a county jail term, the pursuit must stop at the suspect’s door unless there is a true emergency.

When the case returned to the California courts, Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office did not claim that there had been an emergency justifying the entry, but argued that the conviction should stand because the CHP officer had reasonably believed he was acting legally, based on past cases allowing the pursuit of misdemeanor suspects into their homes. The appeals court agreed.

The goal of the exclusionary rule — to discourage illegal searches — is not served by prohibiting evidence obtained by an officer who acted in “objective good faith,” Justice Teri Jackson wrote in the 3-0 ruling. Until the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Lange’s case, she wrote, police could reasonably rely on decisions like one in 1989 from another California appeals court that said a suspect who is being sought for misconduct in public cannot avoid arrest or search “by fleeing to a private place.”

Quoting the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2011 case, Jackson said, “A police officer who acts in compliance with binding judicial precedent is not culpable in any way.”

Lange’s lawyer, Peter Goodman, said he would appeal.

“For the last five plus years, Mr. Lange has fought to protect his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures of his home,” Goodman said. “The attorney general’s attempt to deny him the fruits of his victory in the United States Supreme Court will be fought with the same sense of purpose.”