Kentucky v. King

131 S.Ct. 1849 (2011)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

Police officers set up a controlled buy of crack cocaine outside an apartment complex. After the deal occurred, Officer Gibbons radioed uniformed officers to move in on the suspect. He told the officers that the suspect was moving quickly toward the breezeway of an apartment building, and he urged them to “hurry up and get there” before the suspect entered an apartment. The uniformed officers drove into the nearby parking lot, left their vehicles, and ran to the breezeway. Just as they entered the breezeway, they heard a door shut and detected a very strong odor of burnt marijuana. At the end of the breezeway, the officers saw two apartments, one on the left and one on the right, and they did not know which apartment the suspect had entered. Because they smelled marijuana smoke emanating from the apartment on the left, they approached the door of that apartment. The officers banged on the left apartment door “as loud as [they] could” and announced, “ ‘This is the police’ ” or “ ‘Police, police, police.’ ” As soon as [the officers] started banging on the door,” they “could hear people inside moving,” and “it sounded as [though] things were being moved inside the apartment.” These noises led the officers to believe that drug-related evidence was about to be destroyed. The officers announced that they “were going to make entry inside the apartment.” Officer Cobb then kicked in the door, the officers entered the apartment, and they found three people in the front room smoking marijuana. The officers performed a protective sweep of the apartment during which they saw marijuana and powder cocaine in plain view. In a subsequent search, they also discovered crack cocaine, cash, and drug paraphernalia. Police eventually entered the apartment on the right. Inside, they found the suspected drug dealer who was the initial target of their investigation. King (D) filed a motion to suppress the evidence from the warrantless search, but the Circuit Court denied the motion. The Circuit Court ruled that exigent circumstances justified the warrantless entry, the court held, because “there was no response at all to the knocking,” and because “Officer Cobb heard movement in the apartment which he reasonably concluded were persons in the act of destroying evidence, particularly narcotics because of the smell.” D entered a conditional guilty plea, reserving his right to appeal the denial of his suppression motion. The Kentucky Court of Appeals affirmed that the police did not impermissibly create the exigency because they did not deliberately evade the warrant requirement. The Supreme Court of Kentucky reversed. It announced a two-part test. First, the court held, police cannot “deliberately create the exigent circumstances with the bad faith intent to avoid the warrant requirement.” Second, even absent bad faith, the court concluded, police may not rely on exigent circumstances if “it was reasonably foreseeable that the investigative tactics employed by the police would create the exigent circumstances.” The court ruled that there was no bad faith, but it was reasonably foreseeable that the occupants would destroy evidence when the police knocked on the door and announced their presence. The Supreme Court granted certiorari.