Kentucky v. King

Kentucky v. King
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued January 12, 2011 Decided May 16, 2011
Full case name	Kentucky v. King
Docket no.	09-1272
Citations	563 U.S. 452 (more) 131 S. Ct. 1849
Case history
Prior	defendant convicted (Fayette Co. Cir. Ct.); affirmed, unpublished (Ky. App.); reversed, 302 S.W.3d 649 (Kentucky, 2010).
Holding
Warrantless searches conducted in exigent circumstances do not violate the Fourth Amendment so long as the police did not create the exigency by violating or threatening to violate the Fourth amendment.
Court membership
Chief Justice John Roberts Associate Justices Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy Clarence Thomas · Ruth Bader Ginsburg Stephen Breyer · Samuel Alito Sonia Sotomayor · Elena Kagan
Case opinions
Majority	Alito, joined by Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan
Dissent	Ginsburg
Laws applied
Fourth Amendment

Kentucky v. King, 563 U.S. 452 (2011), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court which held that warrantless searches conducted in police-created exigent circumstances do not violate the Fourth Amendment so long as the police did not create the exigency by violating or threatening to violate the Fourth Amendment.

Background

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution requires searches and seizures be reasonable. The Court has held a search or seizure without a warrant presumptively unreasonable. However, there are many exceptions to the warrant requirement, including exigent circumstances, search incident to arrest, consent search, plain view, automobile exception, and border search exception.

Kentucky v. King involves the exigent circumstances exception to the warrant requirement. The Court has identified three exigent circumstances: emergency aid, hot pursuit, and destruction of evidence. The"emergency aid” exception allows officers to enter a home without a warrant to provide assistance to an occupant who is injured or under imminent threat of injury. The “hot pursuit” exception allows officers to pursue a fleeing suspect onto protected property without a warrant. The "destruction of evidence" exception permits warrantless entry when officers reasonably believe the occupants are destroying evidence of a crime.

Before Kentucky v. King was decided, lower courts had developed the “police-created exigency” doctrine, which stated that police may not create exigent circumstances to justify a warrantless search. The Supreme Court confronted the “police-created exigency” doctrine in Kentucky v. King.

Facts of the Case

Police officers in Lexington, Kentucky, set up a drug buy outside of an apartment complex using an undercover informant. After the suspect sold the informant crack cocaine, Officer Gibson, who was watching the transaction from a nearby patrol vehicle, called in backup officers to pursue the suspect. After getting out of their vehicles, the officers pursued the suspect into a breezeway but lost sight of him. They heard a door close but, when they got to the end of the breezeway, they encountered two door and did not know whether the suspect entered the apartment on the right or the left. Officer Gibson did see the suspect enter the door on the right, but the other officers did not hear his radio transmission because it went to their vehicle.

While the officers did not know which apartment the suspect was in, they could smell burning marijuana coming from inside the apartment on the left. The officers began banging on the door “as loud as [they] could” and announced, “‘This is the police’” or “‘Police, police, police,’” after which they heard movements which they believed indicated evidence was going to be destroyed. They forcibly knocked down the door and found Hollis King, the defendant, and others inside smoking marijuana. Upon a further search of the home, they found cash, drugs, and paraphernalia.

King entered a conditional guilty plea, reserving his right to appeal denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained from what he argued was an illegal search.The Kentucky Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction, holding that exigent circumstances supporting the warrantless search were not of the police's making and that police did not engage in deliberate and intentional conduct to evade the warrant requirement. In January 2010, the Kentucky Supreme Court reversed the lower court order, finding that the entry was improper. The court held that the police were not in pursuit of a fleeing suspect when they entered the apartment since there was no evidence that the original suspect even knew that he was being followed by police.

Issue

Whether the exigent circumstances rule, which allows police officers to conduct a warrantless search, applies where the police create the exigent circumstance without violating or threatening to violate the Fourth Amendment.

Opinion of the Court

Justice Alito delivered the opinion of the Court, holding that the exigent circumstances rule applies and that the officers therefore did not violate the Fourth Amendment. He explained that the police officers actions before they entered the apartment--knocking and announcing their presence--were lawful. Since the officers' actions that created the exigency did not violate the Fourth Amendment or threaten to do so, their subsequent entry was permitted by their reasonable belief that evidence was being destroyed inside the apartment.

The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the lower court order.

Justice Ginsburg Dissent

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ginsburg contends that the majority allows police to “dishonor the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement in drug cases.”. She criticizes this holding as exceeding the emergency exception to prevent the destruction of evidence.

See also

• Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757 (1966) (5-4): “Destruction of evidence” exception to the warrant requirement allows police to draw blood from a DUI suspect without a warrant because the officer reasonably believes the blood alcohol percentage will diminish in evidentiary value in the time it will take to secure a warrant.
• Brigham City v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398 (2006) (9-0): “Emergency aid” exception to the warrant requirement allows police to make a warrantless entry into a home when they have “an objectively reasonable basis for believing that an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with such injury.”
• Illinois v. McArthur, 531 U.S. 326 (2001) (8-1): “Destruction of evidence” exception allows police to briefly seize defendant by ordering him to stay outside of his home to prevent him from destroying evidence while police obtained a search warrant for the home.
• Payton v. New York
• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 563

Further reading

• Bradley, Craig (2011). "Kentucky v. King: The Scope of the Exigent Circumstances Exception". Indiana Legal Studies Research Paper No. 183. SSRN 1758709.
• Doyle, Charles (2011). "Warrantless, Police-Triggered Exigent Searches: Kentucky v. King in the Supreme Court" (PDF). CRS Report for Congress No. R41871.
• Levick, Rachel (2012). "'Knock, Listen, Then Break The Door Down'? The Police-Created Exigency Doctrine After Kentucky v. King" (PDF). University of Pennsylvania Law Review. 161 (1): 1–19.
• O'Connor, Martin L. (2011). "Kentucky v. King: The Police Do not Create Exigent Circumstances by Lawfully Knocking on the Door to a Home and Announcing 'Police'". Criminal Justice Studies. 24 (4): 329–336. doi:10.1080/1478601X.2011.625695.