A comparable motion was denied by the federal court, whereas the state court granted it in part.
The state trial court issued its ruling in People v. Mangione, addressing whether portions or the entirety of the items inside Luigi Mangione’s backpack should be excluded from the state prosecution against him. In the parallel federal case, the federal court had ruled in January against suppressing the backpack’s contents. By contrast, the state court has now suppressed several items (notably the magazine, cellphone, passport, wallet, and computer chip) while allowing the government to introduce other contents (notably the red notebook).
I found the new ruling somewhat unconventional. There was a portion I expected to see discussed that didn’t appear, and I planned to explain what I had in mind. [UPDATE: See below for what appears to be the explanation, rooted in New York state constitutional law.]
First, the opinion. The court begins by holding that the governing framework comprises the federal Fourth Amendment and the New York Constitution, even though the conduct in question was carried out by Pennsylvania police in Pennsylvania. Consequently, the heightened protections of New York law apply to the Pennsylvania officers, even though they presumably did not know (and perhaps could not have known) that New York’s search-and-seizure standards would govern their actions.
Second, the court concludes that New York search-and-seizure law resolves what I have described as the “moving property problem”: if a backpack is detached from the person and moved away, New York law forbids a search incident to arrest because the exigency has dissipated and the backpack is no longer within the suspect’s control.
Third, the court turns to the search conducted at the police station, where the backpack’s contents were examined. The court deems this search permissible: while the McDonald’s search cannot stand as an incident-to-arrest search, the police-station search qualifies as a valid inventory search. In particular, this allows the notebook found in the backpack to be admitted, since it was not searched at McDonald’s.
Fourth, the court states that the later warrant obtained to search the backpack does not render the contents admissible under the independent-source doctrine, as there was no independent source for that warrant.
Apart from the question of New York law’s reach—a point about the scope of New York law with which I am not entirely familiar—I remain perplexed as to why there isn’t an inevitable-discovery argument based on the inventory search. This had been the central premise the federal court relied on in denying the motion to suppress, grounded in the same facts: the police were going to inventory everything anyway and would inevitably uncover all items, regardless of whether the initial search had been lawful.
To my understanding, the state court did not address this argument, though it strikes me as the pivotal issue to resolve. Did the state court fail to raise it? Or is there something about New York law that makes such an argument inappropriate? I cannot say with certainty, as I have not tracked the case closely enough to determine.
UPDATE: A New York attorney notes that this is an issue of New York law, under which the inevitable-discovery exception is far narrower than under federal law. See People v. Stith, 69 NY2d 313, 318–19 (1987):
When the inevitable discovery rule is applied to secondary evidence, as in Payton, Fitzpatrick and Nix, the effect is not to excuse the unlawful police actions by admitting what was obtained as a direct result of the initial misconduct. It is not the tainted evidence that is admitted, but only what was found as a result of information or leads gleaned from that evidence. The rationale is that when the secondary evidence would have been found independently in any event, “the prosecution [should not be] put in a worse position simply because of some earlier police error or misconduct” (Nix v Williams, supra, at 443; emphasis in original). In contrast, when the inevitable discovery rule is applied to primary evidence, as was done here, the result is quite different. It is the tainted evidence itself and not the product of that evidence which is saved from exclusion. Permitting its admission in evidence effects what amounts to an after-the-fact purging of the initial wrongful conduct, and it can never be claimed that a lapse of time or the occurrence of intervening events has attenuated the connection between the evidence ultimately acquired and the initial misconduct. The illegal conduct and the seizure of the evidence are one and the same.
In the case before us, the suppression court and the Appellate Division, in holding that the illegally seized weapon should not be suppressed, hypothesized that the gun would inevitably have been discovered through a source that was independent of the initial taint. Viewing the situation at the moment of the illegal seizure, the courts below simply assumed the chain of events which would customarily have been set in motion following defendant Newton’s failure to produce a registration certificate: that a radio check would have revealed that the truck was stolen, defendants would have been arrested, the truck would have been impounded and the gun would have been found in an inventory search.
We hold that applying the inevitable-discovery rule in these circumstances, and effecting what would amount to a post hoc rationalization of the initial wrong (see, Nix v Williams, supra, at 448), would be an unacceptable dilution of the exclusionary rule. It would undermine a primary purpose of that rule, deterrence of police misconduct (see, People v Bigelow, 66 N.Y.2d 417, 427, supra). As the Oregon Court of Appeals noted in State v Crossen (21 Ore App 835, 838, 536 P2d 1263, 1264), in declining to apply the inevitable-discovery rule to primary rather than secondary evidence, failing to exclude wrongfully obtained primary evidence “would encourage unlawful searches in the hope that probable cause would be developed after the fact” (see, United States v Massey, 437 F Supp 843, 852-854; Stokes v State, 289 Md 155, 423 A2d 552; State v Williams, 285 NW2d 248, 256-257 [Iowa]; contra, Clough v State, 92 Nev 603, 555 P2d 840; for a discussion of the distinction between primary and secondary evidence, see, 3 LaFave, Search and Seizure § 11.4, at 620-628).
