Seattle Criminal Attorney | No Inevitable Discovery in Washington
I’m a Seattle criminal attorney, but I’ve worked in Kansas and Missouri before. One of things I really love about Washington State is their Constitution. Most of the states in the Union, when adopting their state constitutions, simply copied off of the federal constitution and used all of their language. But Washington State went a different route. Demonstrating their liberal roots so long ago, the founders of the State of Washington gave their citizens rights to be free from searches and seizures that are much stronger than those provided by the United States Constitution. And a decision by the Supreme Court of Washington State this week helped to reinforce that strength.
The name of the case is State v. Winterstein, and as always, if you want to read the case for yourself, you can simply click here and be redirected. And as a Seattle criminal attorney, these are precisely the types of cases I love to see come down.
The case begins like many others – the cops believed Winterstien was engaging in some illegal and wanted to go and check up on him. Winterstein had been in trouble before and was on probation. In Washington State, if you are on probation, your rights are more limited than if you are just a normal person. One of the ways your rights are limited is that your probation officer can search your house if they have a reasonable suspicion that you are committing a crime. In this case the probation officer and some cops went over to what they thought was Winterstein’s house and began looking around for him. In the process they found some methamphetamine paraphernalia and some thing they thought could be used in the manufacture of methamphetamine.
The only problem was, the house they were searching, though Winterstein was staying there, was not his listed address. His listed address was outside in the street – it was a motor home that had the same address as the house, except it was 1/2. If the probation officer would have looked at his records, he would have seen that Wintersteins address was not the house, but the motor home out front.
Like any good Seattle criminal lawyer, Winterstein’s attorney filed motions to suppress the evidence for being seized illegally. The State responded with two arguments: first, the probation officer had a reasonable suspicion to believe the house was Winterstein’s residence, and that is enough because he was on probation; and second, if the first argument doesn’t work, then the evidence would have been discovered inevitably (otherwise known as the inevitable discovery doctrine) and should be allowed in anyway.
Honestly, though the reason why the first argument wasn’t accepted by the court, I don’t really care about it much, so I don’t want to talk about it much. So I’m only going to talk about the reason why the second argument didn’t work. It has far more reaching effect anyway. And since this is my criminal attorney in Seattle blog I’ll write about whatever I want.
The Washington State constitution provides an exclusive right to privacy with no express limitations. This means there are no exclusionary remedies when an individual’s right to privacy has been violated. Specifically, there is no inevitable discovery doctrine in the State of Washington – it is simply too speculative and conjectural and aims to create exactly what the constitution seeks to prevent; the introduction of evidence that was obtained illegally. Accordingly, the Court specifically noted that the inevitable discovery doctrine doesn’t exist in Washington State.
As a Seattle criminal attorney, this ruling is music to my ears for one primary reason – the ruling in Gant relating to search incident to arrest in automobiles was going to turn into a love fest for prosecutors and the inevitable discovery doctrine as they tried to fish for other reasons and explanation for why evidence should be or would be admitted. What this ruling does is head off at the pass some of those arguments (though it still won’t stop them teaching the cops what they should do to make sure they get to search cars at every opportunity – I don’t even want to mention it here in case they are reading (that’s supposed to be sarcastic, by the way).
Like I said, I love Washington State, for no other reason than the Constitution actually means something here and gives me some ammunition to work with for my clients. Thanks for reading Seattle Criminal Attorney News. Come back again.
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