Opinion
Court of Appeals No. A-8389.
August 10, 2005.
Appeal from the Superior Court, Third Judicial District, Kenai, Charles T. Huguelet, Judge, Trial Court No. 3KN-01-411 Cr.
Quinlan Steiner, Assistant Public Defender, and Barbara K. Brink, Public Defender, Anchorage, for the Appellant.
Terisia K. Chleborad, Assistant Attorney General, Office of Special Prosecutions and Appeals, Anchorage, and Scott J. Nordstrand, Acting Attorney General, Juneau, for the Appellee.
Before: Coats, Chief Judge, and Mannheimer and Stewart, Judges.
MEMORANDUM OPINION
The issue in this case is whether the police could search Kevin Dell's Quonset hut without a warrant. The superior court originally upheld this search as a consent search, because the police had obtained the consent of Dell's long-time companion, Pauline Reeve. But in our first decision in this case, Dell v. State, Alaska App. Memorandum Opinion No. 4909 (August 11, 2004), we directed the superior court to reconsider its decision because we could not tell whether the superior court had employed the correct legal analysis when the court determined that Reeve had the authority to consent to the search of the Quonset hut.
The remand proceedings were assigned to Superior Court Judge Charles T. Huguelet. After Judge Huguelet considered the facts of Dell's case in light of the legal authorities that we cited in our first decision, he reversed the original decision and ruled that Reeve had lacked the authority to consent to the search. The State does not contest this ruling regarding Reeve's actual authority.
Judge Huguelet also considered the issue of "apparent authority" — that is, whether the police reasonably believed that Reeve had sufficient authority over the Quonset hut to be able to consent to the search. The judge concluded that, to the extent the police might have believed that Reeve had the authority to consent to a search of the Quonset hut, the officers' belief was unreasonable. The State does contest this latter ruling regarding Reeve's apparent authority.
The doctrine of apparent authority applies to situations where the police conduct a search in reliance on someone's consent, and then it turns out that the person who consented to the search did not actually have the requisite authority over the property. Under the doctrine of apparent authority, the search will be upheld so long as the police reasonably believed that the person who consented to the search had the requisite authority.
However, as we explained in Fitts v. State, the police must act with reasonable caution. The doctrine of apparent authority "will not validate a consent search when the police . . . turn a blind eye to facts that would undermine a person's claim of authority over the property", or when the police "[otherwise] rely on a [person's] unreasonable assertions of authority". This means that, "in ambiguous circumstances, [the police] must inquire into the basis of the consenting party's authority".
Fitts, 25 P.3d 1130, 1133 (Alaska App. 2001).
Id.
As Judge Huguelet noted in his decision, Reeve never directly asserted authority over the Quonset hut. When the police asked Reeve whether the property belonged to her, Reeve answered (accurately) that the Quonset hut belonged to Dell, and that she and Dell were not married. When the police initially asked Reeve to show them the Quonset hut, Reeve told the police to talk to Dell. When the police persisted and sought to ascertain the extent of Reeve's authority over the hut, Reeve told them that she had visited the Quonset hut in the "past few months", and then she acknowledged that she had been inside the hut as recently as six days before.
Judge Huguelet ruled that, under these circumstances, it was unreasonable for the police to conclude that Reeve had the requisite authority to consent to a warrantless search of the Quonset hut. We agree. Reeve did not claim to own the hut, reside in it, or store her belongings there. Her answers to the officers' questions suggested that she was only occasionally inside the hut. Given these facts, Reeve's relationship to the hut — in particular, her authority over it — was sufficiently ambiguous that the police acted unreasonably when they chose to forego applying for a search warrant and instead decided to rely on Reeve's consent to the search. At a minimum, the police were obliged to ask further questions to clarify matters — and the answers to these questions would have shown that Reeve did not have the requisite authority to consent to the search.
Accordingly, we affirm the superior court's decision to suppress the evidence found in the Quonset hut. And because, under the terms of Dell's Cooksey plea, his conviction is conditioned on the State's prevailing on this suppression issue, we REVERSE Dell's conviction.