The state trial court handed down its ruling in People v. Mangione, on whether to suppress part of all of the contents of the backpack Luigi Mangione was carrying at the time of his arrest in the state prosecution against him. In the federal case against Mangione, the federal court back in January denied the motion to suppress the contents of the backpack. But today the state court suppresses some of the contents for the state court prosecution (in particular, the magazine, cellphone, passport, wallet and computer chip) and allows the government to use other contents (in particular, the red notebook).
I found the new opinion a little odd. There’s a part I was expecting that wasn’t addressed. I thought I would explain what it is.
First, the opinion. The court begins by concluding that the relevant law is the federal Fourth Amendment and the New York Constitution, even though the actions were those of Pennsylvania police in Pennsylvania. So the heightened restrictions of New York law apply to the Pennsylvania officers, even though they presumably didn’t know (and maybe couldn’t know) they would be governed by New York state search and seizure law.
Second, the court concludes that New York search and seizure law settles what I have called the “moving property problem”: If someone has a backpack, and it is moved away from a person, New York law says it can’t be searched incident to arrest because the exigency is gone and the backpack is no longer in the area of the suspect’s control.
Third, the court turns to the search at the police station, where the items in the backpack were searched. This search was fine, the court says: although the search at the McDonalds can’t be allowed as an incident-to-arrest search, the search at the police station was valid as an inventory search. In particular, this allows admission of the notebook found in the backpack that wasn’t searched at the McDonalds.
Fourth, the court says that the warrant the government obtained later that today to search the backpack does not make the contents admissible under the independent source doctrine, as this wasn’t an independent source.
Beyond the part about New York law applying—a matter of the scope of New York law that I don’t have a view of myself—I’m puzzled as to why there’s no inevitable discovery argument based on the inventory search. That’s the main argument that the federal court rested on in denying the motion to suppress, based on the same facts: the police were going to inventory everything anyway and find everything anyway, so everything they found in the backpack was going to be discovered anyway in the inventory, regardless of whether they initially searched it lawfully or not.
As far as I can tell, the state court does not address this argument, although I would think it’s the key argument to address. Did the state not raise it? Or is there something about New York state law that makes that an improper argument? I don’t know, as I haven’t followed the case closely enough to say.
