PD-0363-24 09/04/2024
The court of appeals erred in overturning the grant of Mr. Newton’s motion to suppress by failing to follow existing authority, creating a split among the courts of appeal, and misapplying both precedent and cannons of statutory construction.
A 911 caller reported seeing a truck strike a guardrail and then flee. A responding DPS trooper followed the skid marks leading away from the scene to a nearby home and Newton’s wrecked truck. The trooper approached the home and “made contact” with Newton, who admitted driving. The trooper identified multiple signs of intoxication and arrested Newton for DWI and Duty on Striking a Fixture, even though he had not witnessed either offense. Newton filed a motion to suppress, arguing that his warrantless arrest in his own yard violated Tex. Code Crim. Proc. art. 14.03(a)(1), which permits warrantless arrests for “persons found in suspicious places and under circumstances which reasonably show [they are guilty of various offenses, including DWI, or are about to commit a crime].” The trial court agreed that Newton was not found in a suspicious place and that there were no exigent circumstances to justify his warrantless arrest. The judge suppressed the fruits of his arrest—namely, the results of a blood draw.
The State appealed. It argued that Newton’s house was a suspicious place under the circumstances and that the only additional requirement for a warrantless arrest under Art. 14.03(a)(1) was probable cause for DWI, not exigent circumstances. The court of appeals noted that Swain v. State stated a place could become suspicious when a person’s presence there and the circumstances “raise a reasonable belief that the person has committed a crime and exigent circumstances call for immediate action or detention by police.” 181 S.W.3d 359, 366 (Tex. Crim. App. 2005). But it noted that, since then, the McGuire plurality declined to clarify whether Swain established an exigent circumstances requirement. State v. McGuire, 689 S.W.3d 596 (Tex. Crim. App. 2024) (plurality op.). It agreed with Judge Keel’s concurrence in McGuire that Swain had only considered exigency as “one circumstance in the totality.” The court of appeals observed that there was no reference to exigent circumstances in the text of Art. 14.03(a)(1) and held that exigent circumstances were not required.
Newton contends that the court of appeals’s holding conflicts with Swain and various decisions from the courts of appeals requiring exigent circumstances for a suspicious-places warrantless arrest. He argues that the court of appeals’s reliance on McGuire is “rickety, termite ridden ‘support’.” Since McGuire did not (and could not have, as a mere plurality decision) overruled Swain, the court of appeals should have followed precedent. Newton argues that the constitutional-doubt canon requires reading exigent circumstances into the text of Art. 14.03(a)(1) based on Welsh v. Wisconsin, 466 U.S. 740 (1984), which held that a warrantless entry into the home for an arrest for minor offenses like DWI was presumptively unreasonable. Although he was arrested in his yard, he asserts that it was still on the curtilage, to which the protection applies. He also contends that the prior-construction canon requires exigency since the Legislature has not amended Art. 14.03(a)(1) after the CCA interpreted it in Swain. He cites the presumption against a change in common law and contends that, at common law, warrants were required for misdemeanor offenses unless there was no time to obtain a warrant.
