Each of the last three days saw the Appellate Division issue one published opinion in a criminal appeal. Here are summaries of those rulings:
State v. Bryant, ___ N.J. Super. ___ (App. Div. 2025). Judge Sabatino wrote the panel’s opinion in this weapons possession case. It was an appeal from the denial of a defense motion to suppress a gun found by police in a warrantless search of a backpack belonging to defendant’s companion. The companion had carried the backpack out of a car parked on the street before encountering the police. The companion told the police that she thought defendant had placed a gun into her backpack.
The Law Division denied the motion to suppress and defendant was later convicted. On his appeal, the Appellate Division reversed the denial of the suppression motion.
The State contended that defendant lacked standing to contest the search of the companion’s backpack. But Judge Sabatino, relying on the doctrine of “automatic standing,” disagreed. “Specifically, under our state constitution, a criminal defendant is entitled to bring a motion to suppress evidence obtained in an unlawful search and seizure if he has a proprietary, possessory or participatory interest in either the place searched or the property seized or if possession of the seized evidence at the time of the contested search is an essential element of guilt.” Both of those grounds applied here, as defendant’s deposit of the gun into the backpack indicated that he had an interest in that later-seized gun, and possession of the weapon was an essential element of guilt on the weapons charges.
On the merits of the search, the State relied on the “automobile exception” and the “exigent circumstances exception” to the warrant requirement. The automobile exception did not apply. “The police's search of the backpack was not performed as part of a search of an automobile,” but on the street where the companion was standing. “She dropped the backpack on the ground. The officer picked up the backpack from the ground and placed it in the squad car, where he opened it without a warrant.”
Nor did the exigent circumstances exception apply. “At the moment the police chose to search inside of the backpack, there was no realistic possibility that the former passenger [defendant’s companion] nor defendant could have grabbed it, opened it, and retrieved the gun. The former passenger was in the back seat of the squad car with her hands cuffed behind her back. The backpack was in the front seat and out of her reach, separated by a plexiglass barrier.” And the companion had volunteered that the gun might be in her backpack, which showed that she did not want herself or defendant to be able to get at the weapon. In short, the police were in control of the gun. There were no exigent circumstances. Accordingly, the panel reversed the denial of the motion to suppress.
State v. K.H., ___ N.J. Super. ___ (App. Div. 2025). Defendant was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and burglary. As Judge Susswein recounted, defendant “was sentenced as a persistent offender pursuant to N.J.S.A. 2C:44-3(a) to an aggregate sentence of fifty-four years imprisonment subject to the No Early Release Act (NERA), N.J.S.A. 2C:43-7.2.”
Defendant argued that a motion to suppress that he had filed to exclude DNA evidence collected with his consent was wrongfully denied. He contended that his consent had been coerced. He also claimed that detectives had sought his consent after he had already invoked his rights under Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966), that the Law Division had erred in precluding him from calling a particular witness at trial, and that the sentence was unduly punitive.
The Appellate Division rejected all of defendant’s arguments that sought to overturn his convictions. But the panel vacated the persistent offender-based sentence “because his eligibility for the extended term must be decided by a jury, not a judge, in accordance with the rule announced in Erlinger v. United States, 602 U.S. 821 (2024).” The panel therefore “remand[ed] for further proceedings as spelled out in State v. Carlton, 480 N.J. Super. 311 (App. Div. 2024), certif. granted, ___ N.J. ___ (2025).”
State v. Johnson, ___ N.J. Super. ___ (App. Div. 2025). This was another opinion by Judge Susswein, a magnum opus of 51 pages. The case was before the panel after the Supreme Court granted leave to appeal to the Appellate Division. The intricacies of this case are best described by some of Judge Susswein’s opening paragraphs:
“This case presents a novel constitutional question arising from the execution of a communications data warrant (CDW) that authorized the surreptitious installation of a global positioning system (GPS) device on a vehicle to electronically monitor its movements. The State Police initially intended to install the device while the vehicle was on a public street or in a public parking lot. When that failed, the State Police decided to install the device while the vehicle was parked on defendant’s driveway. The CDW did not expressly authorize entry onto the driveway. Nor did the State Police seek prior judicial authorization to enter onto defendant’s residential property when they abandoned the plan to install the device on a public street or parking lot.
We are tasked in this appeal to decide whether the State Police violated defendant's rights under the Fourth Amendment and its state counterpart, Article I, Paragraph 7 of the New Jersey Constitution, when they went on defendant’s driveway to perform the installation. To answer that ultimate question, we consider a series of interrelated sub-questions: Was the portion of the driveway where the subject vehicle was parked part of the ‘curtilage’ of defendant’s home and thus protected under the Fourth Amendment and Article I, Paragraph 7? If so, did the State Police have an ‘implied license’ to step onto the private driveway and proceed to the subject vehicle to install the GPS device? If they did not have such license, did the CDW itself implicitly authorize their entry? Or were they required to obtain express judicial authorization to enter onto defendant’s residential property, either in the initial CDW application or by going back to the judge who issued the CDW when they abandoned their initial plan to install the device while the vehicle was parked on public property?”
Ultimately, the panel reversed the denial of defendant’s suppression motion. Given the layered issues in this case, and the fact that the Supreme Court previously granted defendant leave to appeal to the Appellate Division on an interlocutory basis, it would not be surprising to see the case return to the Supreme Court once again.