Supreme Court of Connecticut, 2014

State v. Kendrick

State v. Kendrick
Supreme Court of Connecticut · Decided October 21, 2014

State v. Kendrick

Opinion

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The syllabus and procedural history accompanying the opinion as it appears on the Commission on Official Legal Publications Electronic Bulletin Board Service and in the Connecticut Law Journal and bound volumes of official reports are copyrighted by the Secretary of the State, State of Connecticut, and may not be repro- duced and distributed without the express written per- mission of the Commission on Official Legal Publications, Judicial Branch, State of Connecticut. ****************************************************** STATE v. KENDRICK—FIRST DISSENT PALMER, J., dissenting. I agree with and join Justice McDonald’s convincing dissent. As both Justice McDon- ald and the Appellate Court explain; see State v. Ken- drick, 132 Conn. App. 473, 484, 31 A.3d 1189 (2011); the circumstances known to the police when they entered the room in Blanca Valvo’s third floor apart- ment at 239 Knickerbocker Avenue in the city of Stam- ford, where the defendant, Said Kendrick, was located, were insufficient to support a reasonable concern that entry into that room was necessary to protect their safety. In particular, and contrary to the reasoning of the majority, the information that the landlord of 239 Knickerbocker Avenue provided to the police, namely, that ‘‘an African-American man matching [Malik] Sing- er’s general description had been ‘keeping company with’ the daughter of the tenant in the third floor unit,’’ is not entitled to any weight because, in fact, the only information that the landlord provided was that the man in question was an African-American. Indeed, although the majority relies on the landlord’s ‘‘descrip- tion’’ of the man that he had seen with Valvo’s daughter to support its conclusion that the warrantless search at issue was justified, the majority also appears to concede that that description was entirely devoid of any other identifying facts or information in noting ‘‘the vagueness of the landlord’s description, which was merely that a black male was associated with the third floor unit.’’

Without anything more—and despite the cell phone ‘‘ping,’’ which provided a basis to believe only that Singer was somewhere in the vicinity of 239 Knicker- bocker Avenue—the police had no more reason to think that Singer was in a room in Valvo’s apartment than that he was in any other room in that entire apartment building. I therefore respectfully dissent.

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