NOT DESIGNATED FOR PUBLICATION No. 119,832 IN THE COURT OF APPEALS OF THE STATE OF KANSAS STATE OF KANSAS, Appellee, v. CASEY MICHAEL BAKER, Appellant. MEMORANDUM OPINION Appeal from Douglas District Court; PAULA B. MARTIN, judge. Opinion filed April 3, 2020. Appeal dismissed. Randall L. Hodgkinson, of Kansas Appellate Defender Office, for appellant. Kate Duncan Butler, assistant district attorney, Charles E. Branson, district attorney, and Derek Schmidt, attorney general, for appellee. Before BUSER, P.J., ATCHESON, J., and WALKER, S.J. PER CURIAM: In this opinion we once again consider whether a convicted defendant's allegations of error in the district court survive after the defendant himself passes away during the pendency of his appeal. After applying prior caselaw, we are convinced that the claims made by Casey Michael Baker in this appeal are moot and therefore his appeal must be dismissed. Baker was convicted in 2018 of one count of possession of methamphetamine and one count of possession of drug paraphernalia following a bench trial. Baker filed this 1 appeal, alleging that the district court erred by denying his motion to suppress evidence discovered through a warrantless search at the time of his arrest. When Baker was arrested on an outstanding warrant, a Lawrence police officer searched the contents of both Baker's wallet and backpack, where he found the methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia. Baker argues the evidence should have been suppressed by the district court because the Lawrence Police Department's unwritten inventory policy is vague and improperly discretionary. In addition, Baker argues the district court erred at a suppression hearing when it denied his request to reopen the evidence and allow him to testify on suppression issues, even though he had declined to testify at the original hearing on the motion to suppress. The district court ultimately denied the motion to suppress, ruling the evidence seized from Baker would have been inevitably discovered during an inventory search of his possessions at the jail. Baker's counsel filed his appellate brief on January 29, 2019. The State filed its brief on May 28, 2019. However, on September 9, 2019, the State filed a "notice of death" with the appellate clerk along with a published obituary indicating that Baker had died. No response contradicting this notice was filed by Baker's counsel. Based upon the State's death notice, and operating on the assumption that Baker had indeed passed away, we ordered additional briefing from the parties on the issue of whether Baker's death rendered the issues in the case moot, thus requiring Baker's appeal to be dismissed. We specifically directed the parties to discuss the application of State v. Hollister, 300 Kan. 458, 329 P.3d 1220 (2014), and State v. Cada, No. 111,440, 2016 WL 367999 (Kan. App. 2016) (unpublished opinion), to this case. Once again, after we entered the order for supplemental briefing we received nothing further from Baker's counsel indicating his client was alive and therefore supplemental briefing was unnecessary. Instead, we received the supplemental briefs both from Baker's counsel and the State, including ...
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