IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF IDAHO Docket No. 46145 STATE OF IDAHO, ) ) Plaintiff-Appellant, ) Boise, June 2019 Term ) v. ) Opinion filed: December 20, 2019 ) KARI JANAE PHIPPS, ) Karel A. Lehrman, Clerk ) Defendant-Respondent. ) Appeal from the District Court of the First Judicial District of the State of Idaho, Kootenai County. Richard S. Christensen, District Judge. Clark A. Peterson, Magistrate Judge. The order of the district court is reversed and the case is remanded. Lawrence G. Wasden, Idaho Attorney General, Boise, for Appellant. Kenneth K. Jorgensen argued. Kootenai County Public Defender’s Office, Coeur d’Alene, for Respondent. Tyler R. Naftz argued. _______________________________________________ MOELLER, Justice. The State appeals from the Kootenai County district court’s reversal of the magistrate court’s order denying Kari Janae Phipps’s motion to suppress. Phipps asserted below that the statements she made while detained during a routine parole search of a parolee’s residence, along with the evidence found as a result of her statements, were inadmissible on Fourth Amendment grounds. The State brings this appeal seeking to delineate the authority of parole officers to detain a non-parolee while performing a routine parole search of a parolee’s residence. For the reasons stated below, we reverse the district court’s decision and hold that the limited detention of Phipps was reasonable. I. FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND On November 18, 2016, Officer Kuebler and Officer Johnson from the Idaho Department of Correction performed a routine residence check on parolee Terry Wilson. Upon their arrival, 1 the officers knocked on the apartment door and Wilson answered. As the officers entered, they noticed Phipps exit from a back bedroom. The officers recognized Phipps from previous visits. The officers asked Phipps and Wilson to take a seat in the living room while they “cleared the bedrooms for other persons.” Officer Johnson testified that, although Phipps never asked to leave at that time, she was not “cleared to leave. . . . [b]ecause of procedure.” After ensuring there was no one else in the apartment, Officer Kuebler advised Phipps and Wilson that a drug dog would be brought in to aid in the search of the residence and asked whether there was anything in the apartment that they should know about. Phipps confessed to having a methamphetamine pipe in her backpack, which was on her person. Officer Kuebler proceeded to conduct a full search of the residence and found two safes containing drugs underneath a bed in a back bedroom. The officers called backup law enforcement to handle the drugs. At some point prior to the arrival of backup, the officers ascertained that Phipps had no outstanding warrants. 1 Approximately ten to twenty minutes later, Officer Hutchison from the Coeur d’Alene Police Department arrived. Officer Hutchison talked with Phipps separately in a back bedroom after he read Phipps her Miranda rights. When asked whether she had a methamphetamine pipe in her backpack, Phipps confirmed that she did. Officer Hutchison searched Phipps’s backpack and found the methamphetamine pipe. Consequently, ...
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