CLAUDE COMEAUX, PETITIONER-APPELLANT,
v.
C. MURRAY HENDERSON, WARDEN, RESPONDENT-APPELLEE

5th Cir. | 1972-07-05
No. 71-3505
462 F.2d 1345 Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (1972) Positive Treatment
Cited by 2 cases

AI-generated. These summaries, headnotes, and key points are machine-generated and may contain errors or omissions. Always verify against the full opinion text below. Not legal advice.


Holding

The court held that the district court erred in dismissing the habeas petition without an evidentiary hearing, as factual uncertainties regarding consent to search require further development.


Facts & Procedural History

Claude Comeaux was convicted of aggravated burglary. He challenged the legality of a search of his home, which yielded evidence used for his convictio…

The full statement of facts, procedural history, and disposition for this case are member content.

Join FLexlaw to unlock all legal intelligence

© FLexlaw, Inc. — AI-generated enrichments are proprietary. All rights reserved.


Opinion of the Court
PER CURIAM:

PER CURIAM:

Claude Comeaux was convicted of aggravated burglary in a Louisiana court and sentenced to imprisonment for thirty years. On direct appeal he contended that a piece of cloth and a pair of pinking shears, introduced at trial for the purpose of connecting him with the burglary, had been illegally seized during a search of his home in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The Louisiana Supreme Court, two Justices dissenting, affirmed the conviction. State v. Comeaux, 1968, 252 La. 481, 211 So. 2d 620.

Comeaux then sought Federal habeas corpus relief,' again challenging the validity of the search. The District Court dismissed the petition without an evi-dentiary hearing, concluding that under the standards prescribed by 28 U.S.C.A. § 2254(d) and Townsend v. Sain, 1963, 372 U.S. 293, 83 S.Ct. 745, 9 L.Ed.2d 770 the State court proceedings conclusively established that the petitioner was not entitled to relief.

We vacate and remand for further development of the facts. On the authority of James v. Louisiana, 1965, 382 U.S. 36, 86 S.Ct. 151, 15 L.Ed.2d 30 the Louisiana Supreme Court explicitly rejected the State’s theory that the search was incident to the defendant’s arrest, while the facts delineated in Justice Barham’s dissenting opinion strongly suggest that the search warrant was invalid, 211 So. 2d at 625. The only remaining justification is the purported consent to the search given by Comeaux’s wife, allegedly obtained after she was arrested and confined in the parish jail with her husband and after she was shown a warrant upon which the State has consistently declined to rely in attempting to establish the search’s legality. “When a law enforcement officer claims authority to search a home under a warrant, he announces in effect that the occupant has no right to resist the search. The situation is instinct with coercion — albeit eol-orably lawful coercion. Where there is coercion there cannot be consent.” Bumper v. North Carolina, 1968, 391 U. S. 543, 550, 88 S.Ct. 1788, 1792, 20 L. Ed.2d 797, 803.

Obviously, however, not every consent to a search is automatically vitiated simply because a tainted warrant is immediately or remotely involved, since the State may still carry “the burden of showing that the consent was given sufficiently independent of the warrant to remove the taint of its coercive nature.” Hoover v. Beto, 5 Cir., 1971, 439 F. 2d 913, 920, pending rehearing en banc. Resolution of individual cases depends almost entirely upon the specific factual context. We cannot conclude that the State proceedings have adequately established that context here in view of the factual uncertainties surrounding Mrs. Comeaux’s presence in the jail and the circumstances under which she accompanied the officers to her home for a further search. An evidentiary hearing in the District Court will provide a true picture of what really happened.

Vacated and remanded.


Cases With Similar Vibessemantic neighbors from the corpus


Citator

Cited By

Authorities Cited

Full citator, related cases, and AI research tools

Open in FLexlaw