People v. Superior Court (Godwin)

[782]

Opinion

DRAPER, P. J.

Charged with sexual molestation of a child (Pen. Code, § 288), defendant confessed his guilt in a police station interview. Shortly before the confession, he had been arrested on the sidewalk outside the apartment house in which he lived. He moved (Pen. Code, § 1538.5) to suppress evidence of the confession, asserting it to be the product of an unlawful arrest. The trial court granted the motion on the ground that the police officer’s request that Godwin accompany him to the sidewalk for further questioning was but a subterfuge designed to evade application of the rule which bars warrantless arrest of a suspect in his home, absent exigent circumstances.

(People

v.

Ramey,

16 Cal.3d 263 [127 Cal.Rptr. 629, 545 P.2d 1333].) The People petitioned this court for writ of mandate (Pen. Code, § 1538.5, subd. (o)), we issued alternative writ, and the issue has been briefed and argued.

Early in the evening of October 4, 1976, the child’s mother telephoned the police to complain of abuse of her five-year-old daughter. Officer Weber went to the complainant’s apartment to investigate the charge. He talked to both parents. They told him that they had paid one Donna, a woman resident of an apartment in the same building, to babysit their daughter, Nina, from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. daily from September 20 to October 4, 1976. At some unspecified date in that two-week period, Donna moved away. The parents had no funds to pay another baby sitter. “Bob,” who had briefly occupied Donna’s apartment while she and another female lived there, and remained when Donna left, volunteered to replace Donna and had acted as baby sitter for a few days. Nina had told her parents that Bob had spanked her with a belt, confirmed by the officer’s seeing scars on Nina, and that he had inserted his finger in her vagina. Nina repeated the charge to the officer. Neither parents nor child knew Bob’s last name, but the parents told Officer Weber the number of the apartment in which he lived with a woman and her child. Officer Weber went there, and knocked on the door. A man answered. The officer asked for identification, and the man showed a driver’s license in the name of Robert Godwin. The officer testified that he wanted to “determine whether [this man] was the person who had been babysitting Nina,” and that because of the “sensitivity” and “seriousness” of the offense, he wanted to question him out of the presence of the others in the apartment. He asked the man to accompany him to the sidewalk. As they neared the patrol car, the officer asked Godwin if he were in fact the recent baby sitter for Nina. When the man