Forty-five

Terry Hadley left the case soon after Vernon Davids argued  Zeigler's first appeal, although he continued to represent Tom and Beulah in the civil suits that grew out of the crime.  Davids had come to know Zeigler well during the month in Jacksonville and had become fond of him.  More important, he believed that the verdict was unjust and that the evidence did not support Zeigler's guilt.

Typically for a first appeal, Zeigler's motion for a new trial was based on a wide variety of issues from the trial.  But Davids believed that the key matter was Paul's decision to admit evidence seized during the search of the store.  Paul had relied on a "crime scene exception" to the Fourth Amendment.

But in 1978, in a significant Fourth Amendment decision, the U.S. Supreme Court had found that the crime scene exception did not exist. In Mincey v. Arizona, the Court ruled that while the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit police from warrantless entry during an emergency, the police must obtain a warrant to remain on the premises once the emergency is ended.

Davids read Mincey with excitement, because it seemed to be completely "on point": the facts of that case seemed to apply directly to the search at the store.  Police in Pima County, Arizona, went to the apartment of a suspected drug dealer named Rufus Mincey.  An undercover officer, Barry Headricks, had been in the apartment earlier in the day and had arranged to buy some heroin.  Officer Headricks left, ostensibly to get some money, and returned with nine other plainclothes policemen and a deputy prosecutor.  Someone in the apartment opened the door for Headricks, then the others rushed in.  Headricks and Mincey were critically wounded in an exchange of gunfire; Headricks later died.  Police held the apartment for two days without a warrant and took over two hundred items of evidence that later were used to convict Mincey.

The Arizona supreme court ruled that the search of Mincey's apartment was legal under a crime scene exception to the Fourth Amendment.  But the U.S. Supreme Court found unanimously that once the medical emergency had ended, the police should have obtained a search warrant to remain on the scene.  They were entitled to any evidence that was in plain sight during the emergency, but anything else was inadmissible.

Justice Porter Stewart wrote: "...We hold that the 'murder scene exception' created by the Arizona Supreme Court is inconsistent with the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments-that the warrantless search of Mincey's apartment was not constitutionally acceptable simply because a homicide had recently occurred there."