People v. Minley

OPINION OF THE COURT

Memorandum.

The order of the Appellate Division should be affirmed.

The Supreme Court’s holding in Payton v New York (445 US 573) prohibits the police from crossing the threshold of a suspect’s home to effect a warrantless arrest in the absence of exigent circumstances. The evil to which the rule is addressed is the unsupervised invasion of a citizen’s privacy in his own home. Neither the letter nor the spirit of the Payton rule was violated here, where the police approached defendant’s home, saw defendant, whom they did not know, peeking through a window and directed him to…