Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca9-13-10233/USCOURTS-ca9-13-10233-1/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Oshan Cook
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

FOR PUBLICATION

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.

OSHAN COOK,

Defendant-Appellant.

No. 13-10233

D.C. No.

3:10-cr-00376-

JSW-3

ORDER AND 

AMENDED

OPINION

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Northern District of California

Jeffrey S. White, District Judge, Presiding

Argued and Submitted

January 13, 2015—San Francisco, California

Filed August 13, 2015

Amended December 24, 2015

Before: Richard R. Clifton and Jacqueline H. Nguyen, 

Circuit Judges and Jed S. Rakoff,

* Senior District Judge.

 * The Honorable Jed S. Rakoff, Senior District Judge for the U.S. 

District Court for the Southern District of New York, sitting by 

designation.

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2 UNITED STATES V. COOK

Order;

Opinion by Judge Nguyen

SUMMARY**

Criminal Law

Affirming convictions for conspiracy to possess with 

intent to distribute MDMA and possession with intent to 

distribute MDMA and LSD, the panel held that a search of 

the defendant’s backpack did not violate his Fourth 

Amendment rights.

The panel held that the district court did not err in 

denying the defendant’s motion to suppress evidence seized 

from his backpack because the brief, cursory search of the 

backpack for weapons was incident to a lawful arrest. In 

addition, the district court did not abuse its discretion in 

failing to hold an evidentiary hearing on the motion to 

suppress. 

The panel also held that any Confrontation Clause 

violation in allowing law enforcement agents to testify about 

an identification of the defendant as the drug supplier was 

harmless.

 

 ** This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has 

been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader.

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UNITED STATES V. COOK 3

COUNSEL

David J. Pullman, San Rafael, California, for DefendantAppellant.

Owen P. Martikan (argued), Assistant United States 

Attorney; Melinda Haag, United States Attorney; Barbara J. 

Valliere, Chief, Appellate Division, United States 

Attorney’s Office, San Francisco, California, for PlaintiffAppellee.

ORDER

The opinion filed on August 13, 2015 and published at 

797 F.3d 713 is hereby withdrawn and replaced by the 

amended opinion filed concurrently with this order. With 

these amendments, Judges Clifton, Nguyen, and Rakoff 

have voted to deny the petition for panel rehearing, Judges 

Clifton and Nguyen have voted to deny the petition for 

rehearing en banc, and Judge Rakoff has so recommended. 

The full court has been advised of the petition for rehearing 

en banc, and no judge requested a vote on whether to rehear 

the matter en banc. Fed. R. App. P. 35. The petitions for 

panel rehearing and rehearing en banc are denied. No 

further petitions for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc will 

be entertained.

OPINION

NGUYEN, Circuit Judge:

Oshan Cook appeals his convictions for conspiracy to 

possess with intent to distribute MDMA (also known as 

ecstasy or Molly) and possession with intent to distribute 

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4 UNITED STATES V. COOK

MDMA and LSD. Cook mainly challenges the denial of his 

motions to suppress the evidence seized from his backpack, 

arguing that the search violated his Fourth Amendment 

rights. We conclude, however, that the brief, cursory search 

of Cook’s backpack for weapons was valid incident to a 

lawful arrest, and thus the district court properly denied 

Cook’s motions. Because we also reject Cook’s remaining 

challenges, we affirm.

I

A

Working with an informant, undercover agents from the 

Drug Enforcement Administration arranged to buy MDMA 

from Yuri Lambert and James Edmonds. On the morning of 

April 22, 2010, about thirty minutes before the scheduled 

sale, agents were surveilling Lambert’s house on 63rd Street 

in Oakland, California, when they saw Cook carrying a 

backpack into the house. The agents concluded that Cook 

likely dropped something off while inside the house because, 

when he left a short time later, his backpack appeared less 

full and lighter. About fifteen minutes after Cook left the 

house, Lambert and Edmonds also came out of the same 

house and headed to the location where the drug deal was to 

take place. After Edmonds showed undercover Special 

Agent Jay Dial the MDMA that he intended to sell, both 

Lambert and Edmonds were arrested. During a post-arrest 

interview, Edmonds identified Cook as his supplier, and said 

that he had been dealing drugs with Cook “on and off for 

five years.”

The agents then took Edmonds back to Lambert’s house 

on 63rd Street, where they found two firearms. At the 

agents’ direction, Edmonds placed a monitored call to Cook. 

When Edmonds told Cook that the sale had gone through, 

Cook responded, “Hallelujah. Okay, I’ll see you soon.” 

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UNITED STATES V. COOK 5

About fifteen minutes later, Cook arrived at the 63rd Street 

residence, and when he got out of his car, he wore the same 

backpack that the agents had observed on him during their 

surveillance. As Cook approached the front porch, the 

agents ordered him to the ground at gunpoint. While they 

were placing handcuffs on him, Task Force Officer Robert 

Knight came onto the scene. By this time, a crowd had 

gathered, and even though there were six law enforcement 

agents at the scene—three near Cook and three by Cook’s 

car—they were concerned that additional, unidentified 

coconspirators or others might interfere if they continued to 

attract attention. Thus, the agents wanted to move 

immediately out of the area.

While Cook was still on the ground and within one or 

two minutes of his arrest, Officer Knight picked up the 

backpack, which was right next to Cook, and conducted a 

twenty or thirty-second cursory search for weapons or 

contraband. Finding no weapons, the agents quickly moved 

Cook and the backpack to a more secluded restaurant 

parking lot a few blocks away. There, Officer Knight and 

Special Agent Dial did a more thorough search of the 

backpack. During this second search, they found ziplock 

bags containing MDMA, LSD, marijuana, two mobile 

phones, and a laptop. The purity level of the MDMA found 

in Cook’s backpack matched that of the MDMA seized from 

Edmonds at the drug buy.

B

Cook was indicted for conspiracy to possess with intent 

to distribute MDMA, possession with intent to distribute 

MDMA, and possession with intent to distribute more than 

10 grams of LSD, in violation of 21 U.S.C. §§ 846, 

841(a)(1), 841(b)(1)(C), 841(b)(1)(A)(v).

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6 UNITED STATES V. COOK

Prior to trial, on September 9, 2011, Cook filed a motion 

to suppress the evidence from his backpack. In support of 

his motion, Cook submitted a declaration, stating that during 

the few minutes that he was face down on the ground, he did 

not see anyone open or search his backpack. In opposition, 

the government submitted a declaration from Officer Knight, 

stating that, while Cook was still on the ground, he 

“immediately conducted a quick search of [the backpack] to

make sure that there were no destructive devices or other 

items that might pose an immediate danger.” The 

government also argued in its opposition papers that because 

Cook was face down on the ground, he “was in no position 

to have personal knowledge of when and how the search was 

completed.” Cook filed a reply brief, but rather than dispute 

that the initial search occurred, he conceded “that he [did] 

not know when the search occurred.” Instead, Cook’s reply 

brief focused only on his legal arguments for suppression of 

the evidence.

On November 2, 2011, the district court issued a written 

order stating that it was inclined to deny the motion, but 

asking Cook to respond to the following questions: “Is the 

Court correct that Defendant believes the motion can be 

resolved without an evidentiary hearing? If not, what facts 

does Defendant contend are in dispute?” The next day, 

during a hearing on Cook’s motion, the court invited him to 

answer the questions it had posed. Cook did not ask for an 

evidentiary hearing, failed to dispute that the first search 

occurred, and failed to identify any particular factual dispute. 

Instead, he raised a new challenge that there was no probable 

cause to arrest him. The court continued the hearing and 

allowed Cook to file a supplemental brief addressing 

probable cause. Cook later did so, but still did not identify a 

factual dispute. On December 22, 2011, the district court 

denied Cook’s motion without an evidentiary hearing.

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UNITED STATES V. COOK 7

After Cook’s first trial ended in a mistrial, on August 30, 

2012, he renewed his motion to suppress and, for the first 

time, claimed that the initial search of his backpack did not 

occur at all. Cook argued that inconsistencies between 

Officer Knight’s and Special Agent Dial’s trial testimony 

showed that the initial search was a “post-hoc invention.” 

The district court, without holding an evidentiary hearing, 

denied Cook’s motion. The court explained that it had the 

opportunity during the trial to assess the credibility of the 

testifying agents, and there was “no basis to discredit” 

Officer Knight’s testimony that the first search occurred.

Following a second trial, the jury convicted Cook on 

November 1, 2012 of conspiracy to possess with intent to 

distribute and possession with intent to distribute illegal 

narcotics. On March 6, 2013, Cook again renewed his 

motion to suppress. This time, he focused on Special Agent 

Dial’s admission that his testimony during the first trial was 

incorrect. Special Agent Dial had testified that he was 

present at the first search of Cook’s backpack, when in fact 

he was only there during the second, more thorough search. 

The district court again denied an evidentiary hearing, 

because it concluded that it already had a sufficient basis to 

evaluate the witnesses’ credibility, having heard their 

testimony at two trials. It found that there was “no basis to 

discredit [Special Agent Dial’s] testimony that he simply 

made a mistake about his participation in the initial search of 

Cook’s backpack.” The court denied Cook’s motion. This 

appeal followed.

II

Cook argues that the first search violated his rights under 

the Fourth Amendment. The government counters that the 

search was incident to a lawful arrest, and thus fell within 

that exception to the warrant requirement. As an initial 

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8 UNITED STATES V. COOK

matter, although the evidence Cook seeks to suppress was 

found during the second search of his backpack, which 

occurred at a nearby restaurant parking lot, Cook only 

challenges the first search that occurred at the scene of his 

arrest. This is because Cook recognizes that if that search 

was valid, then the second warrantless search was permitted 

“so long as [his backpack] remain[ed] in the legitimate 

uninterrupted possession of the police.” United States v. 

Burnette, 698 F.2d 1038, 1049 (9th Cir. 1983). We review 

a denial of a motion to suppress evidence de novo. United 

States v. Maddox, 614 F.3d 1046, 1048 (9th Cir. 2010).

A

A search incident to a lawful arrest is a well-established 

exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. 

See Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332, 338 (2009). This 

exception allows an officer to search “the arrestee’s person 

and the area ‘within his immediate control,’” defined as “the 

area from within which he might gain possession of a 

weapon or destructible evidence.” Chimel v. California, 395 

U.S. 752, 763 (1969). As the Supreme Court explained in 

Gant, the “immediate control” requirement “ensures that the 

scope of a search incident to arrest is commensurate with its 

purposes of protecting arresting officers and safeguarding 

any evidence of the offense of arrest that an arrestee might 

conceal or destroy.” 556 U.S. at 339. The Court in Gant 

held that the officers’ search of Gant’s car was unreasonable 

because, prior to the search, Gant and two other arrestees 

were already handcuffed and locked inside separate police 

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UNITED STATES V. COOK 9

cars. Thus, “Gant clearly was not within reaching distance 

of his car at the time of the search.” Id. at 344.1

In evaluating the reasonableness of a search incident to 

arrest, we have examined not only whether the area searched 

was within the arrestee’s “immediate control,” but also 

whether any event occurred after the arrest that rendered the 

search unreasonable. Maddox, 614 F.3d at 1048. While 

“[t]here is no fixed outer limit for the number of minutes that 

may pass between an arrest and a valid, warrantless search,” 

United States v. McLaughlin, 170 F.3d 889, 892 (9th Cir. 

1999), we have said that the search must be “spatially and 

temporally incident to the arrest,” United States v. Camou, 

773 F.3d 932, 937 (9th Cir. 2014). See also United States v. 

Smith, 389 F.3d 944, 951 (9th Cir. 2004) (per curiam) 

(interpreting the temporal requirement to mean that the 

search must be “roughly contemporaneous with the arrest”); 

United States v. Monclavo-Cruz, 662 F.2d 1285, 1288 (9th 

Cir. 1981) (holding that the search of the purse of an arrestee 

“more than an hour after her arrest at the station house” was 

not valid incident to arrest).

B

Cook argues that the initial search of his backpack was 

not valid incident to arrest because he was handcuffed at the 

time of the search, and thus there was no reasonable concern 

for officer safety or evidence destruction.

We agree that Cook’s position at the time of the search—

face down on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his 

 

 1 We do not read Gant’s holding as limited only to automobile searches 

because the Court tethered its rationale to the concerns articulated in 

Chimel, which involved a search of an arrestee’s home. Gant, 556 U.S. 

at 342-43. Neither party in this case contends otherwise.

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10 UNITED STATES V. COOK

back—is a highly relevant fact in determining whether the 

search was justified. Yet Cook’s argument ignores other 

countervailing facts that we must also consider. The search, 

both quick and cursory, was “spatially and temporally 

incident to the arrest.” Camou, 773 F.3d at 937. It occurred 

immediately after Officer Knight arrived on the scene, as 

Cook was being taken into custody. Cook’s backpack was 

right next to him. And, within twenty to thirty seconds, as 

soon as Officer Knight determined that the backpack 

contained no weapons, he immediately stopped the search. 

The brief and limited nature of the search, its immediacy to 

the time of arrest, and the location of the backpack ensured 

that the search was “commensurate with its purposes of 

protecting arresting officers and safeguarding any evidence 

of the offense of arrest that [Cook] might conceal or 

destroy.” Gant, 556 U.S. at 339.

Cook relies heavily on Gant, but the circumstances here 

are entirely different. Unlike Gant, who was arrested for 

driving on a suspended license, Cook was arrested for 

serious felony drug offenses. Significantly, Gant was locked 

inside a patrol car, while Cook’s backpack was easily within 

“reaching distance.” Id. at 344. The fact that Cook was 

already handcuffed is significant, but not dispositive. See 

United States v. Sanders, 994 F.2d 200, 209 (5th Cir. 1993) 

(stating that “[a]lbeit difficult, it is by no means impossible 

for a handcuffed person to obtain and use a weapon 

concealed on his person or within lunge reach, and . . . like 

any mechanical device, handcuffs can and do fail on 

occasion”). We cannot say here that there was no reasonable 

possibility that Cook could break free and reach for a 

backpack next to him. Gant, 556 U.S. at 339.

Moreover, contrary to Cook’s claim, the agents’ safety 

concerns were objectively reasonable. The agents had 

reason to believe that Cook used the same backpack earlier 

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UNITED STATES V. COOK 11

in the day to transport drugs, and they had already recovered 

two firearms from the house associated with Cook’s coconspirator. That Cook’s arrest took place in front of the 

same house, and a crowd had gathered nearby, heightened 

the agents’ reasonable fear that a bystander or additional 

unidentified co-conspirator might intervene. Under the 

totality of the circumstances, we conclude that the search of 

Cook’s backpack was reasonable and valid incident to arrest. 

See United States v. Robinson, 414 U.S. 218, 235 (1973) 

(stating that an officer’s decision to search incident to arrest 

“is necessarily a quick and ad hoc judgment” that need not 

“be broken down in each instance into analysis of each step 

of the search”). Therefore, the district court properly denied 

his motions.

We note that under similar facts, our sister circuit 

reached the same conclusion, in a case cited by both parties. 

In United States v. Shakir, the Third Circuit found that a 

search of a duffel bag, which Shakir had dropped at his feet 

when he was arrested, was reasonable. 616 F.3d 315, 321 

(3d Cir. 2010). Shakir’s hands were already cuffed, and two 

officers were holding his arms, when another officer bent 

down and searched the bag. Id. at 317. The Third Circuit 

considered the circumstances of the arrest and search, 

including the location of the arrest in a hotel lobby with 

many people around, the fact that Shakir’s duffel bag was 

right at his feet, and the officers’ concern that accomplices 

were nearby. Id. at 319. Upholding the search, the Shakir 

court concluded that “there remained a sufficient possibility 

that Shakir could access a weapon in his bag.” Id. at 321. 

Much of the same analysis, as we discussed, applies here. 

As Cook points out, there are factual differences in his case. 

For example, Shakir was standing up, and his large size 

made it initially difficult to handcuff him, whereas Cook’s 

build is slight and he was face down on the ground. None of 

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12 UNITED STATES V. COOK

the factual distinctions relied on by Cook, however, are 

sufficient to alter our analysis.

III

We next turn to Cook’s claim that the district court 

abused its discretion in failing to hold an evidentiary hearing 

to determine whether the initial search of his backpack 

actually occurred.

“An evidentiary hearing on a motion to suppress need be 

held only when the moving papers allege facts with 

sufficient definiteness, clarity, and specificity to enable the 

trial court to conclude that contested issues of fact exist.” 

United States v. Howell, 231 F.3d 615, 620 (9th Cir. 2000); 

see also United States v. Batiste, 868 F.2d 1089, 1093 (9th 

Cir. 1989) (stating that the district court was not required to 

hold an evidentiary hearing on the defendant’s motion to 

suppress where the defendant failed to dispute any material 

fact in the government’s proffer). We review the district 

court’s denial of an evidentiary hearing for abuse of 

discretion. See United States v. Hoang, 486 F.3d 1156, 1163 

(9th Cir. 2007).

Cook’s first motion to suppress failed to raise a material 

factual dispute. The district court nevertheless invited Cook 

to clarify by directing him to confirm that “the motion can 

be resolved without an evidentiary hearing” and to identify 

facts that Cook “contend[s] are in dispute.” In response, 

Cook neither asked for an evidentiary hearing nor identified 

a single disputed fact. He instead focused on a new legal 

argument that his arrest was not supported by probable 

cause. In short, because Cook failed to “allege facts with 

sufficient definiteness, clarity, and specificity to enable the 

trial court to conclude that contested issues of fact exist,” the 

court did not abuse its discretion in failing to hold an 

evidentiary hearing. Howell, 231 F.3d at 620.

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UNITED STATES V. COOK 13

Cook now contends that he in fact identified a factual 

dispute by arguing below that Officer Knight’s first search 

was “manufactured for the purpose of legitimatizing an 

otherwise unlawful search.” What Cook fails to 

acknowledge, however, is that he raised this claim only after

his first trial. By that point, the district court had already 

heard trial testimony from the law enforcement witnesses—

Officer Knight and Special Agent Dial—who Cook would 

have called in support of his motion. Because Cook had 

already cross-examined these witnesses’ accounts of the first 

search, the district court could use “[t]estimony at trial . . . to 

sustain the denial of a motion to suppress evidence.” United 

States v. Sanford, 673 F.2d 1070, 1072 (9th Cir. 1982). This 

is especially true where, as here, Cook never proffered in his 

renewed motions that, at an evidentiary hearing, he would 

testify to an alternate version of the moments after his arrest. 

United States v. Hernandez-Acuna, 498 F.3d 942, 945 (9th 

Cir. 2007) (holding that even though “trials serve a different 

function from evidentiary hearings,” a district court could 

dispense with an evidentiary hearing on a motion to suppress 

in light of the defendant’s opportunity to cross-examine at 

trial the only witnesses who would have testified at a 

suppression hearing before the court). As the district court 

stated, it had the opportunity to observe the demeanor of the 

witnesses, and to assess their testimony and credibility 

during two trials. Thus, the district court did not abuse its 

discretion in determining that no evidentiary hearing was 

necessary.

IV

Finally, Cook argues that his rights under the Sixth 

Amendment’s Confrontation Clause were violated because 

the agents were allowed to testify about Edmonds’s 

identification of him as the supplier, even though Edmonds 

was not a trial witness. We need not decide whether the 

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14 UNITED STATES V. COOK

district court erred because, even if it did, any error was 

harmless. The evidence implicating Cook in the conspiracy 

as the supplier was compelling. Shortly before the drug buy, 

the agents saw Cook appear to drop something off from his 

backpack at Lambert’s house. After Edmonds was arrested, 

he placed a monitored phone call to Cook, who expressed 

his satisfaction that the deal had gone through. Cook then 

came to Lambert’s house with the same backpack that he had 

carried earlier, and the backpack contained MDMA of the 

same purity as the MDMA that Edmonds had offered to the 

agents. Thus, any error in admitting Edmonds’s 

identification of Cook as his supplier was “harmless beyond 

a reasonable doubt.” United States v. Morales, 720 F.3d 

1194, 1199 (9th Cir. 2013).

***

The district court properly denied Cook’s motions to 

suppress because the search of his backpack was valid 

incident to arrest. We further conclude that the district 

court’s failure to hold an evidentiary hearing was not an 

abuse of discretion, and any error in the court’s evidentiary 

rulings was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.

AFFIRMED.

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