Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-11-03029/USCOURTS-caDC-11-03029-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Eric Maurice Brodie
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals 

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

 

Argued January 17, 2014 Decided February 18, 2014 

No. 11-3029 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

APPELLEE

v. 

ERIC MAURICE BRODIE, 

APPELLANT

Appeal from the United States District Court 

for the District of Columbia 

(No. 1:08-cr-00235-1) 

Lisa B. Wright, Assistant Federal Public Defender, argued 

the cause for appellant. With her on the briefs was A.J. 

Kramer, Federal Public Defender. 

Margaret E. Barr, Assistant U.S. Attorney, argued the 

cause for appellee. With her on the briefs were Ronald C. 

Machen Jr., U.S. Attorney, and Elizabeth Trosman and David 

B. Kent, Assistant U.S. Attorneys.

Before: TATEL, Circuit Judge, and EDWARDS and 

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judges. 

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Opinion for the Court filed by Senior Circuit Judge

WILLIAMS. 

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge: While waiting to 

execute a search warrant at the home of an arrested murder 

suspect, police saw defendant Eric Brodie leave the house. 

They pulled up to Brodie, who was by then on the sidewalk a 

few houses away from the house to be searched; they ordered 

him to put his hands on a nearby car. Brodie obeyed. A few 

seconds later, he fled. Before being caught, he jettisoned 

three weapons, and in a pat down the officers recovered crack 

cocaine. 

The government advances three alternative arguments as 

to why the weapons and crack need not be suppressed under 

the Fourth Amendment: (1) Brodie’s putting his hands on the 

car for a few seconds did not amount to submission to the 

police, so no seizure occurred; (2) any seizure was reasonable 

because it was conducted in the execution of a valid search 

warrant; and (3) Brodie’s flight and abandonment of the 

weapons purged the taint of any illegal seizure. Controlling 

authorities compel us to reject all three and therefore to 

reverse the judgment of conviction. 

* * * 

We begin with a brief account of the facts before 

exploring their relation to the government’s three arguments. 

In anticipation of executing a search warrant at the townhouse 

of Jerome Earles, a murder suspect in police custody, two 

officers parked their car around the corner from the house, 

waiting to be joined by homicide detectives. A few minutes 

later, Deputy Marshal Clark saw Brodie leave the townhouse. 

According to Clark, Brodie “looked . . . [h]inked up” when he 

saw the officers but continued to walk down the sidewalk, 

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away from the townhouse and toward the corner where the 

officers were parked. Because Brodie had left the house they 

planned to search, the officers (presumably suspecting he 

might be in cahoots with Earles) decided to stop and identify 

him. They pulled their car parallel to Brodie (who was now 

two townhouses away from Earles’s); Clark got out of the car 

and told Brodie to put his hands on a nearby car. Brodie 

complied. But when Clark turned a few seconds later to give 

an instruction to his partner, Brodie took off. As the officers 

chased him he discarded three guns and finally dropped to the 

ground when an officer threatened to tase him. He proved to 

be in possession of crack cocaine. 

The district court denied Brodie’s motion to suppress the 

evidence of weapons and crack. In a plea agreement Brodie 

acknowledged unlawful possession of a firearm in violation of 

18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), but retained the right to appeal the 

district court’s denial of the suppression motion. The district 

court sentenced him to fifteen years in prison, the mandatory 

minimum under the Armed Career Criminal Act, which the 

government concedes does not apply to Brodie in light of 

Descamps v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 2276 (2013). We now 

consider whether the district court erred in denying the motion 

to suppress. 

* * * 

For purposes of the Fourth Amendment a seizure occurs 

when physical force is used to restrain movement or when a 

person submits to an officer’s “show of authority.” California 

v. Hodari D., 499 U.S. 621, 626 (1991). The government 

concedes that the police made a show of authority when they 

ordered Brodie to put his hands on the car. But they claim 

that he didn’t submit, arguing that the compliance was too 

“momentary” to constitute submission. Brodie says that he 

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submitted by putting his hands on the car, and that therefore 

he was seized for the brief period between compliance and 

flight. We review de novo the question of when a seizure 

occurs. United States v. Maragh, 894 F.2d 415, 417-18 (D.C. 

Cir. 1990); see also Ornelas v. United States, 517 U.S. 690, 

697-98 (1996) (holding that district court decisions on 

ultimate questions of reasonable suspicion and probable cause 

are to be reviewed de novo). 

We can see no basis for classifying Brodie’s action—

putting his hands on the car when told to do so by the police—

as anything other than full compliance with the officer’s 

request. Nothing suggests, for example, that the compliance 

was feigned. Cf. United States v. Garcia, 516 F.2d 318, 320 

(9th Cir. 1975). In fact, the district court found that “Mr. 

Brodie put his hands on the car and then decided that he was 

going to run.” Motions Hearing Tr. 75, July 26, 2010 

(emphasis added). Nor does anything in the record suggest 

that Brodie had some ulterior purpose in putting his hands on 

the car, such as a belief that doing so would facilitate escape. 

Contrary to the government’s position, the short duration of 

Brodie’s submission means only that the seizure was brief, not 

that no seizure occurred. Later acts of noncompliance do not 

negate a defendant’s initial submission, so long as it was 

authentic. See United States v. Brown, 401 F.3d 588, 595 (4th 

Cir. 2005); see also United States v. Brown, 448 F.3d 239, 246 

(3d Cir. 2006). 

The government argues that our decision in United States 

v. Washington, 12 F.3d 1128 (D.C. Cir. 1994), requires a 

contrary outcome. There we found that a person’s briefly 

pulling over in response to an officer’s flashing lights, 

followed by the defendant’s driving off “before [the officer] 

even reached the car,” did not amount to submission. Id. at 

1132. But putting one’s hands on a car when ordered to do so 

is quite different from stopping a car just until the moment 

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that an officer’s almost inevitable exit provides an improved 

chance of escape. Brodie’s gesture had no such advantage, 

and would almost surely have culminated in a search but for 

Clark’s momentary diversion to speak with his colleague. 

Similarly, in the two Brown cases cited above, where 

defendants on foot complied with orders to put their hands on 

the roof of a car, the courts found the requisite submission. 

* * * 

Finding that a seizure occurred, we turn to whether that 

seizure was reasonable within the meaning of the Fourth 

Amendment. The government has not claimed either probable 

cause or reasonable suspicion. Rather, it argues that the case 

belongs in the set of seizures deemed reasonable only because 

they are incident to the execution of a search warrant. 

Michigan v. Summers, 452 U.S. 692, 704-05 (1981). 

After the district court decided Brodie’s suppression 

motion, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Bailey v. 

United States, 133 S. Ct. 1031 (2013), clarifying the limits of 

the Summers doctrine. While confirming the existence of an 

exception for seizures made during the execution of search 

warrants, the Court emphasized its limits, saying it applies 

only “to those who are present when and where the search is 

being conducted.” Id. at 1040 (emphases added); see also id. 

at 1038 (“In Summers and later cases the occupants detained 

were found within or immediately outside a residence at the 

moment the police officers executed the search warrant.” 

(emphases added)); id. at 1038 (“When law enforcement 

officers execute a search warrant, safety considerations 

require that they secure the premises, which may include 

detaining current occupants.” (emphasis added)). 

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We need not determine whether Brodie’s seizure meets 

the “where” requirement because we find that it doesn’t 

satisfy the “when.” While the record does not indicate how 

long the officers expected to wait, it makes clear that they 

observed Brodie merely in anticipation of the search. They 

parked around the corner from the house to wait for the 

homicide detectives’ arrival and pulled around near the target 

residence only in order to talk to Brodie. The officers did not 

encounter Brodie “when” a search was underway, even if we 

imagine a search to be in progress from the minute officers 

start to advance from car or sidewalk to front door. Cf. 

Summers, 452 U.S. at 693. 

We note that because this conclusion hews closely to 

Bailey, it doesn’t wholly address the issue of risk to officers in 

the course of a search. Bailey expressly noted its limitations 

on that point. It observed, for example, that the risk that 

someone who left a dwelling about to be searched might 

return, during the search execution proper, exists even if the 

person left the place “five minutes or five hours earlier.” 133 

S. Ct. at 1039. And it noted the chance that a departing 

occupant might notice the surveillance and “alert others still 

inside the residence,” but then discarded that risk as “an 

insufficient safety rationale to justify expanding the existing 

categorical authority to detain so that it extends beyond the 

immediate vicinity of the premises to be searched.” Id. at 

1039-40. In other words, the Court was emphatic that 

Summers-Bailey was not to be subject to some sort of risk 

creep. To the extent that the exception leaves risks beyond its 

scope unaddressed, officers must depend either on other 

doctrines (such as Terry) or on taking additional precautions 

such as “erecting barricades” to fend off a departing occupant 

who may return. Id. at 1039. 

 Finding Summers-Bailey inapplicable, and noting that the 

government does not attempt to justify this as a Terry stop, we 

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conclude that Brodie’s seizure was unreasonable, in violation 

of the Fourth Amendment. 

* * * 

An illegal search or seizure calls for suppression of 

evidence only if the seizure is a but-for cause of the discovery 

of the evidence (a necessary condition), and if the causal chain 

has not become “too attenuated to justify exclusion,” Hudson 

v. Michigan, 547 U.S. 586, 592 (2006), or, to put the same 

point with another metaphor, if circumstances have not 

“purged [the evidence] of the primary taint,” Wong Sun v. 

United States, 371 U.S. 471, 488 (1963) (internal quotation 

marks omitted). 

The presence of but-for causation is quite plain. The 

government does not contend, and no evidence suggests, that 

anything like the scene of flight and weapon-discarding would 

have occurred if the officers had stayed in their car to wait for 

back-up as originally intended. In fact, though Brodie looked 

“hinked up” when he first saw the officers, he continued to 

walk toward the police car, making no effort to flee or to shed 

his concealed weapons. This is quite unlike cases such as 

United States v. McClendon, 713 F.3d 1211, 1217-18 (9th Cir. 

2013), where the court found ample evidence that the fruitful 

search would have occurred even in the absence of the 

antecedent illegal search. 

In resolving whether the causal chain has become “too 

attenuated,” the Court has identified three factors of special 

relevance: (1) the amount of time between the illegality and 

the discovery of the evidence, (2) the presence of intervening 

circumstances, and (3) the purpose and flagrancy of the illegal 

conduct. Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590, 603-04 (1975). For 

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this inquiry, the government bears the burden of 

demonstrating admissibility. Id. at 604. 

The first and third factors cancel out, at most. The 

evidence was discovered mere seconds after the illegal 

seizure, so time obviously did not purge the taint. And while 

the police conduct may not have been especially flagrant, 

neither was it a case of an innocent mistake, such that 

exclusion would not materially advance the deterrent purpose 

of the rule, as in Herring v. United States, 555 U.S. 135, 144-

46 (2009), where officers reasonably but mistakenly believed 

there was an outstanding arrest warrant. Thus, the outcome of 

the attenuation analysis turns on assessment of the intervening 

circumstances. 

The government contends that Brodie’s flight and 

abandonment of evidence were intervening circumstances that 

purged the taint. As those events flowed directly from the 

seizure, however, it is hard to spot any attenuation. See 

United States v. Wilson, 953 F.2d 116, 127 (4th Cir. 1991). 

There are indeed a number of cases where courts have found 

attenuation in a defendant’s response to illegal police conduct. 

But in those decisions the court found that the defendant had 

committed a new crime, e.g., United States v. Bailey, 691 F.2d 

1009, 1015-18 (11th Cir. 1982), or had at least fled in a 

manner posing serious risks to the public safety—typically a 

vehicular flight leading to a high-speed car chase, e.g., United 

States v. Boone, 62 F.3d 323, 324 (10th Cir. 1995). 

Bailey contains perhaps the most analysis. The defendant 

engaged in forcible resistance to the seizing officers, which 

the court regarded as a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 111, making it 

a crime to forcibly resist officers of the United States going 

about the execution of their duties. The conclusion depended 

on the court’s reading § 111 as withholding any defense based 

on the illegality of the officers’ prior conduct. Bailey, 691 

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F.2d at 1018. Plainly we need not get into the soundness of 

these cases: Brodie fled on foot, and the manner of his flight 

in itself posed no incremental threat to anyone. 

As to Brodie’s discard of his weapons, the Bailey court’s 

treatment of a similar case is persuasive. The court noted that 

a defendant’s tossing marijuana out a car window during an 

illegal stop did not constitute a new, attenuating crime: the 

tossing “only revealed [the] extant crime and did not itself 

constitute a crime.” Id. at 1017. So here. 

In short, the government has not met its burden to show 

attenuation between the illegal seizure and the discovery of 

the guns and drugs. 

* * * 

The judgment of conviction is reversed because of error 

in denial of the motion to suppress. We remand the case to 

the district court for further proceedings consistent with this 

opinion. 

 So ordered. 

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