Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-04-03144/USCOURTS-caDC-04-03144-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Curtistine Johnson
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued December 13, 2005 Decided February 10, 2006

No. 04-3144

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

APPELLEE

v.

CURTISTINE JOHNSON,

APPELLANT

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 03cr00175-02)

Thomas J. Saunders, appointed by the court, argued the

cause and filed the brief for appellant.

John P. Gidez, Assistant U.S. Attorney, argued the cause for

appellee. With him on the brief were Kenneth L. Wainstein,

U.S. Attorney, John R. Fisher, Assistant U.S. Attorney at the

time the brief was filed, and Roy W. McLeese III and Elana

Tyrangiel, Assistant U.S. Attorneys.

Before: GINSBURG, Chief Judge, SENTELLE, Circuit Judge,

and WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge.

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Opinion for the Court filed by Senior Circuit Judge

WILLIAMS. 

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge: Curtistine Yvette Johnson

was convicted of three crimes: unlawful possession with intent

to distribute five grams or more of cocaine base in violation of

21 U.S.C. §§ 841(a)(1) & 841(b)(1)(B)(iii); using, carrying, and

possessing a firearm in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1); and

unlawful maintenance of premises to manufacture, distribute,

store, and use a controlled substance during a drug trafficking

offense in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 856(a)(2). Her conviction

rested on evidence discovered by the police in a search of her

apartment—some 5.5 grams of cocaine base packaged into 61

small plastic bags, cocaine cooking equipment, other drug

paraphernalia, and guns. On appeal, she claims that the warrant

for the search was invalid. She asserts primarily that some of

the supporting evidence was old and that the warrant

misspecified her address, locating the site in Washington’s

Northwest quadrant rather than, as it actually was, in the

Southeast. Accordingly, she says, the district court erred in not

suppressing the seized evidence. She also argues that her

conviction for possession of cocaine base should be reversed

because the government failed to prove that the substance seized

was smokable cocaine base or crack cocaine; in the absence of

such proof, we may not, under United States v. Brisbane, 367

F.3d 910 (D.C. Cir. 2004), uphold the higher penalties that § 841

prescribes for crimes involving “cocaine base.” We reject both

challenges.

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* * *

The affidavit attached to the search warrant makes clear that

the search’s target was not Johnson but her co-defendant,

Melvin Lawrence, who, it showed, had been involved in drug

trafficking and had claimed to live much of the time at

Johnson’s address. Included in the March 12, 2003, affidavit’s

evidence of drug trafficking were incidents both old and new.

The old ones involved three purchases of drugs from Lawrence

by undercover officers, occurring between April and June 2002,

each for more than $1,000 cash, and each for a tan rock

substance that tested positive for cocaine. The most recent event

was a chance encounter between one of the undercover officers

and Lawrence at a gas station on February 4, 2003, a little more

than a month before the affidavit. The affidavit recounts that

Lawrence asked the officer for his cell phone number, and urged

him to “come around the way and holla at me for some more

shit.” 

There was nothing so recent to connect Lawrence to

Johnson’s apartment. The affidavit said that in an interview

with the District of Columbia Pretrial Services Agency on

March 26, 2002 (almost a year before the affidavit and search),

Lawrence had given as his current addresses both his parents’

home on Ogden Street in the Northwest quadrant and Johnson’s

apartment in the Southeast. The affidavit includes two other

pieces of information linking Lawrence to Johnson’s apartment,

both undated: Lawrence called the undercover officer to cancel

a sale from a cell phone registered to Y. Johnson (“Yvette” is

Johnson’s middle name) at the 30th Street address. And on

more than one occasion, it said, investigators had observed

Lawrence walking out of the 30th Street address. 

The affidavit also offered expert evidence on dealers’

practices. It said that narcotics traffickers frequently keep

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various items related to trafficking in secure locations, “most

often in the homes of the individuals involved in the

organization,” and that, in the expert’s experience, “[i]t is not

uncommon for those involved in illegal narcotics activity to use

multiple residences and/or properties to elude detection.” 

In evaluating Johnson’s objections to the district court’s

denials of her motion to suppress, we review the district court’s

findings of historical fact for clear error but review the district

court’s conclusions of law de novo. See United States v.

Thomas, 429 F.3d 282, 285 (D.C. Cir. 2005) (citing Ornelas v.

United States, 517 U.S. 690, 699 (1996)). Like the district

court, we must accord “great deference” to the issuing official’s

determination of probable cause. See Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S.

213, 236-237 (1983).

Johnson’s weakest objection is her argument that the

affidavit failed to connect Lawrence’s criminal activity to

Johnson’s residence. In a case similarly without direct evidence

of drug dealing or possession at the address to be searched,

United States v. Thomas, 989 F.2d 1252, 1255 (D.C. Cir. 1993),

we found the affidavit sufficient, relying on expert testimony

very like that provided here—that in the affiant’s experience,

“drug dealers frequently keep business records, narcotics,

proceeds from sales, and firearms in their houses.” Id. at 1254.

Though the 30th Street dwelling wasn’t Lawrence’s sole

dwelling, the affidavit showed it to be one of two. 

More compelling is Johnson’s claim that the evidence relied

upon was stale. Everything else being equal, of course, dated

information is less likely to show probable cause than fresh

evidence. In Schoeneman v. United States, 317 F.2d 173 (D.C.

Cir. 1963), we found a lack of probable cause on the date the

search warrant was issued because of the “great delay” of 107

days in between the observations of criminal activity at issue

(displaying classified documents describing the Navy’s planned

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purchases) and the application for a warrant. We objected to the

absence of any updates: “There is no allegation that the books

[containing the classified information] had not been moved in

the intervening three and one-half months or, indeed, that the

[defendant] himself had not moved.” Id. at 177. More recently,

in United States v. Webb, 255 F.3d 890 (D.C. Cir. 2001), 109

days passed in between the last controlled drug transaction

between Webb and a government informant. When the

informant attempted to purchase more drugs just 12 days before

the swearing of the affidavit, Webb told him he didn’t have any

crack for sale. Id. at 892. We were troubled by the delay, and

in the end didn’t rule on the existence of probable cause but

relied on United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984), which

directs courts not to suppress evidence “obtained in objectively

reasonable reliance on a subsequently invalidated search

warrant.” Id. at 922. 

Most significantly for our purposes, our decision in Webb

made clear that different kinds of information go stale at

different rates. “[E]ven if Webb did not have drugs in his

apartment at the time of the application, it would not necessarily

have been unreasonable for an officer to conclude that a

longtime drug dealer, whose most recent known deal had

occurred three months earlier, would still retain papers

permitting him to get back in touch with his customers or—as

turned out to be the case—his supplier.” 255 F.3d at 905. As

records might well be retained even during a lull in sales, there

was considerable prospect that such records would still be

available in the defendant’s dwelling even 109 days after his

most recent known sale. 

Thus we agree with the district court here “that greater

lengths of time should be tolerated in assessing the staleness of

information regarding a person’s address, as opposed to their

possession of contraband, because a person’s address is often

less fluid than a person’s possession of incriminating evidence.”

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Mem. Op. (1/30/04) at 17 n.9. Whereas in Webb the most recent

information on the suspect’s drug activity was negative, here,

four and a half weeks before the affidavit, Lawrence invited the

agent to just “holla.” As the information about drug dealing was

fairly fresh, and the relatively old information related only to

Lawrence’s residence, we conclude that staleness didn’t

undermine the showing of probable cause.

Johnson’s final objection to the warrant is its

misspecification of her address. The warrant locates her

apartment in the Northwest quadrant of Washington rather than

the Southeast. While that was undoubtedly wrong, the warrant

incorporated an affidavit that used the correct address four times

but in one place substituted “Northwest” for “Southeast.” 

The Fourth Amendment provides that “no Warrants shall

issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or

affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be

searched, and the persons or things to be seized” (emphasis

added). In evaluating whether a warrant satisfies the

particularity requirement in spite of an error in the description

of the place to be searched, nearly every other circuit court

considers (1) whether the description is sufficient to enable the

executing officer to locate and identify the premises with

reasonable effort, and (2) whether there is any reasonable

probability that another place might be searched mistakenly.

See, e.g., United States v. Mann, 389 F.3d 869, 876 (9th Cir.

2004); United States v. Lora-Solano, 330 F.3d 1288, 1293 (10th

Cir. 2003); United States v. Pelayo-Landero, 285 F.3d 491, 496

(6th Cir. 2002); United States v. Vega-Figueroa, 234 F.3d 744,

756 (1st Cir. 2000); Velardi v. Walsh, 40 F.3d 569, 576 (2d Cir.

1994); United States v. Gilliam, 975 F.2d 1050, 1055 (4th Cir.

1992); United States v. Clement, 747 F.2d 460, 461 (8th Cir.

1984); United States v. Avarello, 592 F.2d 1339, 1344 (5th Cir.

1979). Where a warrant incorporates the supporting affidavit by

reference, we read the description in the warrant in the light of

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descriptions in the affidavit. United States v. Vaughn, 830 F.2d

1185, 1186 (D.C. Cir. 1987). 

Neither of the relevant concerns is troubling here. A

physical description of the building accompanied the street

address on the affidavit. Furthermore, the district court found

that two members of the search team, Officers Jackson and

DiGirolamo, had been familiar with the 30th Street address for

some time before the warrant was executed and thus knew that

they were searching the correct location. Mem. Op. (1/30/04)

at 8. Officer Jackson had observed Lawrence entering and

leaving the building on several occasions. Id. at 7. Jackson also

obtained keys to the building (but not to any apartment) from the

building management company, and tested those keys to make

sure the search team would be able to approach the apartment

readily. Id. at 7-8. Finally, both officers testified that there was

no “3030 30th Street” in the Northwest quadrant of D.C. 

The situation is thus quite like that of United States v.

Occhipinti, 998 F.2d 791 (10th Cir. 1993), where the warrant

identified the premises to be searched as being in a particular

area of “East Township 225 South, Section 36 of CO, KS,”

while in fact the intended site was in township “22 South.”

Upholding the search, the court relied on (1) the accuracy of the

attached supporting affidavit (which gave the correct township

number and also specified the county, which the warrant had

omitted), (2) the non-existence of any township numbered “225

South” or “25 South,” so that “a person serving the warrant

would have further reason to seek the necessary clarification in

the attached documents,” id. at 799, and (3) the familiarity with

the premises of the officer who had applied for and executed the

warrant. All three features have their analogues here and assure

us that the two risks that an address error may pose are absent.

Contrast Groh v. Ramirez, 540 U.S. 551 (2004), where the

portion of the warrant that was supposed to identify the items to

be seized instead described the house to be searched, creating a

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blatant facial gap that the affidavit, since it wasn’t incorporated,

did not correct.

* * *

Johnson challenges her conviction for possession of cocaine

base, invoking United States v. Brisbane, 367 F.3d 910 (D.C.

Cir. 2004), where we addressed an ambiguity in 21 U.S.C.

§ 841. That provision imposes higher penalties for drug crimes

involving “cocaine base” than for those involving “cocaine, its

salts, optical and geometric isomers, and salts of isomers.” 367

F.3d at 911. We found the statute ambiguous because, as a

chemical matter, “cocaine” and “cocaine base” mean the same

thing. Id. 

Looking to the legislative history, we found that two

particular characteristics of crack cocaine motivated Congress

to impose higher penalties on cocaine base. First, crack cocaine

“could be smoked, making it more potent and addictive.” Id. at

913. Second, its “low cost and ease of manufacture made it

more widely available than other forms of smokable cocaine,

especially among the nation’s youth.” Id. By reference to these

criteria, we saw uncertainty for the classification of a third

category of cocaine products—those which are smokable but are

not crack cocaine—such as “‘traditional’ freebase cocaine and

cocaine paste.” Id. at 914. Because in Brisbane the government

had proved neither that the drugs in question were crack nor that

they were smokable, we were able to leave open the

classification of smokable non-crack cocaine. Either way, we

could uphold only a conviction for the lesser included offense of

distributing cocaine. Here too we need not resolve the

ambiguity, as the government adduced sufficient evidence that

the substances involved were crack cocaine to meet the plain

error standard. Because Johnson may have waived the claim

completely by failing to renew her motion for acquittal at the

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close of all the evidence, see United States v. Sherod, 960 F.2d

1075, 1077 (D.C. Cir. 1992), plain error is, of the possibly

applicable standards of review, the one most favorable to her. 

Plain error allows an appellate court to vacate the

conviction for a new trial or to reverse outright where (1) there

is error (2) that is plain and (3) that affects substantial rights, and

(4) the court of appeals finds that the error seriously affects the

fairness, integrity, or public reputation of judicial proceedings.

United States v. Olano, 507 U.S. 725, 732 (1993).

In inquiring into plain error we assume in Johnson’s favor

that an error under Brisbane would qualify as “plain.” In

Johnson v. United States, 520 U.S. 461 (1997), the Court

addressed the problem of law changing between trial and appeal.

 In order to relieve counsel of having to raise objections clearly

precluded under existing law, the Court held that an error was

plain if the “law at the time of trial was settled and clearly

contrary to the law at the time of appeal.” Id. at 468. Cf. Olano,

507 U.S. at 734 (declining to consider what law should govern

in “the special case where the error was unclear at the time of

trial but becomes clear on appeal because the applicable law has

been clarified”). Brisbane was decided on May 11, 2004, more

than a month after the end of Lawrence’s trial. Before Brisbane

there was no law affirmatively excusing the government from

the obligation of proving that the cocaine at issue in the case was

either crack cocaine or smokable, so we are presented with the

“special case” left open by Johnson and Olano. Nonetheless, we

assume arguendo that Brisbane defines the applicable

requirement. 

In United States v. Eli, 379 F.3d 1016 (D.C. Cir. 2004), a

post-Brisbane case, we found the district court’s conclusion that

the drugs at issue were crack cocaine was well-supported and

not clearly erroneous, id. at 1022, where:

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First, the government chemist testified, and Eli did not

dispute, that Eli’s drugs tested positive for cocaine base.

Second, both the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA’s)

lab report and the U.S. Probation Office’s Presentence

Investigation Report (to which Eli acceded) stated that

the drugs recovered in the sales were “rock-like.” Third,

the chemist indicated that the drugs were smokable.

Finally, he concluded that the drugs were properly

identified as crack cocaine

Id. at 1021 (citations omitted). 

The evidence here is similar. As in Eli, a forensic chemist

testified that the substance recovered from Johnson’s apartment

was cocaine base. (Moreover, the substance was 55% pure; Eli

notes that the typical purity of crack cocaine is between 50%

and 60%, 379 F.3d at 1021.). Second, as in Eli, officers testified

that the recovered drugs were “rock” or “white rock,” a physical

description that reflects crack cocaine. Third, a law enforcement

officer executing the search warrant testified that he found,

inside a brown basket, a “cocaine cooking kit” consisting of

Inositol, a dietary supplement that is a “fine powdery

substance”; hospital masks; a glass pot and plate with white

residue; a digital scale; a beater; and loose, empty, Ziploc bags

that were one-quarter to one-half inch in diameter. A detective

qualified as an expert in the distribution and use of narcotics

explained in some detail how each of these items could be used

to convert cocaine hydrochloride into “cocaine base or crack

cocaine.” Finally, the same expert testified that the quantity and

packaging of the drugs found in Johnson’s apartment—5.5

grams of cocaine packaged in 61 tiny Ziploc bags—were

consistent with “the typical $10 ziploc bags of crack cocaine

that’s sold on the streets.” 

The case differs from Eli in that there was no evidence

about the substance’s smokability and no expert offered a

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specific conclusion that the drugs in question were crack

cocaine, although the forensic chemist did testify that the

substance was not cocaine hydrochloride or powder cocaine. 

Besides that negative point, the evidence consists of many

features consistent with crack cocaine—the purity and rocklike

character of the drugs and the nature of the equipment and of the

packaging. We do not know the frequency with which each of

those features occurs with non-crack cocaine (if at all); but

under plain error the burden is on the defendant to show the

likelihood that the (supposed) error could have affected the

outcome. See Olano, 507 U.S. at 734-35. Johnson has failed to

show that such ambiguity as may remain was likely to have

adversely affected the outcome of the trial. 

The judgment of conviction is 

Affirmed.

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