Source: http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/454/249/489771/
Timestamp: 2017-09-19 11:53:08
Document Index: 415639679

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 922', '§ 1983', '§ 924', '§ 924', '§ 924', '§ 922', '§ 11']

United States of America v. Robert Mosley, Appellant, 454 F.3d 249 (3d Cir. 2006) :: Justia
Justia › US Law › Case Law › Federal Courts › Courts of Appeals › Third Circuit › 2006 › United States of America v. Robert Mosley, Appellant
United States of America v. Robert Mosley, Appellant, 454 F.3d 249 (3d Cir. 2006)
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit - 454 F.3d 249 (3d Cir. 2006)
However, the Supreme Court has held that anonymous tips do not provide sufficient justification for an investigatory stop, see Florida v. J.L., 529 U.S. 266, 120 S. Ct. 1375, 146 L. Ed. 2d 254 (2000), and the officers did not observe Hayes committing any traffic violation that would have justified the stop under Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 116 S. Ct. 1769, 135 L. Ed. 2d 89 (1996). The government conceded that the stop was illegal, and dropped all charges against Hayes.
The government proceeded, however, with the gun possession case against Mosley, arguing that because he was a passenger in the vehicle, he could not seek to suppress the guns, notwithstanding the illegality of the stop. Mosley contended that insofar as he had been illegally seized by the traffic stop, he should have the same suppression claim as Hayes. The District Court agreed with the government, and admitted into evidence the guns found in the back seat of the vehicle.1 Mosley was convicted under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) for possessing a firearm following a felony conviction.2 He appeals on several grounds; we will decide the case on the suppression issue.3 "We review the denial of a motion to suppress for clear error as to the underlying factual determinations and exercise plenary review over the application of the law to those facts." United States v. Williams, 417 F.3d 373, 376 (3d Cir. 2005).
When one peruses the traffic-stop suppression caselaw, one is struck by how rarely a traffic stop is found to have been illegal. In Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 116 S. Ct. 1769, 135 L. Ed. 2d 89 (1996), the Supreme Court established a bright-line rule that any technical violation of a traffic code legitimizes a stop, even if the stop is merely pretext for an investigation of some other crime. And once a car has been legally stopped, the police may "escalate" the encounter by visually inspecting the interior of the car, and checking credentials and asking questions of the occupants. See United States v. Givan, 320 F.3d 452, 458 (3d Cir. 2003) ("After a traffic stop that was justified at its inception, an officer who develops a reasonable, articulable suspicion of criminal activity may expand the scope of an inquiry beyond the reason for the stop and detain the vehicle and its occupants for further investigation."). Courts give considerable deference to police officers' determinations of reasonable suspicion, see, e.g., United States v. Nelson 284 F.3d 472, 482 (3d Cir. 2002), and the cases are steadily increasing the constitutional latitude of the police to pull over vehicles.4
Passengers in cars, unlike owners or licensees, have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the interior of the vehicle in which they are riding. Because the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches is predicated on the invasion by the government of a person's reasonable expectation of privacy, passengers are generally held to lack "standing"5 to object to evidence discovered in a search of a vehicle. See Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128, 99 S. Ct. 421, 58 L. Ed. 2d 387 (1978). Fourth Amendment rights are personal rights, and a search of a car does not implicate the rights of non-owner passengers: the car is treated conceptually like a large piece of clothing worn by the driver.
But we should not be distracted by the fact that this case involves evidence found in a car. This is not an "auto search" case. The search of the car is not before us; the seizure of Mosley is. This case is about an illegal seizure by the police of the defendant, pursuant to which evidence was discovered. The violation of Mosley's Fourth Amendment rights was the traffic stop itself, and it is settled law that a traffic stop is a seizure of everyone in the stopped vehicle, see Delaware v. Prouse, 440 U.S. 648, 653, 99 S. Ct. 1391, 59 L. Ed. 2d 660 (1979).6 Thus passengers in an illegally stopped vehicle have "standing" to object to the stop,7 and may seek to suppress the evidentiary fruits of that illegal seizure under the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, as expounded in the line of cases following Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 83 S. Ct. 407, 9 L. Ed. 2d 441 (1963). The dispositive legal issue is the causal relationship between the traffic stop and the discovery of the evidence: whether the evidence found in the car was "fruit" of the illegal stop. The question that bedeviled the proceedings below is whether the evidence found in the car was causally linked to the illegal seizure of Mosley, the passenger.
In analyzing that causal connection, the District Court relied on a Tenth Circuit case, United States v. DeLuca, 269 F.3d 1128 (10th Cir. 2001), in which a passenger sought to suppress evidence found during a traffic stop. Taking its cue from that case, the District Court proposed various hypotheticals to test the "factual nexus" between the violation of Mosley's Fourth Amendment rights and the discovery of the evidence. Specifically, the District Court pondered whether, if Mosley had asked for and received permission to leave the scene immediately after the car was stopped, the evidence in the car would still have been discovered. Since the answer to that question is obviously "yes," the District Court ruled that Mosley had failed to demonstrate an adequate "factual nexus" between the illegal government action and the discovery of the challenged evidence. Although the government had clearly violated Mosley's Fourth Amendment rights, the District Court determined that the specific violation of Mosley's rights—as opposed to Hayes' rights—did not have a sufficiently close causal connection, or "factual nexus," to the discovery of the evidence to support Mosley's suppression claim.
The general requirement of a "factual nexus" between a specific Fourth Amendment violation and a specific piece of evidence derives from two Supreme Court cases on wiretap evidence. In those cases, the government had gathered thousands of discrete pieces of evidence over many months of investigation. Over the course of the investigation, the government committed various illegal acts, and the question for the Court was how to determine which pieces of evidence were tainted by the particular illegal actions. See Nardone v. United States, 308 U.S. 338, 341, 60 S. Ct. 266, 84 L. Ed. 307 (1939); Alderman v. United States, 394 U.S. 165, 183, 89 S. Ct. 961, 22 L. Ed. 2d 176 (1969). Because of the multiplicity and complexity of the investigation and the evidence, there was no commonsense causal relationship between any given Fourth Amendment violation and any given piece of evidence. Rather than hold all the evidence to have been tainted by the violations, the Court held that the proper course is for district courts to probe more deeply, and employ thought experiments to determine which violation was causally connected to which piece of evidence.8 These cases express the commonsense proposition that a single Fourth Amendment violation does not taint an entire case, but only the evidence uncovered as a result of that violation.
[Wong Sun ] and its progeny, see, e.g., United States v. Melendez-Garcia, 28 F.3d 1046, 1053-54 (10th Cir. 1994), are readily distinguishable insofar as in those cases the illegal police conduct preceded the means by which the evidence was obtained, thus establishing the requisite factual nexus between the evidence and the illegal conduct. By contrast, any unlawful police activity here occurred after voluntary consent had been obtained. Consequently, [the defendant] could not establish that, but for the alleged illegal seizure, the evidence would not have come to light as required by DeLuca.
United States v. Roberts, 91 Fed.Appx. 645, 648 (10th Cir. 2004) (emphasis added).
However, the quoted passage is dicta because we held both that the approach was not a seizure and that the officers had reasonable suspicion sufficient for a Terry stop in any event. The vehicle was parked in a public place and the officers did not make a show of force, and "law enforcement officers do not violate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable seizures merely by approaching individuals on the street or in other public places." Id. at 352 (quoting United States v. Drayton, 536 U.S. 194, 200, 122 S. Ct. 2105, 153 L. Ed. 2d 242 (2002)).
Here is the reductio ad absurdum. It is settled law that if the police illegally enter a house and search it, the owner or tenant of the house, or any long-term guests, may suppress evidence found during the search.15 Short-term guests, however, have no expectation of privacy in the house and therefore cannot suppress the fruits of the illegal search. This is true even if the short-term guests were seized pursuant to the illegal entry into the house. If, for example, the police barricaded the exits to a residence, entered, and ordered everyone present to freeze, they would have thereby seized everyone present in the residence. If their entry was illegal, for example if effected without a warrant and absent exigent circumstances, then all of those seizures were illegal. However, only the owner, tenant, or long-term guests could suppress evidence found during the search. Short-term guests would face the full evidentiary weight of any evidence discovered. See Minnesota v. Olson, 495 U.S. 91, 110 S. Ct. 1684, 109 L. Ed. 2d 85 (1990).
Now make the house a mobile home, and drive it down the street until it is pulled over illegally. The police again illegally seize all the occupants and search the interior. Under the holding we are announcing today—which conforms, as we observed above, with those of our sister circuits—those short-term guests are now passengers in an illegally seized vehicle, and thus can suppress all evidence discovered during the search. This result appears anomalous insofar as the Fourth Amendment has been repeatedly characterized by the Supreme Court as affording enhanced protection to the home, and diminished protection to vehicles. Compare, e.g., Georgia v. Randolph, 547 U.S. ___, 126 S. Ct. 1515, 164 L. Ed. 2d 208 (2006) (citing Wilson v. Layne, 526 U.S. 603, 610, 119 S. Ct. 1692, 143 L. Ed. 2d 818 (1999)) (invoking the "centuries-old principle of respect for the privacy of the home"); Minnesota v. Carter, 525 U.S. 83, 99, 119 S. Ct. 469, 142 L. Ed. 2d 373 (1998) (Kennedy, J., concurring) (" [I]t is beyond dispute that the home is entitled to special protection as the center of the private lives of our people."); Miller v. United States, 357 U.S. 301, 307, 78 S. Ct. 1190, 2 L. Ed. 2d 1332 (1958) (noting common law tradition that a poor man in a humble cottage might nonetheless bid defiance to all the forces of the crown (if it is his cottage)), with, e.g., United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U.S. 543, 561, 96 S. Ct. 3074, 49 L. Ed. 2d 1116 (1976) (explaining that Fourth Amendment protections are lessened for occupants of cars because cars searches do not implicate "the sanctity of private dwellings, ordinarily afforded the most stringent Fourth Amendment protection."). Yet in our hypothetical, passengers in a vehicle are afforded greater Fourth Amendment protection than guests in a home.
The Ninth and Eleventh Circuits have recently decided cases with precisely analogous facts. See United States v. Twilley, 222 F.3d 1092 (9th Cir. 2000); United States v. Chanthasouxat, 342 F.3d 1271 (11th Cir. 2003). In each case, the traffic stop was illegal from its inception,16 and evidence found during the traffic stop was introduced against a passenger in the car. In each case, the government contested the passenger's motion to suppress by arguing that the passenger lacked "standing" to challenge the evidence because he did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the interior of the car. In each case, the court applied a standard fruits analysis, and suppressed the evidence as the fruit of the illegal seizure.17
The two courts treated this fact pattern as an utterly straightforward and unremarkable application of the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine. Their analyses proceed precisely as Mosley argues ours should, in the following three steps. First, the traffic stop was a violation of the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights; second, the evidence was found as a direct consequence of the stop (that is, there were no significant intervening events); third, the government did not establish any of the various available exceptions (attenuation, independent source, inevitable discovery). The Twilley court held that " [b]ecause we conclude that the stop was not supported by reasonable suspicion, and because the subsequent search was a product of the stop, the evidence leading to Twilley's conviction should have been suppressed." Id. at 1097.18 The Chanthasouxat court held that " [b]ecause we conclude that the initial traffic stop violated the Fourth Amendment, the violation was not cured by voluntary consent, and that Chanthasouxat's [incriminating] statements [made during the stop] were fruits of the poisonous tree, we hold that the drug evidence and Chanthasouxat's statements must be suppressed." 342 F.3d at 1281.
In United States v. Reed, 349 F.3d 457 (7th Cir. 2003), the defendant passenger confessed to drug distribution after spending several hours with police (whether in custody or not was disputed) following a traffic stop. He contended that the police lacked probable cause for the stop,20 and sought suppression of the confession on fruits grounds. The district court ruled that even if the arrest was illegal, his subsequent confession was still voluntary. Thus the district court did not rule on the legality of the initial stop. On appeal, the Seventh Circuit, applying Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590, 95 S. Ct. 2254, 45 L. Ed. 2d 416 (1975), vacated and remanded, holding that, notwithstanding the lapse of time and the voluntariness of Reed's confession, the confession would have to be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree if the initial stop had been illegal. The Reed court explicitly rejected a "counterfactual purgation" analysis of the sort employed by the Tenth Circuit in DeLuca and by the District Court in the case at bar:
In United States v. Guevara-Martinez, 262 F.3d 751 (8th Cir. 2001), the defendant was a passenger in a car pulled over in an illegal traffic stop. During the stop, the officers searched the car and discovered methamphetamine. On that basis they arrested Guevera-Martinez. That night, in jail, he told an INS agent that he was in the country illegally. Guevera-Martinez was charged in separate indictments with both drug and immigration violations. Guevera moved to suppress the drugs, arguing that the traffic stop was illegal. The district court granted the motion, and the drug charges were dismissed. On the immigration charge, Guervera-Martinez sought to suppress both the statements he made and the fingerprints taken while he was in jail. The district court granted the suppression motion on the same grounds, holding that both the statements and prints were fruit of the illegal traffic stop, and the Eighth Circuit affirmed.
The Eighth Circuit applied a straightforward fruits analysis: " [O]fficers obtained Guevera-Martinez's fingerprints [and statements] by exploiting his unlawful detention, instead of by means sufficient to have purged the taint of the initial illegality." Id. at 755. The court deemed it irrelevant that Guevera-Martinez "will inevitably face" civil deportation proceedings in which new fingerprint evidence would easily be obtained, and which would support the reinstatement of the criminal immigration charges: " [T]he government asks us to ignore its use of tainted evidence in this case. We decline to [do so]... The important thing is that those administering the criminal law understand that they must obtain the evidence the right way." Id. at 756 (quoting Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U.S. 721, 726 n. 4, 89 S. Ct. 1394, 22 L. Ed. 2d 676 (1969)) (internal quotes, brackets omitted).
The Dortch case is particularly significant as an analogue to the case at bar because it was governed by the twin propositions that, first, an exterior investigation of a car by a drug-sniffing police dog is not a search as a matter of law, see Dortch, 199 F.3d at 198; (citing United States v. Seals, 987 F.2d 1102, 1106 (5th Cir. 1993)); see also Illinois v. Caballes, 543 U.S. 405, 409, 125 S. Ct. 834, 160 L. Ed. 2d 842 (2005), and second, that the dog's alerting to the car constitutes probable cause for a search, as a matter of law. See Dortch, 199 F.3d at 198 (citing United States v. Zucco, 71 F.3d 188, 191-92 (5th Cir. 1995)). Thus, in Dortch's case, as in Mosley's, there was no search to which he can object. If the dog team had arrived while Dortch was legally detained, there would have been no Fourth Amendment violation.21 The only basis for Dortch's suppression motion, as for Mosley's, is that the challenged evidence is the fruit of an illegal detention. Thus it is irrelevant that Dortch was the driver rather than a passenger, because that distinction applies only to challenges to the search of the car, and Dortch, like Mosley, made no such challenge.
United States v. Jones, 234 F.3d 234 (5th Cir. 2000), is similar to Dortch. In Jones, the car was validly stopped for speeding, but the police continued to detain both driver and passenger without probable cause after the legitimate purposes of the stop—issuance of a citation, and computer criminal history check— were completed. During the illegal prolongation of the detention, the driver consented to a search of the car, and contraband was discovered. The Fifth Circuit, upon determining that the consent was not sufficiently attenuated from the illegal detention to have been purged, ordered suppression of the evidence as to both the driver and the passenger, reasoning that although the passenger had no standing to challenge the search of the car, he could challenge the illegal extension of the traffic stop, and that extension was a single event which was causally connected to the discovery of the evidence. Id. at 244.
We think the better view is that a traffic stop is a single act, which affects equally all occupants of a vehicle. To us, that description of traffic stops comports with the commonsense experience of everyone who has ever ridden in a car; we agree with the First Circuit that the distinction between passenger and driver "is a distinction of no consequence in this context." Kimball, 25 F.3d at 5. A police officer who pulls over a vehicle does not, in the act of pulling over the vehicle, interact separately with each occupant; rather, the officer undertakes one action—turning on the siren and lights—which instantly affects everyone in the targeted vehicle, signaling to them that their freedom of movement has been restricted. It defies common sense and common experience to transmute one action into three, and we will not endorse a Fourth Amendment approach that relies on such a transmutation. The government insists that "Fourth Amendment rights are personal rights," and we do not contest the abstract validity of that proposition. But general propositions do not decide concrete cases, and we reject the practical implications the government seeks to derive from that proposition. We reject "blind adherence to a phrase which at most has superficial clarity and which conceals underneath that thin veneer all of the problems of line drawing which must be faced in any conscientious effort to apply the Fourth Amendment." Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128, 147, 99 S. Ct. 421, 58 L. Ed. 2d 387 (1978).
The Supreme Court has just this Term reiterated that the exclusionary rule was founded on, and is grounded in, the continuing exercise of pragmatic judicial supervision of the law enforcement activities of the executive branch, effectuated by expansion and contraction of the bubble of proximate cause as courts face particular concrete factual situations. See Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U.S. ___, 126 S. Ct. 2159, ___ L. Ed. 2d ___ (2006) (eliminating suppression remedy for knock-and-announce violations because, inter alia, as compared with the 1950s, police departments are more likely to be "staffed with professionals," and lawyers are more likely to take on § 1983 cases). The test by which our models of constitutional causation are measured is not empirical validation by experiment, but rather the march of social progress, refracted through continual judicial evaluation of constitutional purposes and social consequences. As the social context of law enforcement evolves, so too does the exclusionary rule. The debate about the constitutional consequences of traffic stops is akin, in this respect, to the debate about the constitutional consequences of electronic surveillance or computer copying. See, e.g., Orin S. Kerr, Searches and Seizures in a Digital World, 119 Harv. L. Rev. 531, 561 (2005) (pondering whether electronic copying of computer files constitutes a "seizure," and if so what the appropriate Fourth Amendment remedy should be).
Furthermore, were we to allow the government to use against Mosley the evidence recovered in this case, we would weaken, indeed nearly eviscerate, the Supreme Court's clear and unanimous command in Florida v. J.L. that an anonymous tip is a constitutionally deficient basis for an investigatory detention. See 529 U.S. at 273-74, 120 S. Ct. 1375. The Supreme Court did not, we presume, contemplate that its plain constitutional holding could be simply ignored as to all occupants of a vehicle other than the driver, and we will not lightly countenance such a result.
Nor, finally, is the reductio ad absurdum presented above (stationary mobile home versus moving mobile home) really all that absurd. The level of justification required to support a valid car search is extremely low, as we explained above, as compared with that required to support a valid home search. Most obviously, in contradistinction to house searches, there is no general warrant requirement for car searches. See, e.g., Maryland v. Dyson, 527 U.S. 465, 467, 119 S. Ct. 2013, 144 L. Ed. 2d 442 (1999). Thus all occupants of cars, drivers and passengers alike, are overwhelmingly more likely to be subject to police scrutiny when on the road than when at home. Of course, illegal police entries into and searches of homes do occur. But the frequency with which police effect forcible entries into homes is incomparably less than the frequency with which they pull over cars, and the teaching of Hudson is that such social facts matter. If warrantless house searches were as common as roadside traffic-stop searches, for example, then perhaps the protection afforded houseguests in Minnesota v. Olson, 495 U.S. 91, 110 S. Ct. 1684, 109 L. Ed. 2d 85 (1990), might have been broader. The exclusionary rule expresses, inherently and always, a standard of reasonableness that evolves along with police practices and social norms.
Mosley also contends, first, that the evidence of constructive possession was insufficient; second, that the District Court erroneously sentenced him under the "armed career criminal" enhancement provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 924(e); third, that the District Court failed adequately to determine whether Mosley's prior convictions were "related" for purposes of calculating his criminal history under the Guidelines; and fourth, that § 924(g), the felon-in-possession statute, is unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause. As to these, the government concedes error on the § 924(e) issue, and does not object to reconsideration of the Guidelines criminal history calculation. Because we will order suppression of the guns, we deem it unnecessary to decide the sufficiency question. And we acknowledge that the Federal Public Defender's office preserves the Commerce Clause challenge to § 922(g) in order to pursue certiorari in the Supreme Court; we are bound by our prior case,United States v. Singletary, 268 F.3d 196 (3d Cir. 2001), in which we upheld the constitutionality of the statute.
Consider this scenario: the police mount an operation in which they erect a fake "drug checkpoint" (which are flatly illegal under Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32, 121 S. Ct. 447, 148 L. Ed. 2d 333 (2000)) and then stake out the highway exit just before the fake checkpoint, videotape all vehicles exiting there, and pull over any vehicle that violates a traffic law (for example, failing to signal at the exit turn). The practice was upheld this year in United States v. Rodriguez-Lopez, 444 F.3d 1020 (8th Cir. 2006). More famously, in United States v. Arvizu, 534 U.S. 266, 122 S. Ct. 744, 151 L. Ed. 2d 740 (2002), the Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit's determination that a Border Patrol officer had gone too far in basing a traffic stop of a family van on his observation that the kids had waved at him "mechanically."
The "standing" inquiry, in the Fourth Amendment context, is shorthand for the determination of whether a litigant's Fourth Amendment rights have been implicated See United States v. Kimball, 25 F.3d 1, 5 (1st Cir. 1994) ("We use the term `standing' as a shorthand method of referring to the issue of whether the defendant's own Fourth Amendment interests were implicated by the challenged governmental action. `Technically, the concept of "standing" has not had a place in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence for more than a decade, since the Supreme Court in Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128, 99 S. Ct. 421, 58 L. Ed. 2d 387 (1978), indicated that matters of standing in the context of searches and seizures actually involved substantive Fourth Amendment law.' United States v. Sanchez, 943 F.2d 110, 113 n. 1 (1 st Cir. 1991).").
While the District Court's opinion is not entirely clear on this point, we read it to suggest that the District Court analytically separated the detention of the vehicle from the removal and detention of Mosley's person, and believed that only the latter constituted a seizure of Mosley for Fourth Amendment purposes. The District Court stated, for example, that " [f]or purposes of the instant Motion [to suppress], the Government concedes that the officers violated Defendant's Fourth Amendment rights by removing him from the vehicle and detaining him in connection with the stop of the vehicle."
For the most comprehensive collection of cases, see 6 Wayne R. LaFave,Search and Seizure § 11.3 (4th ed.2004) (citing, inter alia, United States v. Grant, 349 F.3d 192 (5th Cir. 2003); United States v. Ameling, 328 F.3d 443 (8th Cir. 2003); United States v. Gama-Bastidas, 142 F.3d 1233 (10th Cir. 1998); United States v. Sowers, 136 F.3d 24 (1st Cir. 1998); United States v. Rusher, 966 F.2d 868 (4th Cir. 1992)).
The test has since been applied by the Ninth Circuit in complex cases involving ongoing police investigations See, e.g., United States v. Kandik, 633 F.2d 1334 (9th Cir. 1980); United States v. Allard, 600 F.2d 1301 (9th Cir. 1979); United States v. Cella, 568 F.2d 1266 (9th Cir. 1977).
In fact this is not such an unusual occurrence. A traffic stop requires only reasonable suspicion to believe that a traffic violation has been committed. But detaining the vehicle longer than is necessary to effectuate the legitimate response to that traffic violation requires independent suspicion that some other crime is afoot. The transition from traffic stop to investigatory stop is the focal point of many suppression cases See, e.g., Illinois v. Caballes, 543 U.S. 405, 407, 125 S. Ct. 834, 160 L. Ed. 2d 842 (U.S.2005) ("A seizure that is justified solely by the interest in issuing a warning ticket to the driver can become unlawful if it is prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete that mission.").
We will not be overly coy, though: we recognize that the rationale for our holding might be thought to undermine the DeLuca rationale even on DeLuca facts. But the preceding sentence is dicta; when an appropriate case arises, the parties may do what they will with our decision here.
And the same is true of an earlier Tenth Circuit case,United States v. Nava-Ramirez, 210 F.3d 1128 (10th Cir. 2000), cited in DeLuca: "Nava-Ramirez does not contest the legality of the initial stop. Rather, he argues that at the moment [the officer] concluded his search of the passenger compartment without finding any evidence indicating Nava-Ramirez was involved in illegal activity, his continued detention became unlawful." That factual setting—initially legal stop, subsequent illegal detention of passenger—is the underpinning and necessary condition for the DeLuca-type "factual nexus" test. It has absolutely no application to situations where the passenger challenges the legality of the initial stop.
The Roberts case, to be sure, is unpublished, but we think the recently adopted amendment to Fed. R.App. Proc. 32(a) confirms the utility of looking to unpublished cases to determine how precedential cases are applied. Where, as here, an NPO clarifies the application of a prior precedent, almost all the circuits allow its citation by the parties, and we will not needlessly deprive ourselves of useful guidance on the scope of the caselaw that governed this case below.
Unless, of course, the illegality is restricted to a violation of the knock-and-announce rule, in which case no one, not even the owner, can suppress See Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U.S. ___, 126 S. Ct. 2159, ___ L. Ed. 2d ___ (2006).
The illegality of the traffic stop was caused in each case by a mistake of law on the part of the police officer. (Unlike a reasonable mistake of fact, a mistake of law negates reasonable suspicion and renders the stop illegal.) In Twilley, the officer pulled over the car based on the California law that all vehicles must display all plates issued by the state of registration. The car was from Michigan, which issues only one plate. The officer assumed that Michigan must issue two because, he said, "an awful lot of states issue two plates." 222 F.3d at 1094. In Chanthasouxat, the officer pulled over the van because it lacked an inside rearview mirror, and he thought that Alabama law required one. It does not.
The parties give a fair amount of attention to United States v. Pulliam, 405 F.3d 782 (9th Cir. 2005), but Pulliam is inapposite for the same reason most of the apparently analogous cases are: there was no determination or allegation that the initial stop of the car was illegal. The defendant in Pulliam was convicted based on evidence found in a search of a car in which he was a passenger, but he challenged only his personal arrest and search—not the initial traffic stop. He conceded that the traffic stop was legally justified, because the car had a broken tail light. 405 F.3d at 785. Pulliam is just another of the many cases where passengers lose suppression motions following legal traffic stops. That is not our case.
See also, e.g., United States v. Colin, 314 F.3d 439 (9th Cir. 2002) (same analysis as Twilley, and collecting cases). In both Twilley and Chanthasouxat, indeed, (and unlike our case) the driver of the vehicle in fact consented to the search, but the court ruled that the consent was not "obtained by means sufficiently distinguishable from the illegal stop to be purged of the primary taint." Chanthasouxat, 342 F.3d at 1280 (internal quotes, brackets omitted); accord Twilley, 222 F.3d at 1097 (because "the interrogation and search were a direct result of the illegal stop... this is a classic case of obtaining evidence through the exploitation of an illegal stop.") (internal quotes omitted).
Consent following an illegal seizure does not in itself purge the taint of the illegality for Fourth Amendment purposes; the government must show sufficient attenuation to causally disconnect the consent from the seizure. See United States v. Snype, 441 F.3d 119, 133 (2d Cir. 2006) (collecting numerous cases).
And indeed Dortch was neither the owner nor the authorized possessor of the car. The car had been rented by a third party (neither Dortch nor the passenger). Thus there is a colorable argument that Dortch had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the interior of the car whatsoever. But the court explains that it does not need to reach that issue, because the detention was illegal, and the fruits suppression follows directly from that determination See Dortch, 199 F.3d at 197-98 and n. 4 ("Given that Dortch does not challenge the legality of the search, it is puzzling that the dissent goes to such efforts to develop its theory that `because the rental agreement provided only the renter was an authorized driver, Dortch had no right to complain of the vehicle's detention.' In arguing that Dortch has no legitimate privacy interest in a rental car, the dissent seems to miss the point. As we explain above, Dortch's complaint is not that the vehicle was detained or improperly searched, but rather that he was improperly seized....").
For an illustration of this methodology in practice in the district courts, see United States v. Jones, 374 F. Supp. 2d 143 (D.D.C. 2005), which is very strongly analogous to our facts. The district court suppressed all the challenged evidence against the defendant after going through precisely the fruits analysis Mosley contends for here. Jones was a non-owner passenger in a vehicle that was illegally detained by the police. The car was parked when officers approached, questioned, detained, and arrested the two occupants, effecting an illegal seizure of Jones. The government argued first that the encounter was consensual, and then in the alternative that it was a permissible Terry stop. The court rejected both arguments and found the detention to be illegal. Id. at 149, 152. Accordingly, it suppressed all evidence subsequently recovered, including both physical evidence and statements, because "the government failed to meet its burden of justifying under the Fourth Amendment the police intrusion upon Jones' liberty." Id. at 153. The court recognized that Jones, as a non-owner passenger, "failed to demonstrate a legitimate expectation of privacy in the vehicle or items recovered from it," id. at 154, but deemed that fact irrelevant because the suppression claim was grounded in the illegal detention rather than the search itself. " [The auto passenger search cases] involve claims that the search of the vehicle or compartments within it was unlawful. By contrast, Jones here argues that he was unlawfully stopped and seized, and thus the contents of the [car] should be suppressed as the result of that unlawful seizure." Id. The court accordingly considered whether any "dissipating" or "purging" factors were present, such as lapse of time or intervening circumstances. Finding none, the court ordered all evidence recovered as a result of the initial encounter to be suppressed.
That this practice is legitimate is at present beyond constitutional cavil under Whren. However, the excesses its use periodically engenders have not gone unnoticed, and in recent years many police departments have studied and adopted procedural reforms that may be implemented to monitor vehicle stops and reduce the incidence of racial profiling and other abuses of the seizure power on the roads. See, e.g., Robin Shepard Engel, et al., Project on Police-Citizen Contacts (2004) (report and recommendations prepared for Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Colonel Jeffrey Miller); New Jersey Senate Judiciary Committee, The New Jersey Senate Judiciary Committee's Investigation of Racial Profiling and the New Jersey State Police: Overview and Recommendations (2001) (recommendations for reforms in wake of widely-publicized racial profiling incidents). Such reforms can provide significant protection for equal protection and due process rights, in addition to Fourth Amendment rights, and we recognize that the incentives created by the exclusionary rule have a significant effect on police behavior. Allowing unfettered use against passengers of evidence obtained during unconstitutional traffic stops could undermine these reform efforts. And unlike the knock-and-announce rule, the constitutional prohibitions on racial profiling and reliance on anonymous tips do go the heart of the validity of the underlying police action itself, not merely the method of its execution.