Opinion ID: 786196
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Fulani Abandoned His Overhead Bag

Text: 10 Following the Supreme Court's rulings in Bostick and Drayton, police officers may request to search bus passengers, even without notifying them of their right to refuse cooperation, so long as a reasonable person would have felt free to refuse cooperation. In Fulani's case, he was told that he had the right to refuse cooperation, but he nonetheless chose to cooperate. There is no evidence that a reasonable person in his position would not have felt free to refuse cooperation; in fact, the bus doors remained open and the aisle remained unobstructed during the entire investigation. 11 In choosing to cooperate with Agent Paret's questioning, Fulani told him that he had one plastic bag by his feet and no baggage in the overhead rack. Fulani had other choices. First, he could have said that he owned the overhead bag, thereby requiring the agents to obtain his consent to search it if they desired to do so. 2 Second, Fulani could have remained silent, and thus have avoided giving the agents a basis to search the bag. Instead, what Fulani did was disclaim ownership of every bag located in the overhead rack, including the one that bore his name on it. In so doing, Fulani abandoned ownership in his bag, effectively waiving his right to bar its search. 12 Fulani manifested his intent to abandon his overhead bag in a clear and unequivocal way. In addition to his express statement to Agent Paret that none of the baggage in the overhead rack belonged to him, after voluntarily cooperating Fulani implicitly denied ownership of the bag on two occasions when he remained silent in the face of Agent Aster's questioning directed to the entire bus. This silence was no mere passive failure to claim ownership, as the district court concluded in reliance on Stanberry v. Maryland, 343 Md. 720, 684 A.2d 823 (1996). 13 We are satisfied that viewing the facts in their totality, Fulani's explicit denial of ownership of the bag (when he spoke to Agent Paret), coupled with his two implicit denials (when he remained silent in response to Agent Aster's bus-wide questioning), show Fulani's clear and unequivocal abandonment of his privacy interest in the overhead bag. 3 Thus, we hold that the district court erred in suppressing the bag and its contents. Accord United States v. Cofield, 272 F.3d 1303, 1307 (11th Cir.2001) (abandonment resulted where in response to police officers' requests for permission to search two bags, defendant removed the bags from his shoulders and put them on the ground, denied that the bags belonged to him, and attempted to walk away from the area); United States v. Springer, 946 F.2d 1012, 1017 (2d Cir.1991) (abandonment occurred where defendant stated that bag was not his and then consistently disclaimed ownership of it); Lewis, 921 F.2d at 1303 (abandonment occurred where defendant denied ownership of luggage in overhead rack). 14 Moreover, we disagree with the district court's ruling that once the agents discovered Fulani's nametag on the unclaimed luggage, that they no longer could infer that the luggage was abandoned. While the presence of a nametag on one's luggage may be an indicia of an expectation of privacy, the Fourth Amendment protects only a reasonable expectation of privacy, and after a passenger refuses to claim luggage with the nametag on three separate occasions after he cooperates at least in part with the agents, as Fulani did here, he no longer has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his luggage. We further reject Fulani's argument that he could not have abandoned his luggage without physically removing himself from it. The Fourth Amendment poses no such requirement; it merely asks whether the defendant has made a clear and unequivocal manifestation of his intent to abandon his property. 15 Finally, there is no evidence of any police misconduct in this case that might render Fulani's abandonment involuntary. See Lewis, 921 F.2d at 1302-03 (abandonment may be involuntary, and thus invalid, where it results directly from police misconduct, such as an illegal search or seizure, deceit, or, perhaps, a pattern of harassment). In this case the agents advised all the passengers, including Fulani, of their right not to cooperate; they left the bus doors open; and they left the aisle unobstructed. Thus, there was no evidence of a confining atmosphere that might have rendered Fulani's abandonment involuntary. See, e.g., United States v. McDonald, 100 F.3d 1320, 1327-29 (7th Cir.1996) (rejecting argument that confining atmosphere on bus due to the presence of three police officers rendered abandonment invalid).