Opinion ID: 199768
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: standard of review

Text: 17 In reviewing a district court's curtilage decision, we confront a mixture of specific factual questions, such as distances, visibility, boundaries, and uses of property, as well as legal conclusions. This court has never specifically articulated the standard of review applicable to curtilage determinations, but we believe that United States Supreme Court precedent and our own caselaw call for clear error review of the district court's factual findings and de novo review of the court's legal conclusions. 18 In Ornelas v. United States, 517 U.S. 690, 698-99 (1996), the Supreme Court endorsed a de novo standard of review for the ultimate resolution of similar Fourth Amendment questions: the determination of reasonable suspicion and probable cause. As in those inquiries, the question of curtilage requires a court to make a legal judgment about the significance of a collection of facts. We borrow the observations of the Ninth Circuit in United States v. Johnson, 256 F.3d 895 (9th Cir. 2001) (en banc) 1 : 19 The curtilage question turns on whether the area in question is so intimately tied to the home itself that it should be placed under the home's 'umbrella' of Fourth Amendment protection. [United States v. Dunn], 480 U.S. [294, 301 (1987)]. The question of whether an area should be protected by the Fourth Amendment is not ultimately a factual one. It depends upon whether the government's intrusion in the area infringes upon the personal and societal values protected by the Fourth Amendment. Oliver [v. United States, 466 U.S. 170, 182-83 (1984)]. In making that determination, a court must apply this legal value judgment to the facts of each case. 20 Id. at 912-13 (footnote omitted). The application of law to a particular set of facts is not peculiarly within the province of the district courts, id. at 913, and indeed, [i]ndependent review is . . . necessary if appellate courts are to maintain control of, and to clarify, the legal principles, Ornelas, 517 U.S. at 697. 21 Even before the Court's decision in Ornelas, we had utilized this dichotomous standard of review for constitutional questions involving a mix of fact and law. See United States v. Schaefer, 87 F.3d 562, 565 n.2 (lst Cir. 1996) (The Ornelas Court's holding is fully consistent with this circuit's precedent . . . . (citing United States v. Zapata, 18 F.3d 971, 975 (lst Cir. 1994) (In scrutinizing a district court's denial of a suppression motion, the court of appeals will review findings of fact for clear error, while at the same time subjecting the trial court's ultimate constitutional conclusions to plenary oversight.))). 2 We therefore explicitly extend this approach to findings that particular locations are within or outside a home's curtilage. 3