Opinion ID: 222448
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Import of Search Intent

Text: On appeal, McCarty contends the district court was correct in finding that Andrade developed a subjective “impermissible motive” to search for contraband that extended the warrantless search beyond the constitutional bounds of the valid administrative search, essentially transforming what began as a lawful administrative search into an independent investigation for evidence of child pornography. As such, McCarty argues that Andrade’s subjective motivation was the invalidating factor that caused her actions to exceed the scope of the lawful administrative search. The government counters that where the overarching search scheme involves only a single, constitutionally-valid programmatic motive, the subjective intentions of the individual agent acting without broad discretion in carrying out the search are wholly irrelevant. Accordingly, the government argues, because the TSA agents here could have viewed any item in McCarty’s bag while screening for explosives as part of their administrative search and there was no additional programmatic motive, any subtle shifts in the individual minds of the TSA screeners had “no constitutional significance,” the search was not extended beyond its permissible scope, and all of the items viewed during the search should have been admitted. In the mine run of Fourth Amendment cases where at least some quantum of suspicion is involved, the reasonableness inquiry we conduct is largely an objective one, and the subjective motivations of the individual officer involved are irrelevant in determining whether the circumstances objectively justified the action taken or the intrusion occasioned. See Ashcroft v. Al-Kidd, 563 U.S. ___, 131 S. Ct. 2074, 2080 (2011). There are “[t]wo ‘limited exception[s]’ to this rule [for] special-needs and administrative-search cases, where ‘actual motivations’ do matter.” Id. (quoting United States v. Knights, 534 U.S. 112, 122 (2001)). In these cases, the special or administrative need typically dispenses with the Fourth UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY 10027 Amendment requirement of a warrant or probable cause for the search. Id. at 2081. However, the exemption from the warrant and probable cause requirements in these types of warrantless, suspicionless searches “do[es] not apply where the officer’s purpose is not to attend to the special needs or to the investigation for which the administrative inspection is justified.” Id. (citing Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 811-12 (1996)). [5] Thus, some inquiry into the actual motivations behind an administrative search is permitted to guard against wholly pretextual intrusions into the public’s reasonable expectations of privacy. See Edmond, 531 U.S. at 46-47; United States v. Hellman, 556 F.2d 442, 444 (9th Cir. 1977) (inventory of defendant’s car was not validated by administrative search rationale where department had no standard policy of inventorying impounded cars, it was clear that the search was actually conducted for “an investigatory police motive,” and officer testified that he instigated the impound specifically to “justify an investigatory search”); see also Bulacan, 156 F.3d at 967 (because an “administrative search scheme invests the Government with the power to intrude into the privacy of ordinary citizens”—a power with “vast potential for abuse”— “courts must take care to ensure that an administrative search is not subverted into a general search for evidence of crime.” (citations omitted)).15 [6] Nevertheless, where—as here—the search is “ ‘undertaken pursuant to a general scheme without individualized suspicion,’ ” Al-Kidd, 131 S. Ct. at 2081 (quoting Edmond, 15 Cf. Al-Kidd, 131 S. Ct. at 2082 (describing administrative searches as “less protective” than searches pursuant to warrants); Whren, 517 U.S. at 811-12 (“the exemption from the need for probable cause (and warrant), which is accorded to searches made for the purpose of inventory or administrative regulation, is not accorded to searches that are not made for those purposes”). 10028 UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY 531 U.S. at 45-46), consideration of the government actor’s actual motivation has been limited to an inquiry into the programmatic purposes motivating the search, see Edmond, 531 U.S. at 47; accord Al-Kidd, 131 S. Ct. at 2081. The Supreme Court has cautioned that this inquiry “is not an invitation to probe the minds of individual officers acting at the scene.” Edmond, 531 U.S. at 48 (emphasis added) (citing generally Whren, 517 U.S. 806). Accordingly, this court has held that where a warrantless search is conducted pursuant to a lawful administrative scheme with a constitutionally permissible motivation, “the subjective motive of the individual conducting the search will not invalidate the search.” See Bulacan, 156 F.3d at 966-67 (citing United States v. Bowhay, 992 F.2d 229, 231 (9th Cir. 1993)). See also United States v. Tsai, 282 F.3d 690, 695-96 (9th Cir. 2002) (applicability of the exception to the probable cause requirement “turns more on examination of the search’s scope than on an inquiry into the searcher’s motivation”). In Bowhay, a police officer searched an arrestee’s bag pursuant to a standard inventory search policy that required inventory of all evidence brought to the police station. 992 F.2d at 230. We held that the fact that the officer had an unlawful secondary search purpose in mind when he searched the bag— hoping to find contraband inside—did not invalidate the otherwise lawful administrative inventory search because the searching officer’s actions would have been the same regardless of his “true” motivation. Id. at 231. Similarly, Bulacan examined the effect of an unlawful secondary purpose—the goal of searching for narcotics—on an otherwise valid administrative search, where the officers performed administrative searches of all entrants to a federal building. 156 F.3d at 965. The agents were required, pursuant to a federal regulation and instruction, to search the bags of all entrants for both safety hazards and vice items such as narcotics, alcohol, or gambling materials. Id. at 965-66. However, unlike in Bowhay, the officers had unfettered discretion UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY 10029 in determining which bags or containers to search, based on their own individual judgment. Id. at 966. We held that, where the officer had “broad discretion as to the parameters of the search,” the addition of the programmatic motive to search for narcotics, which was not legitimately related to the constitutional administrative search for safety purposes, led to the impermissible extension of the scope of the search, “regardless of whether the items searched could have been subject to a valid administrative search.” Id. at 970. Central to Bulacan’s holding was that the search scheme itself imposed an additional, impermissible motive unrelated to administrative purposes, such that individual officers, in exercising the broad discretion granted them, could conduct more extensive searches based on the secondary law enforcement-related motive. See id. at 971, 973 (“[W]hen an administrative search scheme encompasses both a permissible and an impermissible purpose, and when the officer conducting the search has broad discretion in carrying out the search, that search does not meet the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirements.”). We were concerned that the secondary motive explicit in the search scheme would necessarily infect the primary search motive, altering the scope of the search. Id. at 971. Likewise, in $124,570 U.S. Currency, we held an airport search of a passenger’s baggage, pursuant to an established policy providing a $250 reward for screeners reporting discovery of large sums of U.S. currency, could not be upheld as a valid administrative search because the policy injected into the administrative search scheme—at the programmatic level —an impermissible secondary purpose, and screeners with broad discretion to decide what bags to search necessarily could not separate the permissible from the impermissible motive. 873 F.2d at 1245-47 & n.3; see also id. at 1246 (noting that “the policy of ‘work[ing] hand-in-hand with U.S. Customs and Port Police regarding the detection and reporting of drugs and U.S. currency’ will very likely influence [trans10030 UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY portation security] officers to conduct more searches, and more intrusive searches, than if they focus on air safety alone” (first alteration in original)).16 In determining that Andrade’s subjective intent to search for child pornography would have invalidated an otherwise lawful search if the search was one of dual purposes, the district court emphasized that Andrade had broad discretion, similar to the discretion afforded officers in Bulacan, in how deeply she searched McCarty’s bag. McCarty, 672 F. Supp. 2d at 1098. This was error resulting from conflation of the applicable law. That the TSA screener here might have had discretion as broad as the screener in $124,570 U.S. Currency or Bulacan is immaterial to our analysis because, unlike Bulacan and $124,570 U.S. Currency, it is undisputed that here there was no programmatic secondary purpose—Andrade did not receive any reward for finding contraband, and searching for evidence of a crime was not part of her assigned duties. The TSA search scheme under which she operated was focused solely on the discovery of threats to air travel safety. Thus, the inquiries into discretion and search intent outlined in Bulacan and $124,570 U.S. Currency are simply inapplica16 Although $124,570 U.S. Currency involved an airport search, similar to this one, in which a bag was flagged as having an unidentifiable dense mass by an X-ray machine, we did not premise our holding on the subjective intent of the officer. Rather, we found that the impermissible search scheme, combined with broad discretion in which containers to search, invalidated the simultaneous lawful administrative search from the outset. See 873 F.2d at 1247. We emphasized that [n]othing we say today precludes [transportation security] officers from reporting information pertaining to criminal activity, as would any citizen. We see the matter as materially different where the communication is undertaken pursuant to an established relationship, fostered by official policy, even more so where the communication is nurtured by payment of monetary rewards. The line we draw is a fine one but, we believe, one that has constitutional significance. Id. at 1247 n.7 (emphasis added). UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY 10031 ble here because the “purpose inquiry in [the context of intrusions undertaken pursuant to a general scheme without individualized suspicion] is to be conducted only at the programmatic level and is not an invitation to probe the minds of individual officers acting at the scene.” Edmond, 531 U.S. at 45-46. Of course, to say that we conduct the Fourth Amendment inquiry “only at the programmatic level” is not to say that a lawful administrative search intent, engaged at the inception of the search but later abandoned, provides carte blanche to the searching officers to snoop to their hearts’ content without regard to the scope of their actions. The search must still be “in furtherance” of the administrative goal, Davis, 482 F.2d at 908, “no more extensive nor intensive than necessary, in the light of current technology, to detect the presence of weapons or explosives[,] . . . [and] confined in good faith to that purpose,” id. at 913. [7] So, as long as (1) the search was undertaken pursuant to a legitimate administrative search scheme; (2) the searcher’s actions are cabined to the scope of the permissible administrative search; and (3) there was no impermissible programmatic secondary motive for the search, the development of a second, subjective motive to verify the presence of contraband is irrelevant to the Fourth Amendment analysis. See id.; Edmond, 531 U.S. at 45-46; Aukai, 497 F.3d at 962; Bulacan, 156 F.3d at 967-68; Bowhay, 992 F.2d at 231. Thus, the presence here of a secondary desire to confirm that the items searched might be contraband could not, in and of itself, invalidate the initially constitutional administrative search Andrade conducted, at least as long as she actually engaged in a search for explosives and her actions were no more intrusive than necessary to clear the bag of any safety concerns. See Bowhay, 992 F.2d at 231 (“When the police conduct would have been the same regardless of the officer’s subjective state of mind, no purpose is served by attempting to tease out the officer’s ‘true’ motivation.” (citing Horton v. Califor10032 UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY nia, 496 U.S. 128 (1990))). The subjective intent of the individual officer in such a search thus becomes as relevant as objective conduct only at the point at which the search ceases legitimately to be for the valid administrative purpose, as that is the point after which the administrative exception can no longer justify continuation of the warrantless search.