Opinion ID: 222448
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Scope of the Lawful Administrative Search

Text: [1] The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures of people and their effects. U.S. Const. amend. IV. Searches and seizures are “ ‘ordinarily unreasonable in the absence of individualized suspicion of wrongdoing,’ ” Aukai, 497 F.3d at 958 (quoting City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32, 37 (2000)), and the circumstances under which a warrantless search not supported by probable cause may be considered reasonable under the Fourth Amendment are very limited, see id.; United States v. Caseres, 533 F.3d 1064, 1070 (9th Cir. 2008) (citing Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 357 (1967)). [2] Blanket suspicionless searches “calibrated to [a] risk may rank as ‘reasonable.’ ” Aukai, 497 F.3d at 958 (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting Chandler v. Miller, 520 U.S. 305, 323 (1997)). For example, if properly limited, “searches now routine at airports and at entrances to courts,” are reasonable because they respond to a “ ‘risk to public safety [that] is substantial and real.’ ” Id. (quoting Chandler, 520 U.S. at 323). Generally, “airport screening searches . . . are constitutionally reasonable administrative searches because they are ‘conducted as part of a general regulatory scheme in furtherance of an administrative purpose, namely, to prevent the carrying of weapons or explosives aboard aircraft, and thereby to prevent hijackings.’ ” Id. at 960 (quoting United States v. Davis, 482 F.2d 893, 908 (9th Cir. 1973)).13 13 Aukai cautions that “[t]he Supreme Court has not specifically held that airport screening searches are constitutionally reasonable administrative searches,” but rather has suggested that they qualify as such. 497 F.3d at 959 n.2 (collecting cases). UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY 10025 [3] Here, the parties agree that, under federal law, TSA agents could legally search McCarty’s entire bag for explosives or other safety hazards. See 49 U.S.C. § 44901; cf. 49 C.F.R. § 1540.111(c) (prohibiting passengers from placing unauthorized explosives, firearms, and incendiary devices in their checked baggage). However, because warrantless, suspicionless administrative searches remain subject to the Fourth Amendment, a particular search is “constitutionally reasonable [only where] it ‘is no more extensive nor intensive than necessary, in the light of current technology, to detect the presence of weapons or explosives [and where] it is confined in good faith to that purpose.’ ” Aukai, 497 F.3d at 962 (quoting Davis, 482 F.2d at 913). [4] In other words, an airport search remains a valid administrative search only so long as the scope of the administrative search exception is not exceeded; “once a search is conducted for a criminal investigatory purpose, it can no longer be justified under an administrative search rationale.” United States v. $124,570 U.S. Currency, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 n.5 (9th Cir. 1989). Thus, because TSA screeners are limited to the single administrative goal of searching for possible safety threats related to explosives, the constitutional bounds of an airport administrative search require that the individual screener’s actions be no more intrusive than necessary to determine the existence or absence of explosives that could result in harm to the passengers and aircraft. See id. at 1245.14 14 Of course, longstanding precedent allows a screener to call law enforcement if she inadvertently discovers a possibly contraband item in the course of performing her safety check, so long as the scope of the search remains properly cabined to the extent of the lawful administrative search. $124,570 U.S. Currency, 873 F.2d at 1249 n.7. We have “refuse[d] to impose an unworkable and unreasonable constraint” on government agents engaged in good faith administrative searches “by requiring that they avert their eyes from obvious unlawfulness.” United States v. Seljan, 547 F.3d 993, 1005 (9th Cir. 2008) (en banc) (treating customs official searches). 10026 UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY
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.
The crux of the issue, then, involves two related questions: (1) when did Andrade’s administrative search for explosives truly end, and become a wholly independent search for evidence of child pornography?; and (2) which of Andrade’s actions exceeded the scope of the administrative search by becoming “more extensive [or] intensive than necessary, in the light of current technology, to detect the presence of weapons or explosives”? Davis, 482 F.2d at 913. In a typical case, lines of permissibly cabined and impermissibly extended search actions are easy to identify—in Aukai, for instance, we noted that a TSA screening of airline passengers and their carry-on luggage was appropriately limited where TSA screeners escalated the invasiveness of their search after each level of screening produced a reason to search more closely. 497 F.3d at 962. We reasoned that taking such a stairstep approach—first wanding a passenger after a magnetometer alerted to the presence of metal on the passenger’s body, then asking the passenger to remove items from his pocket, and ultimately only feeling the outside of the passenger’s pocket after the passenger failed to remove all of the contents upon request—was both minimally intrusive and respectful of personal privacy. Each level of increased invasiveness in the search was necessary and tailored to dispel the safety concerns presented. See id. [8] By contrast, where an action is taken that cannot serve the administrative purpose—either because the threat necessitating the administrative search has been dismissed, or UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY 10033 because the action is simply unrelated to the administrative goal—the action clearly exceeds the scope of the permissible search. Cf. United States v. Miles, 247 F.3d 1009, 1014-15 (9th Cir. 2001) (police officer exceeded scope of permissible Terry frisk where he continued to manipulate a box in a defendant’s pocket after having concluded that the box could not possibly be a weapon, as “[h]e had no cause to shake or manipulate the tiny box on the pretext that he was still looking for a weapon”); United States v. $557,933.89, 287 F.3d 66, 82 (2d Cir. 2002) (suggesting that airport security personnel would exceed permissible search scope if they “looked into areas or opened packages which could not possibly contain weapons or explosives”). [9] Here, the scope of the permissible search—mandated by the TSA protocol—was defined by the point at which the screener was convinced the bag posed no threat to airline safety. Once Andrade was sufficiently certain that there were no explosives or other safety hazards hidden inside McCarty’s bag, the administrative search was over—nothing else was required to detect threats to aircraft safety. As the district court correctly reasoned, any search actions taken thereafter would impermissibly extend the scope of the search beyond what was necessary, because they could not possibly meet the requirement that the screener’s actions be “ ‘strictly tied to and justified by the circumstances which rendered [the search’s] initiation permissible.’ ” Davis, 482 F.2d at 911 n.49 (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 19 (1968)); see also Aukai, 497 F.3d at 962. [10] Andrade conceded that, at the point when she read the content of the letters and looked at the newspaper articles and advertisements, she was no longer searching for explosives. Rather, at that point, she had abandoned the search for safety hazards and was reviewing the items to confirm her feeling that the photographs were contraband evidencing children in harm’s way. DCD #57 at 81-85. These actions were indisputably part of an effort to verify the presence of child pornogra10034 UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY phy. Thus, the actions taken in this portion of the search clearly fell outside the permissible scope of the lawful administrative search and violated McCarty’s Fourth Amendment rights because they were more extensive and intrusive than necessary to detect air travel safety concerns. See Davis, 482 F.2d at 913. But the district court found that other portions of Andrade’s search exceeded the scope of the lawful administrative search as well. Based on Andrade’s “testimony and lack of credibility, the court specifically [found] that [she] searched the photographs in the envelope not for sheet explosives but for evidence of child pornography.” McCarty, 672 F. Supp. 2d at 1097 n.8. It thus cabined the extent of the lawful search to just the first few photographs that spilled onto the search table, and found that the photographs and other items in the envelope had only been discovered as a result of an “overbroad investigation into the criminal nature of the photographs.” See id. at 1099. We are mindful that factual findings of this type are entitled to great deference and should be reversed only where a thorough reading of the record leads us to the “definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been made.” Husain, 316 F.3d at 835 (internal quotation marks omitted). Nonetheless, we can find no support in the record for the district court’s conclusion that Andrade searched the photographs in the envelope for evidence of child pornography. At one point in its decision, the district court asserted that Andrade had conceded that she was reviewing the contents of the envelope—including the photographs therein—solely out of concern for the children depicted. McCarty, 672 F. Supp. 2d at 1094 (referencing DCD #57 at 81-83). It is upon this statement that the district court based its factual finding that Andrade was not searching for sheet explosives when she looked through the photographs in the envelope. Id. at 109798. However, a review of the transcript reveals that Andrade’s UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY 10035 concession was limited to a statement that when she read lines from the newspaper clippings and the letters—which occurred after she had inspected the initially spilled photographs and a small portion of the photographs in the envelope—her reading was focused on determining whether the children had been harmed. DCD #57 at 61-62, 81-82. Andrade did not at any point state that she had abandoned her primary search for aircraft safety hazards at the time she viewed the photographs in the envelope. The district court also stated that “Andrade testified that she went through some of the photographs on the table because she ‘felt that the children were in a harmful way’ and ‘needed to see more before I called my lead.’ ” McCarty, 672 F. Supp. 2d at 1097 (citing DCD #57 at 61-62). The record contradicts this conclusion. Although the long question posed to Andrade before she made those statements did reference her perusal of the photographs as part of a chronology of her actions, the part of the question soliciting an answer did not; it merely asked Andrade “why did you go through those testimonies?” DCD #57 at 61-62 (referring to Andrade’s having read a few lines of the letters).17 Andrade went on to clearly and repeatedly testify that she viewed the photographs in the envelope for the purpose of investigating the “possible mas17 The complete inquiry reads as follows: Q: So procedurally I want to go through what happened at that point when you decided to go through these items. Okay. When you went through the items, you looked at you said less than half the photographs, there was these other items that you testified to, these ads, newspaper clippings, and letters, why did you go through those testimonies? A: Because I felt the children were in a harmful way. THE COURT: I’m sorry, I did not understand your answer. THE WITNESS: I felt that I needed to see more than what I saw before I called my lead. DCD #57 at 61-62. 10036 UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY sive dark area” on which the CTX machine alarmed, and to determine if any sheet explosives were hidden therein. See DCD #57 at 63 (“I needed to go through the envelope itself because of the possible massive dark area.”); 76 (correcting defense counsel when he suggested that she began looking through the materials in the envelope to see what the contents were about: “Not check exactly what it was. I needed to finish my check as far as the massive dark area.”); 86 (noting that, after looking at the photographs that spilled onto the table but before looking at the newspaper clippings or letter, she “went into the envelope to see if there was anything hidden in the envelope”); 89 (noting that she could not determine that there was no safety concern, with respect to explosives, just by pulling the photographs out of the envelope; she had to do a physical search of the items); 95 (correcting defense counsel’s assertion that at the point she pulled the photographs out of the envelope, she was no longer concerned with the safety of the dense mass identified by the scanner: “I still was.”). Indeed, defense counsel asked Andrade repeatedly whether she was still searching for explosives and other safety concerns when she read materials from the envelope, and Andrade confirmed on each occasion that she was concerned only about the children in the photos at that point. Id. at 8385 (confirming four times that at the time she began to read the other items in the envelope—including the newspaper articles and the letters—she was no longer concerned with safety but needed to know what the nude pictures were about). However, when defense counsel asserted that Andrade had searched all of the items in the envelope for the purpose of determining what the nude photographs were about, Andrade corrected him, stating “No . . . I need to determine if there was anything hidden in the pictures — rest of the pictures in the envelope . . . . Because of the massed area. I needed to continue my search.” Id. at 85.18 18 Indeed, the prosecutor objected to defense counsel’s question on this point as misstating Andrade’s testimony; the district court overruled the objection. DCD #57 at 85. UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY 10037 [11] However unclear Andrade’s testimony was on other points—exactly which images she saw, how many photographs spilled onto the table, and whether she touched or did not touch the photographs on the table before calling the lead officer—she was consistently clear and emphatic that when she looked through the photographs in the envelope, she was still acting to ensure that there were no sheet explosives hidden inside. No testimony in the record contradicted hers on this point. Further, this search intent was consistent with the TSA protocol requiring Andrade to thumb through the photographs in order to clear the bag. The district court’s factual conclusion on this point is without support in the record, and must be vacated.19 [12] Thus, the screener’s review of the photographs in the packet occurred within the scope of the ongoing lawful administrative search. As a result, her discovery of their nature coincided with her search for explosives, rather than followed the formation of an independent and exclusive intent to search for contraband. Accordingly, Andrade’s viewing of the photographs from the envelope was justified by and part of the lawful administrative search, see Aukai, 497 F.3d at 19 That the TSA screener did not flip through the entire stack of photographs before calling her supervisor does not undermine our conclusion. We find it troubling that the district court treated the fact that the search was not completed as a strong indicator that Andrade’s testimony was not credible. See McCarty, 672 F. Supp. 2d at 1098. A review of the testimony presented shows that only a few short minutes passed between the time the CTX machine alarmed on the bag and the time law enforcement was called, DCD #57 at 201, and the TSA lead officer was already in the room when Andrade began the lawful search. Given the timeframe within which the events occurred, we are unsurprised that the TSA screener did not complete the thumb through before her lead came over to see what possible contraband had been found, and we think this fact should not subvert the notion that a complete—or at least further—protocol search would have been required to dispel any safety concerns after viewing the initial photographs. Supporting our reasoning is the fact that although Andrade did not finish clearing the bag of safety concerns herself before calling the lead, TSA Supervisor Kamohai did so. Id. at 95. 10038 UNITED STATES v. MCCARTY 962, and—as we clarified above—even the development of a secondary desire to confirm that the photographs evidenced contraband did not invalidate that search, see Bowhay, 992 F.2d at 231.