Opinion ID: 2994497
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Evidence Gathered During Searches

Text: Wesela first contests the legality of the officers’ search for his gun immediately following his arrest. His theory is that Mrs. Wesela allowed the officers to enter her home for one very limited purpose: to arrest him. He contends that Mrs. Wesela did not consent to a search for the gun, or, in the alternative, that even if she impliedly consented to a search for the gun, the officers exceeded the scope of that implied consent. (He concedes that if the search for the gun was permissible, then evidence of the rest of the items discovered during that search, such as the blood-stained tennis shoes, cat feces, and blood stain on the rug, were admissible under the plain view doctrine.) Wesela also contests the admission of evidence related to items found during Detective Corbett’s search of the home (the bullet in the baseboard, the gun box, and the shell casings). For the latter search, he argues again that his wife did not give her express consent and, because she was being interviewed by Detective Schmitz while Detective Corbett searched, she could not have impliedly consented either. Following a hearing on the motion to suppress, Magistrate Judge Gorence made several findings of fact, which the district court adopted in their entirety. The district court, however, drew different legal conclusions from those findings. Both judges agreed that Mrs. Wesela consented to the police entry of her apartment to arrest her husband and to search for the gun. The magistrate judge, who found that the scope of her consent was limited to looking for the gun, would have suppressed the items Detective Corbett found, because Mrs. Wesela never broadened her consent. The district court saw things differently. It concluded that Mrs. Wesela’s failure to object constituted general consent to the search, and all evidence discovered by Detective Corbett--the documents in the gun box, the bullet in the baseboard, and the two shell casings deep inside the garbage bag--was admissible. Under the Fourth Amendment, the standard for measuring the scope of an individual’s consent is objective reasonableness: what would the typical reasonable person have understood by the exchange between the officer and the [person giving consent]? Florida v. Jimeno, 500 U.S. 248, 251 (1991). The scope of a search is generally defined by its expressed object. Id. To determine whether a search was within the boundaries of consent is determined according to the totality of all the circumstances. United States v. Torres, 32 F.3d 225, 230-31 (7th Cir. 1994). We agree with the district court that these facts demonstrate Mrs. Wesela’s consent to search the apartment for both her husband and the gun. She called the agents for the express purpose of ridding her house of the threat posed by her (armed) husband, and she allowed the officers to enter her house in order to arrest him. At the suppression hearing, one of the officers testified that she consented to the officers’ entering the apartment to secure both the man and the gun. Mrs. Wesela herself told the officers where they could find the gun. The fact that there was no direct verbal exchange between Detective Corbett and Mrs. Wesela in which she explicitly said it’s o.k. with me for you to search the apartment, is immaterial, as the events indicate her implicit consent. Mrs. Wesela was in the living room while the search was going on in the bedroom; the bedroom was not visible from the living room, but Detective Corbett was able to overhear her description of events while he was in the bedroom and she was able to hear and respond to his question about the ownership of the tennis shoes. Due to the proximity of the rooms, Mrs. Wesela was probably aware of what was going on in the bedroom and elsewhere in the apartment. Had she wished to do so, she could have objected to Detective Corbett’s search. See United States v. Stribling, 94 F.3d 321, 324 (7th Cir. 1996); Gerald M. v. Conneely, 858 F.2d 378, 884-85 (7th Cir. 1988). The district court reasonably concluded that Mrs. Wesela at the very least implicitly consented to the search. Had Detective Corbett conducted an all-out search of the Wesela home, perhaps the result would be different. But everything he did was narrowly confined to finding evidence related to the events of that evening: the gun, the bullets, the shell casings, and the dead cat. He did not go through drawers, rummage through closets, or search other rooms of the house in an attempt to find drugs, money, or any other extraneous evidence of other possible illegal activities. Under the circumstances here, the court did not err in denying Wesela’s motion to suppress.