Court Opinion

ID: 9493437
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:08:13.975352+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:50.536283
License: Public Domain

WARDLAW, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Although I generally agree with the majority’s statement of the law, I disagree with its application of the law to the facts at hand. Because the district court correctly ruled that the consent to search apartment 101 was valid, I would affirm the convictions. Therefore, I respectfully dissent.1
*1029I.
At approximately seven or eight o’clock in the morning on June 15, 1998, Deputy United States Marshal Kitts knocked on the door of apartment 101 at'4424 44th Street in San Diego. Kitts had been informed that the men living at the apartment were “black males with accents consistent with Jamaican nationals.” Therefore, when a black man, later identified as Junior Grant, opened the door, Kitts spoke with him specifically “to ascertain his accent.” Kitts concluded that “[h]is voice depicted a Jamaican accent or an accent consistent with Jamaican males.” At the same time, through the open door, Kitts noted the scent of burning marijuana.2
When Kitts identified himself as a law enforcement officer, Grant slammed the door shut and locked it. One of Kitts’s partners at the scene shortly thereafter saw Grant running out the back of the apartment, and he stopped Grant, without the use of force.3 Prompted by this officer’s call over the radio, Kitts ran to the back of the building, where he found that Grant had abandoned his.flight and was standing with his hands on the back door. Kitts’s partner, who was in plain clothes,4 had his gun drawn.
Kitts acted to defuse the situation. He “informed ... Grant immediately ... that [the agents] were there just to speak to him, but [Kitts] was going to cuff [Grant] for [Kitts’s] safety, and that he wasn’t under arrest at that point.” Kitts handcuffed Grant and “inquired of him whether there was anyone else' in the house.” Grant answered that there was not. When Kitts asked Grant for identification/ Grant indicated' that it was in the apartment. After again asking Grant whether anyone else was in the apartment, Kitts then asked permission to enter the house to get the identification.5 Grant consented to the entry. Then, as the officers and Grant entered the apartment, Kitts asked for permission for the officers to “look[ ] around the apartment just to make sure there were no other persons there for officer safety.” Again, Grant consented. During this consensual protective sweep, evidence was found in plain view that provided support for a search warrant ánd, eventually, led to the convictions.
II.
A person has authority to consent if he or she shares “mutual use of the- property [and] joint access or control for most purposes.” United States v. Dearing, 9 F.3d 1428, 1429 (9th Cir.1993). When actual authority is absent, we will uphold a consensual search under the doctrine of apparent authority if “the facts available to the officer at the moment ... warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief that the consenting party had authority over the premises.” Illinois v. Rodriguez, 497 U.S. 177, 188, 110 S.Ct. 2793, 111 *1030L.Ed.2d 148 (1990) (internal quotation marks omitted) (omission in original). Here, Deputy Kitts’s conclusions about Grant’s authority were reasonable in light of the facts known to him.
Grant answered the door early in the morning, a time when someone who answers an apartment door is likely to be a resident or a person otherwise closely associated with the property. Grant, who answered the door, had an accent corresponding to the accent that, the officers knew, the occupants of the apartment possessed. The presence of burning marijuana suggests that Grant was no stranger to the apartment: either he was comfortable enough in the apartment to smoke marijuana, or others in the apartment were familiar enough with his presence that they would do so. Grant stated that he was alone in the house, which is suggestive of authority over the place. He answered the door without knowing who would be on the other side. Finally, he did not carry his identification on his person but instead left it around the house, suggesting that he was comfortable there, not a casual visitor or a business visitor but someone with substantial connections to the place.6
Although the evidence does not point all in one direction on the question of apparent authority,7 the officers’ conclusions were not unreasonable. No more is required.
III.
In assessing whether Grant’s consent was voluntary, the district court must consider “the full richness of [the] encounter,” United States v. Morning, 64 F.3d 531, 533 (9th Cir.1995), and “the totality of all the circumstances,” Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218, 226, 93 S.Ct. 2041, 36 L.Ed.2d 854 (1973), while being guided by the factors (noted by the majority) that we have discussed in various cases. We review the district court’s determination of voluntariness for clear error. See United States v. Welch, 4 F.3d 761, 763 (9th Cir.1993).
In the case before us, the district court considered the circumstances, noted that they point in both directions, and made careful findings of fact. Judge Enright reasoned, “Certainly, there are facts showing the agents employed a level of force to the encounter: within minutes of the time Grant gave his consent, he had been held at gunpoint, handcuffed, and frisked. The agent did not tell Grant that he had a right to refuse.” Noting its finding that Grant had been legally stopped and that “even a person under arrest can voluntarily consent to a search,” see United States v. Tolias, 548 F.2d 277, 278 (9th Cir.1977), however, the district court stated that “despite the show of authority, Kitts diffused the situation by specifically informing Grant that he was not under arrest and that he used the handcuffs for safety reasons.” The district' court noted that when Grant originally answered the front door, in like vein, Kitts had indicated that he “only wanted to talk to” him. The court observed that “Grant was on familiar territory, and was not transported to a distant or isolated location.”
As the district court found, the facts point both ways. The handcuffs and guns were threatening; but the officers acted to dispel any coercion Grant may have felt. Kitts’s partner, and perhaps Kitts himself, were in plain clothes. Although Grant apparently had no experience with law enforcement in the past, he was in a familiar place during this encounter. Nothing in the record suggests that the agents attempted to procure Grant’s consent by stating that they could obtain a warrant *1031regardless of consent. Moreover, the request for permission to retrieve the identification was legitimate, as was the further request for permission to conduct a quick search for safety’s sake. These requests are far less threatening than a request to search every nook and cranny for inculpa-tory evidence.
Judge Enright considered the relevant factors, recognized the arguments on both sides, and made the delicate contextual analysis of voluntariness. I cannot say that I am “left with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed,” United States v. Doe, 155 F.3d 1070, 1074 (9th Cir.1998) (en banc), necessary for overturning this finding of fact.
IV.
None of the appellants’ other arguments for the reversal of their convictions are persuasive, and I, therefore, would affirm the convictions. I would order further submissions from the parties to determine whether appellant Reid’s challenge to his sentence is moot.8

. Because the'protective sweep was a search supported by a valid consent, I need not reach the issues whether the search was also supportable by exigent circumstances or as a protective sweep incident to an arrest.

. Although the majority refers to the absence of such a fact from the search warrant affidavit, see Maj. Op. at 1023 n. 2, 1027 n. 5, this discrepancy was squarely raised before the district court, which found as a fact that Kitts did smell the burning marijuana. See Memorandum Decision and Order, filed September 16, 1998, by the District Court ("Memorandum”) at 2. The district court's resolution of this issue — which at bottom was a credibility determination — is not clearly erroneous. See United States v. Cervantes, 219 F.3d 882, 891 (9th Cir.2000) (“We review a district court’s credibility determination for clear error.”).

. It may be that this officer stated to Grant that he was going to prison. See Maj. Op. at 1023, 1027. Grant's testimony was extremely confused, and it is not clear whether he attributes this "prison” comment to Kitts or to Kitts's partner. To the extent that he alleges Kitts to have made the statement, Grant's allegation was. discredited by the district court, which expressly found Kitts's testimony more credible than that of Grant to the extent that they conflicted. See Memorandum at 16. (Kitts’s testimony, needless to say, did not indicate that he said such a thing.)

. The record does not make clear whether Kitts himself was in uniform.

. It is not clear whether Kitts's partner still had his weapon in hand at the time of this request for consent.

. The majority is, of course, correct that "the mere fact of access, without more, does not ■ indicate that the access was authorized." Maj. Op. at 1025 (quoting Dealing, 9,F.3d at 1430). But, as noted above, far more than "mere access” was apparent from the facts available to the officers at the time.

. One contrary piece of evidence, as noted by the majority, is that Grant disclaimed knowledge of one of the two cars known to be associated with the apartment.

. At oral argument, Reid’s counsel stated that Reid had been released from custody and either had been or soon would be deported. The parties have not confirmed for us that this deportation has occurred. Moreover, it is unclear from the record whether the terms of Reid’s sentence provide that deportation would terminate the supervised release to which he was sentenced. Because the appeal from the sentence is moot if the sentence has been completed, I would order the parties to brief these issues. Compare United States v. Palomba, 182 F.3d 1121, 1123 (9th Cir.1999) (holding appeal from sentence moot where the sentence had been completed), with United States v. Valdez-Gonzalez, 957 F.2d 643, 646-47 (9th Cir.1992) (holding appeal from sentence not moot even though aliens sentenced to supervised release had been deported and were not required to report to their probation officers, because “should [they] be rearrested in the United States, their supervised release time would be converted to incarceration time”).