Court Opinion

ID: 9462162
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:33:15.922793+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:25.908965
License: Public Domain

ZIRPOLI, District Judge
(concurring in part and dissenting in part).
I find myself in agreement with the majority’s position on most of the contentions made by appellants. I agree that the agents had a founded suspicion to stop the load boat,1 that they need not have given Miranda warnings any sooner than they did, and the appellants had no reasonable expectation of privacy as to the registration number on the decoy boat. I see no reason to speculate on whether the agents had probable cause to search the load boat because the trial court found that Hickman had consented to the search of that boat and his finding is not clearly erroneous. See R.T. 275—76; Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218, 93 S.Ct. 2041, 36 L.Ed.2d 854 (1973).2 I must disagree with the major*330ity’s conclusion that the agents had probable cause to search the decoy boat when they did. However, since Hickman nowhere claimed (as he presumably could not) that he had a possessory interest in the decoy boat, I concur in the majority’s affirmance as to him. See Brown v. United States, 411 U.S. 223, 229, 93 S.Ct. 1565, 36 L.Ed.2d 208 (1973). Landers, however, affirmed on the witness stand that the decoy boat was his. R.T. 240-41. Since two of the four counts on which he was convicted were for possession, he has “automatic standing” to object to any search of the load boat that was the product of an illegal search of the decoy boat. See United States v. Boston, 510 F.2d 35 (9th Cir. 1974). I therefore dissent from the affirmance as to Landers.3
Since the trial court did not find that the agents had probable cause to search the decoy boat,4 this court need not indulge any presumption that the trial court did correctly so conclude. Instead, the majority concludes that the agents had probable cause to search the decoy boat principally in reliance on the factors it recites to provide a founded suspicion to stop the load boat: (1) the discovery that appellants had two identical boats with the same registration number; (2) the tip from an informant that a boat with appellants aboard had earlier arrived in Mission Bay “under suspicious circumstances”; (3) information from an informant in Modesto (the in camera material) that appellants had been involved in narcotics trafficking; (4) appellants’ unusual activities in an area noted for a high number of smuggling violations. In addition, the majority points to the fact that when questioned after being stopped, appellants reported that they had not made a customs declaration even though they had come from Mexican waters and that Hickman said he owned the boat trailer although the agents knew it was registered to a third party.
Absent the in camera material, I cannot agree that these circumstances provide probable cause to search the decoy boat. While the majority concludes that these circumstances provided “a strong *331inference that [the decoy boat] was being used as part of a smuggling operation,” it appears to me that the agents had no more than a vague suspicion or hunch prior to their search of the decoy boat. The only really persuasive fact is that appellants had two boats with the same hull number, which does look suspicious in combination with the incidence of smuggling in the Mission Bay area. The informant’s tip about their earlier arrival — under “suspicious circumstances” — is so vague as not to add much to the suspicions engendered by the identical hull numbers; it was merely the stimulus that prompted the agents to investigate and discover the identical hull numbers. At the time they stopped the load boat, therefore, the agents had very little beyond a founded suspicion to justify searching it. Since Hickman consented to the search, they needed no more.
The developments after the load boat was stopped hardly provided further justification to search the decoy boat. The majority points out that appellants admitted that they had failed to make a customs declaration although they had been in Mexican waters. Whatever impact that admission might have on the propriety of searching the load boat, it does not, as the majority notes, have any bearing on the decoy boat. Additionally, it appeared that Hickman may have misspoken when asked who owned the trailer. But it is apparent from the record of the hearing on the motion to suppress that what the agents were interested in was the boat; his oversight in failing to explain that while he owned the boat he did not own the trailer does not provide more reason to believe he was engaged in smuggling. Instead, the events that followed the stop really operated to vitiate any probable cause that the agents may have had at the outset simply because they were unable, after an hour of searching the load boat, to find anything. The agents’ suspicions were not confirmed, but refuted.
The majority does not confront this dilution of whatever probable cause the agents had when they first stopped the load boat. Instead, it suggests that “the agents needed to determine the ownership of the decoy boat in order to determine whether Hickman was lying in claiming ownership of the load boat and why the boats had the same registration number.” I am not aware of any doctrine that makes need, which might affect the warrant requirement, a substitute for probable cause. Moreover, I see no reason why, after they had spent an hour searching the load boat, the agents had any such need to search the decoy boat. If they were concerned about whether Hickman really had authority to consent to a search of the load boat, it is odd that they waited so long to verify that he did. If they wanted to verify that Hickman owned the load boat, I do not see why they needed to search the decoy boat to do so. It is clear from the record that the reason Agent Gore returned to the decoy boat was that he expected to find there the key to the puzzle of how the contraband was secreted on the load boat. He had no immediate need to find a registration for the decoy boat.
Under these circumstances, the majority’s reliance on Chambers v. Maroney, 399 U.S. 42, 90 S.Ct. 1975, 26 L.Ed.2d 419 (1970), is misplaced, because, at the time they began their search of the decoy boat, the agents had only their vague (and by that time refuted) suspicions that a crime had occurred at all. In Chambers the situation was very different. A robbery had occurred, and two teen-agers reported seeing a station wagon speeding away from the scene of the crime. Within an hour, police stopped a station wagon fitting the description given by the two teen-agers, arrested the occupants, and took the car into custody. Id. at 44, 90 S.Ct. 1975. The issue before the Supreme Court was whether the police should have obtained a search warrant before searching the car even though they had probable cause to search it when they stopped it. The Court held that they did not have to do so. There was no question but that a *332robbery had been committed and that the police had probable cause, based on the description of the robbers they had received, to arrest petitioners for the robbery. Here, in contrast, at the time Agent Gore departed to search the decoy boat, he had no facts at his command that indicated that any crime (save perhaps some technical violation in relation to the identical registration numbers) had been committed; Chambers cannot be used to support what was essentially a fishing expedition.

. In reaching the conclusion that there was a founded suspicion to justify the stopping of the load boat, like the majority, I place no reliance on the information received from an informant and submitted to the trial court for in camera inspection. The in camera hearing was apparently outside the presence of counsel for defendant or the government, and was directed entirely to the question of whether the identity of the informant should be revealed to defendants. Under these circumstances it should not suddenly reappear on appeal through a sealed record to redeem what I view to be a questionable ruling on the motion to suppress.

. The majority relies on a stipulation entered into by appellants and the government after the motion to suppress was denied to support its conclusion that Hickman consented to the search of the load boat. Given the trial court’s finding of consent, referred to in the text, I see no reason to rely on the stipulation. Moreover, I doubt the wisdom of using stipulations entered into after a motion to suppress is denied as a ground for affirming the denial of the motion to suppress. Such a practice might deter defendants who wish to preserve their search-and-seizure issues for appeal from entering into stipulations for purposes of trial after the trial court has denied their motions to suppress. Additionally, the propriety of the ruling on the motion to suppress should, to my mind, be based on the record before the court at the time it rules on the motion; it seems improper to me to rehabilitate it on the basis of stipulations the parties enter into thereafter.

. Landers was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on each count of the indictment, with the sentences on the possession counts and the sentences on the importation counts to run concurrently. While it may be that Landers does not have standing to object to the search of the load boat on the importation counts, compare United States v. Wing, 450 F.2d 806, 810 (9th Cir. 1971), I see no reason to reach that issue since the majority affirms as to all four counts and since the concurrent sentence doctrine does not apply in this case. See United States v. Moore, 452 F.2d 576 (9th Cir. 1971).

. Concerning the decoy boat, the district court reasoned as follows:
Going back to the Landers boat [the decoy boat] and opening the boat up and looking at the configuration of the boat really is of no great consequence, because there was nothing found in that boat, and there is really no standing to object. The fact that that particular act led to the noticing of the differences in the boats, as far as this court is concerned, nobody that I have heard on the stand claimed even any ownership in the boat at the Islandia, except perhaps in kind of a backhanded manner. There was really no objection to that search, in that there was no contraband found in the boat, if it was a search. I think it would be better characterized as an inquiry to determine whether or not the boat that they had a right to search looked like the other boat that was supposed to be identical, with the same hull number.
I can’t find that, while that act might have been an intrusion into the boat, that that was or would taint the discovery, as the search had already been in progress. It would not taint the discovery of the marijuana that was subsequently found as a result of the comparison of the configurations of the interior of the two boats.
R.T. 277. Clearly the district court did not conclude that the agents had probable cause to search the decoy boat. Compare R.T. 271. Equally clearly, it seems to me, the district court’s factual determination that the agents found the marijuana “as a result of the comparison of the configuration of the interior of the two boats” requires us to conclude that that discovery was tainted if the second search of the decoy boat was illegal. See United States v. Bacall, 443 F.2d 1050, 1056-57 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 404 U.S. 1004, 92 S.Ct. 565, 30 L.Ed.2d 557 (1971). The majority therefore attempts to justify the search of the decoy boat on the theory that it was supported by probable cause.