Court Opinion

ID: 9481957
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:36:15.894312+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:40.633846
License: Public Domain

HUG, Circuit Judge:
The Government obtained the civil forfeiture of a 1986 Dodge Ram Charger and $277,000 in U.S. currency found in this vehicle, pursuant to 21 U.S.C. § 881 (1988). Claimant Montes appeals on the ground that evidence discovered in the search of the Dodge Ram Charger should have been suppressed because it was obtained in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. He contends that the police conduct in searching the leased Dodge Ram Charger, which was covered and parked in the backyard of a home, in order to discover the vehicle identification number (“VIN”), was a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. The $277,000 in currency was discovered in the process and was confiscated when the narcotics-detector dog alerted on the currency. The central issue of the appeal is whether the police have a right to search a parked vehicle to obtain the VIN. Execution of the judgment has been stayed pending this appeal, pursuant to Fed. R.Civ.P. 62(d). We reverse.
I.
On October 13, 1987 at 11:32 a.m., Mon-tebello Police Department Officers Rodriguez and Gorman responded to a complaint of loud music from a black pickup truck at 484 Via Norte in a Montebello residential area. Because an incorrect address had been given, the officers radioed the command desk to confirm the location and were told the correct residence had two lion statues in front. Officer Rodriguez noticed this description matched the residence at 476 Via Norte. As they approached this residence, they could hear Spanish music from two houses away.
As they got closer, the officers observed that the music was coming from a black pickup truck parked in the driveway of the 476 Via Norte residence. Walking down the driveway, the officers shouted their presence. No one responded or was seen in the front of the property or through an open garage door.
The officers then went to the house. The wrought iron security gate and front door were both ajar. The officers rang the doorbell and knocked several times. Officer Rodriguez repeatedly announced the police presence in Spanish and English. There was no answer. The officers decided to enter the residence through the opened door in order to issue a municipal citation concerning excessive noise coming from a vehicle, pursuant to Montebello Municipal Code § 4223.1. Upon entering the residence, the officers again announced their presence, in Spanish and English. No one was discovered inside. In the kitchen, the officers observed an individual outside in the backyard, who was later identified as Rafael Mancillias, age 22, and who was seen closing a door to the garage. Officer Rodriguez was prevented from entering the backyard from the residence by a secured wrought iron door in the rear porch. Mancillias complied with Rodriguez’ request to open the door.
While Officer Rodriguez explained the purpose of the police visit to Mancillias, Officer Gorman focused upon two parked vehicles in the backyard which were covered with opaque car covers and had exposed Mexican license plates. The first was a 1986 Dodge Ram Charger, the subject of this appeal, and the second was a 1982 Ford pickup. Officer Gorman noted he was aware that vehicles are often stolen and sold in Mexico. Based upon this suspicion, Officer Gorman raised the car covers on each car to find the place showing the VIN in order to cross-check whether the vehicles had been reported stolen. He reported that the VIN plates were “missing” on both vehicles because they were not visible from the vehicle exterior.
After Officer Gorman informed Officer Rodriguez of the missing VIN on the first vehicle, Rodriguez placed Mancillias in handcuffs and advised him that he was being detained for a grand theft automobile investigation but was not under arrest. The officers then called for the assistance *900of two detectives who were members of the Montebello Police Department automobile theft detail.
When Officer Gorman determined that the VIN plates were missing, he decided to impound the vehicles, pursuant to Cal.Veh. Code § 10751, because the VIN was not adequately displayed and for further investigation of automobile theft. Officer Gor-man opened the locked Dodge Ram Charger with a “slim-jim” in order to locate the VIN or vehicle registration papers. Inside the Dodge Ram Charger, Officer Gorman checked the glove box, visors and front sections and was unable to find either a VIN or registration papers. In the center of the rear passenger floor board, Officer Gorman noticed a brown shopping bag, which according to the police report, he opened to locate registration information. Gorman discovered $67,650 in U.S. currency inside the bag. Continuing his search, Gorman observed a black leather brief case and black canvas camera bag in the rear of the vehicle, which upon opening also contained $130,000 and $79,760 in U.S. currency, respectively. As a result of the manner of packaging of the large sums of money, Gorman believed the currency may have been used in drug trafficking. Narcotics investigators were summoned to the scene as well as Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy T. Lynch, a specialist in automobile theft.
Lynch, who arrived after the vehicle search, examined the vehicle and ultimately found the VIN inside the vehicle. He noted the VIN contained a numbering sequence consistent with vehicles manufactured in Mexico.1 Subsequently, a narcotics-detector dog alerted on the interior of the vehicle, the money and the three containers. On October 15, 1987, the Monte-bello Police Department turned over the 1986 Dodge Ram Charger, the U.S. currency and the containers to the U.S. Customs Service.
At the suppression hearing, claimant Montes testified that on February 25, 1987 he entered into a one-year lease agreement in Mexico with the owner of the Dodge Ram Charger and produced a copy of the lease. In October, 1987, Montes parked the vehicle in the backyard of the residence at 476 Via Norte. Montes received permission to park the vehicle in the backyard from Mancillias. Mancillias was not the owner of the house and did not live there but told Montes he was in charge of the house. Montes gave Mancillias a set of keys to the car but did not give him permission to open the vehicle or to drive it.
II.
The district judge concluded that Montes had no legitimate expectancy of privacy in the residence or the backyard. He found it unnecessary to rule on whether Montes had an expectancy of privacy in the vehicle because of his decision that Montes had no expectancy of privacy in the VIN. He then found that the officers’ removal of the opaque cover from the Dodge was not a violation of Montes’ Fourth Amendment rights, because he had no expectancy of privacy in the VIN. He concluded that when the officer discovered that the VIN was missing, he had the right to impound the vehicle and that the $277,000 in currency inevitably would have been discovered in the inventory search of the impounded vehicle. The historical facts essential to this appeal are not in question. We are thus reviewing the conclusions of law made by the district court from those facts, which conclusions we review de novo.
The claimant contends as follows: (1) the police entry in the residence and the backyard where the vehicles were discovered was unlawful; (2) it was unlawful to remove the cover from the Dodge vehicle without a search warrant or probable cause; (3) it was unlawful for the police to break into the vehicle simply because they could not locate the VIN; (4) even if it had been lawful to break into the vehicle to search for the VIN, that this did not justify opening the shopping bag, the brief case, *901and the black canvas camera bag; (5) the inevitable discovery doctrine was misapplied by the court because there was no justification for impounding the vehicle since it had an appropriate YIN attached.
III.
We agree with the district court that Montes did not have a legitimate expectancy of privacy in the residence or the backyard. He had no control whatsoever over the backyard. Thus, he cannot contest the observation of the covered vehicles or the fact that they had Mexican license plates.
The Government contends that Montes had no expectancy of privacy in the vehicles because he had turned possession of the vehicles over to Mancillias. This presents a closer question. He gave Man-cillias a set of keys to the vehicles but did not give him permission to open or drive them. A person asserting a violation of the Fourth Amendment has the initial burden to establish his right to do so. Thus, Montes had the burden to establish that he had a legitimate expectancy of privacy in the vehicles. See, e.g., United States v. One Parcel of Land, 902 F.2d 1443, 1444 (9th Cir.1990) (per curiam); see also Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128, 130 n. 1, 99 S.Ct. 421, 424 n. 1, 58 L.Ed.2d 387 (1978) (motion to suppress proponent has burden to establish violation of Fourth Amendment rights). The Government relies on our opinion in United States v. One 1977 Mercedes Benz, 708 F.2d 444 (9th Cir.1983), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 1071, 104 S.Ct. 981, 79 L.Ed.2d 217 (1984). In that case, the vehicle was turned over to the exclusive possession of a third-party to drive without safeguarding any privacy interests or restricting the use of the vehicle. Here, Montes was the legitimate lessee of the vehicle; he drove the vehicle into the backyard, covered it with an opaque cover, and gave no permission for Mancillias to open or drive it. This case is more akin to United States v. Mulligan, 488 F.2d 732 (9th Cir.1973), cert. denied, 417 U.S. 930, 94 S.Ct. 2640, 41 L.Ed.2d 233 (1974), cited and distinguished in One 1977 Mercedes Benz, 708 F.2d at 449, n. 4. In Mulligan, we held that the owner of an automobile, which had been parked in the driveway of another for two months, had not relinquished his expectancy of privacy. Montes, as the lessee of the vehicle in this case, like Mulligan, the owner of the vehicle in that case, had not given permission to use the automobile or to enter the automobile. Thus, both here and in Mulligan no authorization had been given to invade the privacy within the automobile itself, as had been the case in One 1977 Mercedes Benz.
We now come to the issue of whether the officers were justified in removing the cover from the Dodge Ram Charger. The justification offered by the Government was that Officer Gorman observed that the vehicles had what appeared to be new Mexican license plates and that, from his experience, he “was aware that trucks and four-wheel drive vehicles are frequently stolen and taken to Mexico and sold.” The Government does not even contend that this amounts to probable cause — as indeed it does not. The Government also does not dispute that lifting the opaque covers from the vehicles was a search — as indeed it was. The Government contends that the officers were justified in removing the covers from the vehicles without probable cause to inspect for the VINs.
The Government relies upon New York v. Class, 475 U.S. 106, 106 S.Ct. 960, 89 L.Ed.2d 81 (1986), a very different case. In Class, a motorist was stopped for a traffic violation. He stepped out of the car to discuss the matter with the officer, to show his registration certificate and explain that he did not have a driver’s license. The officer went to the car and found that the place where the VIN is supposed to be located (on the left-hand side of the dashboard, inside the windshield) was covered by a paper on the dashboard. He entered the car to remove the paper so he could examine the VIN and saw a gun under the seat. The Supreme Court held that this was a search but that “this search was sufficiently unintrusive to be constitutionally permissible in light of the lack of a reasonable expectation of privacy in the *902VIN and the fact that the officers observed respondent commit two traffic violations.” Id. at 119, 106 S.Ct. at 968. In reaching that conclusion, the Supreme Court noted “here, where the object at issue is an identification number behind the transparent windshield of an automobile driven upon the public roads, we believe that the placement of the obscuring papers was insufficient to create a privacy interest in the VIN. The mere viewing of the formally obscured VIN was not, therefore, a violation of the Fourth Amendment.” Id. at 114, 106 S.Ct. at 966.
In the case at hand, the vehicles were not being driven on the roads; they were parked in a backyard. The occasion for the inspection was not brought about by traffic violations; it was merely the discovery of two vehicles with Mexican license plates parked in a backyard. The factors carefully balanced in the Class opinion, such as the necessity of vehicle regulation on the public highways, officer safety and the minimal intrusion involved by removing a paper from the dashboard of a vehicle already stopped for traffic violations, are simply inapplicable here. Surely the careful balancing revealed in the Class opinion is not to be extended so as to permit a search of any parked vehicle without probable cause just because the VIN is obscured in some way.
The California statute concerning the VINs at issue in this case does not require that the VIN be displayed at all times in open view, but rather the requirement is that “no person shall knowingly buy, sell, offer for sale, receive, or have in his possession any vehicle or component part thereof from which the manufacturer’s serial or identification number has been removed, defaced, altered or destroyed....” California Vehicle Code § 10751(a). It is a far cry from the minimum intrusion of an inspection in conjunction with a traffic stop to the intrusion involved by removing car covers or breaking into parked cars to determine whether the VIN may have been “removed, defaced, altered or destroyed,” merely because the VIN is not in plain sight. This is especially true when the statute does not even require the VIN to be unobstructed; it requires only that it not be “removed, defaced, altered or destroyed.”
To create a precedent whereby the police may uncover or enter a car at any time to inspect the VIN would permit the police to rove the streets, to remove car covers, or break into any automobiles where the VIN number is obscured in some way. In this case, the removal of the car cover without probable cause was an unlawful search.2 Such a precedent would be equally applicable to a car that was not covered but where the location of the VIN was obscured in some other way. Thus, if a car owner happens to have a sun deflector on the windshield or a paper covering the VIN in his or her parked car, police would be authorized, without any probable cause, to break into the car merely to determine whether the VIN has been “removed, defaced, altered or destroyed.” The language of the Class opinion does not lend itself to such an intrusive extension. Because we find the search of the vehicle to have been unlawful, we need not reach the remaining contentions of the claimant.
IV.
Removal of the cover of the vehicle having been a search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the evidence, which is the product of that search, must be excluded at trial. As we noted in One 1977 Mercedes Benz, the mere fact that property was illegally seized does not immunize that property from forfeiture; however, any evidence which is the product of an illegal search or seizure must be excluded in the forfeiture hearing. The Government must satisfy forfeiture requirements with untainted evidence. 708 F.2d at 450.
REVERSED.

. Although it is undisputed the VIN was not visible from the vehicle exterior, the record does not disclose its precise interior location.

. Because probable cause did not exist, we do not reach the question of whether a search warrant would be required if there were probable cause or whether the automobile exception would permit the search without a warrant.