Court Opinion

ID: 9474944
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:13:02.985166+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:25.118091
License: Public Domain

NORRIS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I dissent. The district court denied defendant’s suppression motion without findings of fact or conclusions of law. The court simply concluded in a one-sentence oral order that “based on the status of the law at this time”, the challenged evidence was admissible. Unlike the majority, I am unwilling to dispose of defendant’s constitutional claims without particularized findings of fact or any assurance that the district court weighed the evidence in accordance with the proper Fourth Amendment standards. Therefore, I would remand for findings of fact and conclusions of law adequate to support reliable appellate review.
Defendant Cervantes-Gaitan moved to suppress heroin that the Border Patrol discovered in a zippered duffel bag he was carrying at the time of his arrest. Testimony at the pretrial suppression hearing indicated that defendant’s bag was subjected to progressively more intrusive searches *774during the one-hour interval from his arrest to his jailing. Each of these searches revealed packets of heroin carefully squirreled within defendant’s personal effects. Each was also admittedly conducted without a warrant. Thus, the validity of each search depends on whether it can be squared with one of the limited exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.
The government offers three different grounds for upholding the searches, all of which are highly fact-specific. First, the government maintains that the Border Patrol agent who arrested Cervantes-Gaitan immediately searched his bag in the field as a valid self-protective measure incident to arrest. Second, relying on United States v. Burnette, 698 F.2d 1038 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 461 U.S. 936, 103 S.Ct. 2106, 77 L.Ed.2d 312 (1983), the government maintains that the agent’s subsequent thorough search at the roadside did not invade defendant’s continuing expectations of privacy in the contents of the bag because his privacy interests in the bag evaporated with the initial legitimate search. Finally, the government maintains that the exhaustive search at the stationhouse that revealed the full extent of defendant’s heroin stash was justified as a routine inventory, conducted for housekeeping purposes in compliance with established inventory procedure.
On the present record, it is impossible to evaluate the government’s arguments for upholding the successive searches of defendant’s bag. The district court neither resolved the conflicting testimony of the arresting officer and the defendant nor indicated the legal bases it regarded as legitimizing the cumulative search of defendant’s possessions. Faced with this indeterminate record, the majority conjectures versions of each search that conveniently save it from constitutional attack. The majority’s conjectures notwithstanding, the evidence supports with equal, if not greater, plausibility the distinct possibility that the Border Patrol repeatedly violated defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights.
For instance, the first search could not qualify as a protective search incident to defendant’s arrest if, as the Border Patrol agent testified, he had already arrested defendant, thrown the bag some ten yards from his feet, and gained exclusive control over the bag before he searched it. Likewise, if the first search was superficial, the later thorough search at the roadside would have invaded defendant’s residual privacy interests and thus exceeded the limits of the Burnette doctrine. See Burnette, 698 F.2d at 1053-54 (Norris, J., dissenting); see also United States v. Monclavo-Cruz, 662 F.2d 1285 (9th Cir.1981) (fact that purse could have been fully searched concomitantly with valid arrest does not justify delayed warrantless search). Finally, the Border Patrol agent testified that no inventory was drawn up of the items in defendant’s bag, thus casting grave doubt on the applicability of the inventory search exception to the final search at the Border Patrol station. See Illinois v. Lafayette, 462 U.S. 640, 648, 103 S.Ct. 2605, 2610, 77 L.Ed.2d 65 (1983) (conditioning validity of inventory search on compliance with established police procedure).
In my view, the majority errs when it gives the qualified rule of United States v. Williams, 630 F.2d 1322, 1327 (9th Cir. 1980), an unqualified scope. Read against our precedents, particularly United States v. Miner, 484 F.2d 1075 (9th Cir.1973), and United States v. Heimforth, 493 F.2d 970 (9th Cir.1974), cert. denied, 416 U.S. 908, 94 S.Ct. 1615, 40 L.Ed.2d 113 (1974), Williams does not compel us to affirm the district court’s denial, without findings, of a motion to suppress whenever “there is a reasonable view of the evidence that will sustain” the denial. Williams, 630 F.2d at 1327. Instead, our precedents demonstrate that we have discretion to remand to the district court for specific findings whenever our resolution of suppression claims unassisted by such findings would constitute unwarranted conjecture.
In Williams we affirmed the denial of the defendants’ suppression motion despite the absence of findings of fact because the *775district court unquestionably focussed on the critical Fourth Amendment issue — exigent circumstances — and applied the proper test. Williams, 630 F.2d at 1327. In Miner, to the contrary, we vacated the conviction and remanded for further proceedings with respect to the suppression motion because the record put in question whether the district court identified the critical issue — the voluntariness of the defendant’s consent — and how it resolved conflicting testimony that bore on consent. Miner, 484 F.2d at 1077. Although our court recognized in Miner that “[ordinarily, when a motion to suppress has been denied, we view the evidence in the light most favorable to the Government,” we went on to conclude, based on the indeterminancy of the record, that “we should not apply these principles here.” Id.
United States v. Heimforth, 493 F.2d 970 (9th Cir.1974), also calls into question the majority’s unqualified reliance on the Williams standard. In Heimforth the district court upheld a warrantless search without entering findings of fact or otherwise indicating which exception to the warrant requirement formed the basis of its ruling. Heimforth, like the case now before us, involved several fact-specific Fourth Amendment questions, as well as divergent rationales for upholding the search. Although we acknowledged that “the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure do not require ... that findings be made on every suppression motion,” we suggested that “trial courts ought to make factual findings when the issue before them is [delicate].” Heimforth, 493 F.2d at 972; see also United States v. Sicilia, 457 F.2d 787, 788 (7th Cir.1972), cert. denied, 414 U.S. 865, 94 S.Ct. 123, 38 L.Ed.2d 117 (1973) (when “the factual and legal context is somewhat complicated,” district court should record findings of fact and conclusions of law); 3 C. Wright, Federal Practice and Procedure: Criminal 2d § 675, p. 787 (although not required, “it is the better practice” to make findings on a hearing to suppress evidence). We thus vacated the conviction and remanded for “a specific finding on the legality of the search.” Heimforth, 493 F.2d at 972.
“When the factual and legal context is somewhat complicated,” see Sicilia, 457 F.2d at 788,1 believe that the district court has an independent institutional obligation to specify the factual and legal basis for its ruling. Otherwise, we end up adjudicating claims on the basis of alternative, largely unfounded factual hypotheses, without much-needed guidance from the trier of fact. Defendant’s Fourth Amendment claims rest on complex standards, some of which this court has only recently formulated, see, e.g. United States v. Burnette, supra, and on disputed facts that remain in critical respects unresolved. The record in its present state gives us no basis for confidence that the district court either focussed on the critical facts or applied to those facts the correct constitutional standards. Therefore, I would remand to the district court for findings of fact and conclusions of law supporting its denial of defendant’s suppression motion.