Court Opinion

ID: 9493679
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:15:05.382329+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:57.939199
License: Public Domain

NOONAN, Circuit Judge, concurring and dissenting:
I concur in the opinion of the court except as to its holding that Gamez-Ordu-ño and his companions may claim the protection of the Fourth Amendment.
The extension of the Fourth Amendment to overnight visitors reasonably fortifies the right of persons to be secure in their dwellings. The extension embraces those overnight visitors who are the homeowner’s guests. Minnesota v. Olson, 495 U.S. 91, 110 S.Ct. 1684, 109 L.Ed.2d 85 (1990). Gamez-Orduño testified that he and Martinez-Carra and seven others arrived at the trailer “lying down on the bed in the back” of a pick-up truck driven by a man he did not know. That is not the way *466guests customarily arrive. Once at the trailer, the backpackers were not told “to make themselves at home.” Instead, they were instructed not to move about and “not to go out at all.” A person under such restrictive orders does not qualify as a guest in any sense of that fairly specific term, except in the obsolete sense of guest meaning “stranger.”
These backpackers were on business when they stopped overnight at the trailer controlled by them confederates. The term “houseguest or overnight guest,” with the suggestion of friendly hospitality, does not fit them. Neither Oscar nor his absent mother treated these men as persons with the special regard that guests customarily receive. No “longstanding social custom” supports putting up a crowd of men, known at most as mules in the criminal business conducted by their hosts. No “functions recognized as valuable by society” were performed by giving the drugs earners a safe house as they carried their drugs.
Nor w'ere the defendants like a businessman in town to do a deal who is put up overnight by an associate. In such a case there is an element of sociability in the accommodation offered and accepted. The guest could have stayed in a hotel; it is a bit of hospitality to take him or her into a home. Here hospitality was not the aim. The trailer provided the necessities of the criminal trip — food and rest so that the refreshed conspirators could continue on to market their wares.
The district court did not err in its factual finding that the travelers were in the trailer “for a purely commercial purpose.” The district court did not err in its legal conclusion that they had no legitimate expectation of privacy recognized by society. The business of these men was to carry marijuana into the United States; that they paused in their journey to gain strength did not mean that they gave up their task. In the trailer, as outside it, they were the carriers of forbidden merchandise. The only expectation that they could have had was to be arrested if they were discovered. That expectation, which was also the expectation of our society, was realized when the Border Patrol arrived.