Court Opinion

ID: 9497234
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:46:28.068311+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:04.556261
License: Public Domain

FERGUSON, Circuit Judge,
dissenting in part:
I dissent from Parts III, IV, and V of the majority opinion.
The majority holds that the government agents were permitted to infer that the trailer was not used as a home1 from three facts: (1) the Portland General Electric Company did not provide electrical service; (2) the officers did not observe anyone spending the night in the trailer when they observed the property approximately ten or eleven times in the morning or evening hours; and (3) neighbors reported that no one lived on the property (this fact is a mistatement of the evidence).
The fact is, there are people in this country who do live without electricity. The U.S. Department of Energy calculates that 1.4% of U.S. households either do not pay for or have no access to electricity.2 Energy Info. Admin., Office of Coal, Nuclear, Electric and Alternate Fuels, U.S. Dept, of Energy, Energy Consumption and Renewable Energy Development Potential on Indian Lands ix, 3 (2000), http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar .renewa-bles
/ilands/iland_sum.html. I cannot join an opinion that suggests that a house is npt a “home,” with all the constitutional protections that status carries, because it lacks an electricity supply. Moreover, here, the fact that the Portland General Electric Company did not officially provide service to the trailer did not mean that it was not available; Barajas-Avalos’s brother testified that”[t]here is electricity on the telephone pole and we used wire to connect it to the trailer.”
I also cannot say that a house is not entitled to full Fourth Amendment protections because residence in it is not continuous. Both migrant farm workers and wealthy people with second homes in Ha*1062waii (who — for very different reasons— would spend one season in one house and the next season in another) have the same privacy rights in and around them residences as people with only one home. See LaDuke v. Nelson, 762 F.2d 1318 (9th Cir.1985) (holding that Border Patrol agents violated the Fourth Amendment by searching migrant farm housing units without the occupants’ consent). It is not enough to say that a house is unoccupied now, or has been unoccupied lately; houses do not acquire the legal status of barns or warehouses during the temporary absence of their owners. This is true even where the absence is extended, so long as the property has not been abandoned. Cf. United States v. Wilson, 472 F.2d 901 (9th Cir.1972) (holding that a tenant who departed the property, having left the door open and the rent unpaid, did not have standing to object to a search of the abandoned premises).
Finally, the majority states that Bara-jas-Avalos’s neighbors told the police that no one lived on the property. In fact, Agent Poikey testified that the neighbors “said they had no knowledge of anyone living there.” Given that the housing unit in question was surrounded on all sides by vegetation and trees on a thirty-acre parcel of rural land, it is hardly revealing that the neighbors had no knowledge of anyone living in the trailer. I would therefore hold that the government had no information by which it could legitimately have concluded that the trailer was not a home subject to all of the privacy protections afforded homes by the Fourth Amendment.
Additionally, I am concerned that portions of the majority opinion may be understood as suggesting that our Fourth Amendment analysis of curtilage might apply in some different manner to what the majority terms a “dwelling house” than to “temporary sleeping quarters, whether in a hotel room, a trailer, or in a tent in a public area.”3 This cannot be correct, as it would directly contradict our rule in LaDuke v. Nelson, 762 F.2d at 1326 n. 11, that “the Fourth Amendment does not permit [a government agency] to differentiate on a per se basis in the privacy accorded different stocks of housing.” See also Eng Fung Jem v. United States, 281 F.2d 803, 805 (9th Cir.1960) (“The transience of appellant’s stay in the room does not dilute the force of constitutional protection .... The right to privacy must be accorded with equal vigor both to transient hotel guests and to occupants of private, permanent dwellings.”).
LaDuke held that Border Patrol searches of migrant farm housing units required the consent of the occupants. 762 F.2d at 1327-28. Some of the searches held unconstitutional were flashlight searches, as is the case here, and not physical intrusions of the interior of the units. Id. at 1327-28, 1332 n. 19. There is no reason to suppose that we meant to except curtilage from our statement regarding the equal level of “privacy accorded different stocks of housing,” since this area of Fourth Amendment analysis is necessarily implicated when a home is approached by government agents but not entered.
For all of these reasons, I dissent from Parts III and IV of the majority opinion.
*1063I also dissent from Part V of the majority opinion. Once the observations made by the officers while trespassing on Willow Tree Farm are redacted, the affidavit submitted in support of the search warrant does not contain sufficient evidence to establish probable cause.
The majority’s analogy to United States v. Celestine, 324 F.3d 1095 (9th Cir.2003), fails. The facts legitimately available to the government in that case pointed far more directly to the presence of illicit drug activity on the property in question than was the ease here. As the majority notes, the affidavit in Celestine indicated that a pair of scissors containing marijuana residue and an empty bottle of pH reducer (a substance used in indoor marijuana cultivation) were found in the house’s trash, the house consumed twice the electricity of neighboring houses (an indication of an indoor drug-growing operation), and an individual was observed driving from the house to a hydroponics store, where the individual purchased items used in indoor plant cultivation. Id. at 1098-99. The Celestine court held that, taken together, the evidence “established] an adequate basis to conclude that evidence of drug growing would be found in the house.” Id. at 1102.
Here, by contrast, there was little to link the evidence of Mr. Barajas-Avalos’s involvement in a methamphetamine-manufacturing organization with the Willow Tree Farm property. Aside from the fact that Mr. Barajas-Avalos was a part-owner in the property and a statement by a “cooperating defendant” alleging that methamphetamine was being produced on Mr. Barajas-Avalos’s property, the only evidence linking Willow Tree Farm with the production of methamphetamine was the large quantity of empty pseudophed-rine bottles dumped on adjacent public land. There was no evidence to indicate, however, that the bottles had originated from the Willow Tree Farm property. Mr. Barajas-Avalos’s fingerprints were not found on the bottles, and the bottles were not found among trash known to have originated from Willow Tree Farm. By contrast, in Celestine, the scissors containing marijuana residue and the empty bottle of pH reducer were found in the house’s trash, and the excess electricity consumption was directly from the house. The evidence established a clear link between the indicia of marijuana use and the property in question. No such direct link exists in this case.
The government agents’ inability to find any such evidence is all the more striking given the extensive surveilance of the property. The agents had surveiled Willow Tree Farm from a neighboring parcel of land in the morning and evening hours approximately ten or eleven times prior to entering the property on September 21, 2000, and surveiled the property another six to eight times before completing the search warrant affidavit on .October 11. All that this lengthy surveillance revealed was 1) the presence of a black Ford pickup truck owned by Mr. Barajas-Avalos on the Willow Tree Farm and 2) the sound of pots and pans. Given the paltry amount of evidence the government agents were able to obtain from their weeks-long surveillance of the property, it is no wonder that they were tempted to enter the property without first obtaining a search warrant. However tempting it may have been, they should not have done so, for the reasons already stated in this dissent.
Unlike in Celestine, the confidential informant’s statement that Mr. Barajas-Avalos’s property was used for methamphetamine manufacture was insufficiently corroborated and was thus insufficient to support the issuance of a search warrant.
*1064I respectfully dissent from Parts III, IV, and V of the majority opinion.

. Because of this inference, according to the majority, the agents could treat the area around the trailer as "open field,” rather than as the curtilage of a home, and thus did not need a warrant to peer into the trailer through a window with a flashlight.

. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has also found that many Americans live without basic services. A recent HUD report indicates that, in 1997, over a million renter households occupied "severely inadequate” housing units and 725,000 owner households did so. Office of Policy Dev. and Research, U.S. Dept, of Hous. and Urban Dev., Rental Housing Assistance — The Worsening Crisis: A Report to Congress on Worst Case Housing Needs, app. at A-2 (2000), http://www.huduser.org/publications/affhsg/ worstcase00.html. In the report, a unit was considered to be severely inadequate if it had severe problems in its plumbing, heating, *1062electrical system, upkeep, or hallways. Id. at A-20, A-28.

. The majority appears to assume that every " 'non-traditional' house, such as a travel trailer,” is a place "in which persons occasionally spend the night.” This is, of course, not correct, as many people do reside in trailers (as well as in other non-traditional housing units) for long stretches of time. For instance, Barajas-Avalos’s brother testified that he lived in the trailer at issue in this case from September to December 1993.