Court Opinion

ID: 9941115
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2024-02-15 21:01:57.147523+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:46:14.123877
License: Public Domain

In the

    United States Court of Appeals
                 For the Seventh Circuit
                     ____________________
No. 22-2932
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
                                                   Plaintiff-Appellee,
                                 v.

ADRIAN L. JOHNSON,
                                               Defendant-Appellant.
                     ____________________

         Appeal from the United States District Court for the
         Northern District of Indiana, Fort Wayne Division.
          No. 1:21-cr-00017 — Holly A. Brady, Chief Judge.
                     ____________________

  ARGUED OCTOBER 24, 2023 — DECIDED FEBRUARY 15, 2024
               ____________________

   Before ROVNER, WOOD, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.
    WOOD, Circuit Judge. After pulling over Adrian Johnson
for driving with a suspended license, Sheriﬀ’s Deputy Mat-
thew Haber had his trained dog sniﬀ around Johnson’s car.
The dog alerted to the scent of a controlled substance,
prompting Haber to search the car. The dog was right: Haber
found drugs, drug paraphernalia, and two handguns. In time,
Johnson faced federal charges for possession of drugs with in-
tent to distribute in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a), being a
2                                                     No. 22-2932

felon in possession of a firearm, in violation of 18 U.S.C.
§§ 922(g)(1) and 924(e), and possession of a firearm in further-
ance of a drug traﬃcking crime, in violation of 18 U.S.C.
§ 924(c).
    Johnson moved to suppress all evidence, contending that
the search of his car violated his rights under the Fourth
Amendment. The district court denied the motion. Johnson
then pleaded guilty in exchange for the dismissal of the felon-
in-possession charge, but he reserved his right to appeal the
suppression ruling. The court sentenced Johnson to 180
months in prison, and he filed the anticipated appeal. We
agree with the district court that Haber did not unconstitu-
tionally prolong the stop to conduct the dog sniﬀ, and we
therefore aﬃrm.
                                 I
   On January 26, 2021, Deputy Haber was driving a marked
police vehicle on Interstate 69 in DeKalb County, Indiana,
when he saw Johnson driving a white SUV in the opposite
direction. Haber noticed that Johnson was looking beneath his
arm—an odd move that he interpreted as a sign that Johnson
might be trying to hide his face. Believing that this behavior
might indicate criminal activity, Haber began to follow John-
son. As he drove, he ran Johnson’s license plate through the
squad car computer and learned that it was expired. Driving
with an expired license plate is a traﬃc infraction in Indiana,
and so Haber activated his lights to initiate a traﬃc stop. John-
son pulled over, but Haber thought he took an unusually long
time to do so.
    Upon request, Johnson produced paper identification and
a bill of sale for the car, but he did not furnish its registration
No. 22-2932                                                     3

or a driver’s license. (Indiana law requires registration of a car
within 45 days of purchase; those 45 days had expired months
earlier.) Haber returned to his vehicle and ran Johnson’s iden-
tification. The system informed him that Johnson had a sus-
pended license and a prior conviction, which made it a mis-
demeanor for him to drive. Because Johnson had no license
and the car was not registered to him, Haber decided to im-
pound the car. He called for backup and began preparing two
documents: an impound log and a warning for Johnson’s ex-
pired plate. Deputy Carren Franke soon arrived as backup.
    A DeKalb County policy requires oﬃcers to inventory ve-
hicles before impounding them. Shortly after Franke’s arrival,
Haber instructed Johnson to get out of his car to allow the of-
ficers to conduct their inventory. Johnson refused to consent
to a search of his car but allowed Haber to search his person
for weapons. Haber frisked Johnson and found about $1,600
in cash. The oﬃcers decided that Franke would put him in the
back seat of her police vehicle while they inventoried the car
Johnson had been driving.
    Franke walked Johnson to her squad car; as she did so, Ha-
ber brought his dog out to sniﬀ Johnson’s car. The dog sat
twice on the passenger side of the car, alerting to the presence
of a controlled substance. The dog sniﬀ wrapped up about
85 seconds after Franke began escorting Johnson to her car.
   Franke then handcuﬀed Johnson and informed him that
they were detaining him because the dog had alerted near his
vehicle. They told him that he was not yet under arrest, but
that they were going to search his car. Haber began searching
the car and quickly found a pipe used for smoking metham-
phetamine. He then placed Johnson under arrest and in-
formed him of his Miranda rights. The oﬃcers continued
4                                                  No. 22-2932

searching the car and found a box containing a handgun.
Near where the dog had alerted, they also found a bag con-
taining 44 grams of methamphetamine, a mixture containing
fentanyl, a digital scale, and another handgun. Haber called
for a tow truck and waited with the car while Franke took
Johnson to jail.
    As we noted earlier, the government brought drug and
weapons charges against Johnson. Johnson moved to sup-
press all evidence found in the car as fruits of an unconstitu-
tional search. The court denied his motion, finding that the
dog sniﬀ did not violate the Fourth Amendment, and that it
provided the oﬃcers with probable cause to search the car.
Johnson then entered a conditional guilty plea, and the court
sentenced him to 15 years in prison.
                               II
    The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable
searches and seizures. Johnson does not challenge the initial
traﬃc stop, and rightly so. Haber was entitled to stop Johnson
because he knew that Johnson was driving with an expired
license plate in violation of state law. Whren v. United States,
517 U.S. 806, 810 (1996).
    Johnson’s primary argument is that the dog sniﬀ violated
his Fourth Amendment rights. He cannot mean the sniﬀ by
itself, however, because the Supreme Court has held that a
dog sniﬀ is not a search and so does not implicate the Fourth
Amendment. Illinois v. Caballes, 543 U.S. 405, 409 (2005). The
point is a more subtle one: an oﬃcer may not prolong an oth-
erwise-lawful traﬃc stop in order to conduct a dog sniﬀ. In
Rodriguez v. United States, the Court clarified that the permis-
sible duration of a traﬃc stop is determined by the “mission”
No. 22-2932                                                     5

of the stop. 575 U.S. 348, 356 (2018). If an oﬃcer prolongs a
stop beyond its permissible length to conduct a dog sniﬀ, even
for a short time, the stop becomes unlawful unless the oﬃcer
has reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. Id. at 356–57. In
the present case, the government argues that the dog sniﬀ did
not prolong the stop, that it was independently supported by
reasonable suspicion even if it did prolong the stop, and that
the evidence would inevitably have been discovered during
the inventory search anyway.
                                A
    At the outset, we note that Johnson did not challenge the
length or validity of the dog sniﬀ in the district court. The rec-
ord therefore does not contain information crucial to the Ro-
driguez inquiry, such as whether Deputy Haber acted dili-
gently in filling out the impound log while waiting for
backup. To the extent Johnson is now trying to rely on “pars-
ing the time line of the stop” to show that the oﬃcers failed
diligently to pursue their traﬃc mission, that argument is for-
feited. United States v. Stewart, 902 F.3d 664, 674–75 (7th Cir.
2018).
    The district court found it unnecessary to address the
question whether the oﬃcers deviated from their traﬃc mis-
sion. It resolved the case instead by examining whether Ha-
ber’s decision to conduct the dog sniﬀ prolonged the traﬃc
stop. If it did not, then Johnson has nothing to complain
about. We may thus turn to that issue. Johnson’s arguments
on this point are not forfeited, to the extent they are based on
facts available in the record. United States v. Rogers, 44 F.4th
728, 737 (7th Cir. 2022); see also United States v. Hernandez-Ro-
driguez, 352 F.3d 1325, 1328 (10th Cir. 2003) (“We conclude
that when the district court sua sponte raises and explicitly
6                                                    No. 22-2932

resolves an issue of law on the merits, the appellant may chal-
lenge that ruling on appeal on the ground addressed by the
district court even if he failed to raise the issue in district
court.”).
                                B
    We review the district court’s findings of fact for clear er-
ror and its legal conclusion de novo. United States v. Gholston,
1 F.4th 492, 496 (7th Cir. 2021). Rodriguez held that investiga-
tions into potential crimes during a traﬃc stop are detours
from an oﬃcer’s traﬃc mission, as are “safety precautions
taken in order to facilitate such detours.” 575 U.S. at 356. John-
son argues that when Haber stopped pursuing traﬃc-related
tasks to conduct the dog sniﬀ, he detoured from the mission
of the traﬃc stop, violating Rodriguez.
     But the “critical question” under Rodriguez is not whether
the oﬃcer conducted any investigatory task during the stop.
It is “whether conducting the sniﬀ prolongs—i.e., adds time
to—the stop.” 575 U.S. at 357 (internal quotation marks omit-
ted). A case therefore becomes problematic under Rodriguez
only when an oﬃcer, having no legal basis to keep a suspect
in place, drags her feet during a traﬃc stop to give a trained
dog time to arrive.
    This is not that case. Haber did not have to wait for a col-
league to show up with a dog, because he was himself a “K-9
Deputy” and already had a drug-sniﬃng dog with him. By
the time Haber brought the dog to Johnson’s car, Johnson was
already in trouble. The oﬃcers knew that he was driving with
a suspended license, and so they had probable cause to arrest
him. Even if, as the record indicates, Haber did not plan to
arrest Johnson for the misdemeanor, he would not have
No. 22-2932                                                       7

allowed Johnson to drive away without a valid license. The
district court therefore correctly found that by the time Haber
brought the dog out of his vehicle, Johnson “was already in
police custody and going nowhere.” The stop was prolonged
not by the dog sniﬀ, but by Haber’s discovery that he would
have to impound Johnson’s car and not allow him to drive
away in it.
    Perhaps Johnson is saying that the oﬃcers could have
driven him home (or to the jail) faster had Haber not paused
the impound process to conduct the dog sniﬀ. But the dash-
cam footage from Haber’s vehicle reveals that at the begin-
ning of the dog sniﬀ, Deputy Franke was walking Johnson to
her vehicle. Securing a suspect in a police vehicle can be “rea-
sonably incidental” to a traﬃc stop. United States v. Lewis, 920
F.3d 483, 492 (7th Cir. 2019). That is particularly so in this case;
the oﬃcers were required to inventory and impound the car,
and the alternative to placing Johnson in a police vehicle
would have been to leave him standing on a highway on a
cold January night. True, if Franke secured Johnson in her ve-
hicle only to facilitate the dog sniﬀ, Rodriguez might well be
violated. But “to the extent that we simply do not know
whether every moment was spent in traﬃc-related tasks, the
fault for those omissions lies with” Johnson for failing to raise
the issue at the trial level. Stewart, 902 F.3d at 676.
                                III
    Our conclusion that the dog sniﬀ did not unreasonably
prolong the stop makes the remainder of the Fourth Amend-
ment analysis straightforward. To be reasonable, a search
generally must be supported by probable cause and a war-
rant, but oﬃcers may dispense with the warrant requirement
for vehicle searches under the so-called automobile exception.
8                                                    No. 22-2932

United States v. Ross, 456 U.S. 798, 823 (1982). Thus, to search
the car, Deputy Haber needed only probable cause to believe
that it contained contraband. Because Johnson does not chal-
lenge the drug-sniﬃng dog’s reliability, we can accept the dis-
trict court’s finding that the dog’s alerts gave the oﬃcers prob-
able cause to search the car. See Florida v. Harris, 568 U.S. 237,
246–47 (2013). The search of Johnson’s car therefore did not
violate the Fourth Amendment. In light of that fact, we have
no need to reach the government’s alternative arguments.
    The judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.