Court Opinion

ID: 9497542
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:53:41.992431+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:15.430807
License: Public Domain

RILEY, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
From its inception, this case has presented a moving target. Because I agree *787with the court’s ultimate resolution of this case on appeal, I concur. However, I wish to discuss the case’s unique history, including what issues are properly before us, and our circuit’s recent, controlling precedent on the seizure issue to clarify why I concur only in the result.
Loos and Escobar both filed motions to suppress in the district court. The magistrate judge6 held a suppression hearing. After making credibility determinations, the magistrate judge found: (1) the initial contact between law enforcement officers and Loos and Escobar in the bus terminal was a voluntary encounter; (2) Loos and Escobar voluntarily followed the officers to the baggage area inside the terminal; (3) Loos voluntarily consented to searches of her purse and luggage; and (4) Escobar voluntarily consented to the search of his luggage. The magistrate judge recommended the motions to suppress be denied.
Loos and Escobar then filed objections to the magistrate judge’s report and recommendation, attacking the magistrate judge’s “finding that 1) their encounter with the officers was consensual until the officers found the cocaine in the bag, and 2) they voluntarily consented to a search of their belongings.” After a careful de novo review of the record, the district court concluded the magistrate judge “correctly found that the encounter between the officers and the defendants was voluntary and did not become an investigatory detention or seizure until the officers discovered the drugs in Loos’s bag.” The district court also agreed with the magistrate judge’s finding “that Loos voluntarily consented to the search of her purse and bag and that Escobar voluntarily consented to the search of his bag.”
Notwithstanding its findings that Loos and Escobar voluntarily consented to the searches of their luggage, the district court noted Escobar filed an out-of-time objection, arguing, for the first time, “the officers seized his bag from the luggage compartment of the bus without a warrant and took it to a nonpublic area of the bus terminal in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights.” The district court posited the late-filed objection was in response to the district court’s recent decision in an almost identical ease entitled United States v. Va Lerie, 2003 WL 21956437 (D.Neb. Aug.14, 2003). Because the parties had not briefed or argued the seizure issue before the magistrate judge, the district court ordered briefing and an eviden-tiary hearing. The court specifically asked the parties to brief the following issues:
a. Whether the officers’ warrantless removal of the defendants’ bags from the luggage compartment of the bus to the bus terminal’s baggage room was an unconstitutional seizure, and
b. If so, whether the voluntariness of the defendants’ consents to search, as determined by the factors in Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590, 95 S.Ct. 2254, 45 L.Ed.2d 416 (1975), retains the taint of the illegal seizure.
The district court made clear its conclusions “on the voluntariness of the defendants’ consent are consequently only provisional. If new evidence establishes that the seizure of the bag was unconstitutional, evidence about the drugs could be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree unless the defendants’ alleged consent to the searches of the purse and the bags removed the taint of the unlawful seizure.”
*788After the parties briefed the newly raised issues and after an evidentiary hearing, the district court stated, “Upon reviewing the entire record, the party’s supplemental briefs, and the evidence adduced at both hearings, the court finds the seizure of luggage violated the defendants’ Fourth Amendment rights and all subsequent evidence resulting from the seizure should be suppressed.” Relying in part on its seizure decision in Va Lerie, the district court concluded the officers seized the luggage when they “removed the [luggage] from the bus, separated it from the rest of the luggage, and carried it into the baggage area,” because “[t]his degree of dominion and control constitutes a meaningful interference” with Loos’s and Escobar’s property. The district court then decided the officers did not have reasonable suspicion to seize the luggage.
Finally, the district court again addressed the consent to search issue, initially focusing on whether Loos and Escobar consented to the seizure of the luggage. For the first time, the district court recognized the officer’s lie about the drug dog alerting to the luggage “is the same as stating there is probable cause that the luggage contains contraband and is subject to seizure.” The district court stated the “lie relayed a message that Loos and Es-cobar’s consent was not required for the investigators to seize their luggage,” and any consent was merely “an acquiescence to the investigators’ claim they had the legal right to retrieve and detain [the defendants’] luggage.” Thus, the district court found “[t]he coercive nature in which the investigators obtained access to and then searched the luggage precludes a finding of voluntary consent.”
The district court then noted, “After the illegal seizure of the luggage, Loos and Escobar consented to the search of their luggage. In the [court’s] previous order, the court found that both defendants’ consent was voluntary.” Based on its new-found seizure holding, the district court stated “admissibility is dependent on whether the defendants’ voluntary consent was sufficient to purge the taint of the illegal seizure under the principles of Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590, 95 S.Ct. 2254, 45 L.Ed.2d 416 (1975),” requiring a showing that “Loos and Escobar’s consent was an intervening independent act of free will sufficient to purge the primary taint of the unlawful invasion.” The district court concluded by “finding Loos and Escobar’s consent to search their luggage was obtained by exploitation of the illegal seizure.” Thus, the district court granted Loos’s and Escobar’s motions to suppress the cocaine seized from their luggage.
The district court’s evolving view of the evidence and the relevant issues allowed the court to grant the motions to suppress. If the district court had not held the removal of the checked luggage from the bus was an unconstitutional seizure, the court would not have changed its consent findings. That is, the court did not experience a dramatic, epiphanic reversal of its consent to search conclusion. The court in its initial analysis and opinion on consent was aware of the dog-alert lie. Only when the district court viewed the consent issue through the lens of a prior unlawful seizure did the court conclude Loos’s and Escobar’s consents to search were constitutionally deficient. Thus, the district court never found Loos and Escobar failed to consent to the searches of their luggage. Instead, the district court specifically found Loos and Escobar voluntarily consented to the search of their luggage, but later found such “consent was not an [intervening] independent act of free will” necessary to purge the taint of the unlawful seizure. The district court’s consent findings were tied directly and exclusively to its seizure holding.
*789On appeal, the government contends the district court erred in two ways: (1) “in Finding the Defendants’ Bags had been Seized for Unconstitutional Purposes”; and (2) “in Finding the Defendants’ Consents Did Not Purge the Taint of the Prior, Illegal Seizure.”7 For some reason, this panel refuses to address the seizure issue, but instead simply decides the consents to search were tainted. The panel should not avoid altogether the seizure issue and imply the district court’s consent findings were unrelated to its seizure holding. Instead, the panel should address the issues presented by the district court’s decisions and argued by the parties on appeal. In so doing, the panel would reach the same result.
Our court recently decided a seizure case involving the same bus terminal in Omaha, some of the same drug interdiction officers, almost identical facts, and even the same district judge. See United States v. Va Lerie, 385 F.3d 1141 (8th Cir.2004). In Va Lerie, a divided panel of our court held, over my dissent, the removal of checked luggage from the lower luggage compartment of a bus to the same room inside the same Omaha terminal was an unlawful seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Id. at 1148. Because Va Lerie controls the seizure issue, I see no reason for the court in this case to ignore month-old precedent and avoid the seizure issue altogether. Because the seizure issue has been presented squarely to our court in this case, the only authorized holding, in light of Va Lerie, is the officers unreasonably and unconstitutionally seized Loos’s and Escobar’s luggage when the officers removed the checked luggage from the bus’s lower luggage compartment to a room inside the terminal.8
Had the panel applied Va Leñe and held the removal of Loos’s and Escobar’s checked luggage from the bus’s lower luggage compartment constituted a seizure, we then could hold the district court did not commit clear error in finding Loos’s and Escobar’s consents to search did not purge the taint of the unlawful seizure. Such a holding is more faithful to the district court’s decision and the parties’ arguments on appeal.
Deciding consent cases is a fact-intensive exercise, requiring district courts to “careful[ly] sift[ ] the unique facts and circumstances of each case” to determine whether an individual voluntarily consented to a search. Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U.S. 218, 233, 93 S.Ct. 2041, 36 L.Ed.2d 854 (1973). The district court’s sifting of the unique facts and circumstances in this case changed from its first order to its second order. When the district court reviewed the evidence through the lens of an unlawful seizure, it was *790then-and only then-the court found Loos’s and Escobar’s consents were constitutionally deficient.
The district court properly considered the legal effect of the officer’s lie about the drug dog alerting when pondering whether Loos and Escobar voluntarily consented to the searches of their luggage. The Supreme Court has “stated that even when officers have no basis for suspecting a particular individual, they may generally ask questions of that individual, ask to examine the individual’s identification, and request consent to search his or her luggage-as long as the police do not convey a message that compliance with their requests is required.” Florida v. Bostick, 501 U.S. 429, 434-35, 111 S.Ct. 2382, 115 L.Ed.2d 389 (1991) (citations omitted). In a nutshell, the rationale behind this general rule is “[t]he Fourth Amendment proscribes unreasonable searches and seizures; it does not proscribe voluntary cooperation.” Id. at 439, 111 S.Ct. 2382. However, the Supreme Court has further stated, “When a law enforcement officer claims authority to search a home under a warrant, he announces in effect that the occupant has no right to resist the search. The situation is instinct with coercion-albeit color-ably lawful coercion. Where there is coercion there cannot be consent.” Bumper v. North Carolina, 391 U.S. 543, 550, 88 S.Ct. 1788, 20 L.Ed.2d 797 (1968).
Lying about a drug-dog alert could, under some circumstances, including those in this case, convey a message that consent to search is unnecessary. See United States v. Cabrera, 117 F.Supp.2d 1152, 1158 (D.Kan.2000) (finding defendant did not voluntarily consent to a search when an officer lied about a drug dog alerting, noting the officer “relied on a blatant deeeption-the positive dog alert-to further the impression that [the defendant] had no choice but to permit [the] search”); see also United States v. Pena-Saiz, 161 F.3d 1175, 1177-78 (8th Cir.1998) (holding the district court’s no-consent finding was not clearly erroneous, because the individual felt she was under arrest and had to submit to the pat-down search, in part based on the officers saying, “This is what we do. We talk to people, we search people’s bags, we pat search people. This is what we do everyday.”); United States v. Severe, 29 F.3d 444, 446 (8th Cir.1994) (holding threat to obtain a search warrant if individual does not consent to a search is just one factor in deciding whether the totality of the circumstances supports a voluntary consent finding). But cf. United States v. Hawthorne, 982 F.2d 1186, 1191 (8th Cir.1992) (holding district court’s finding of consent was not clearly erroneous when the defendant consented after officers told him they could get a drug dog, even though the defendant knew the dog would alert).
Realizing there is “a vast difference between a misrepresentation of legal authority and a misunderstanding of legal authority,” the district court was not clearly erroneous in finding Loos’s and Escobar’s consents to search, in light of the lie about the drug dog alerting, were insufficient to overcome the taint of an unlawful seizure. See United States v. Allison, 619 F.2d 1254, 1262, 1264 (8th Cir.1980) (holding “a search pursuant to the service of a subpoena duces tecum, as in normal consent search situations,” involves “a question of fact to be determined from the totality of all the circumstances,” and recognizing “a vast difference between a misrepresentation of legal authority and a misunderstanding of legal authority”) (citation omitted). Because I would be faithful to the district court’s decisions, the issues argued by the parties, and our court’s recent *791precedent, I concur only in the result reached by the court in this case.

. The Honorable Thomas D. Thalken, United States Magistrate Judge for the District of Nebraska.

. Escobar's enunciation of the issues, in which Loos joined, is strikingly similar.

. The exact seizure issue presented in Va Ler-ie is presented to this panel. I dissented in Va Lerie, because I did not believe our court's precedents-or Fourth Amendment seizure principles-required a holding that the checked luggage had been seized. Id. at 1151 (Riley, J., dissenting) (suggesting seizure law required a holding that "law enforcement's temporary removal of a commercial bus passenger's checked luggage from a lower luggage compartment to a room inside the terminal does not constitute a seizure if the removal of the luggage does not delay the passenger's travel, affect the timely delivery of the checked luggage, or interfere with the carrier's normal processing of the checked luggage”). If Va Lerie did not control the seizure issue in this case, I would reverse the district court's holding that Loos's and Esco-bar's checked luggage was seized when it was removed from the lower luggage compartment to a room inside the bus terminal. See id. at 1151-57. However, I cannot ignore the holding in Va Lerie and avoid the seizure issue altogether. Nevertheless, I reiterate the concerns expressed in my dissent in Va Lerie.