Court Opinion

ID: 9496158
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:19:05.237833+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:23.632643
License: Public Domain

KLEINFELD, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I respectfully dissent.'
Like the majority, I reject the government’s argument that Davis lacked standing under Rakas v. Illinois1 to contest the *1172search of his bag. As a houseguest in the apartment, he had standing to assert his own legitimate expectation of privacy in his hostesses’ home under Minnesota v. Olson.2
I dissent from the conclusion, because the majority decision improperly extends United States v. Fultz.3 The majority errs partly in its reading of the record, and partly in its understanding of the law on closed container searches.
First, the facts. A man had died of a gunshot wound to the head and the police had learned that Davis was at the scene. They wished to speak with Davis. It turned out that, so far as the police learned, the man shot himself in the head “playing” Russian roulette.
The police asked a woman, Jessica McMannis, who worked in the Reno Police Department dispatch center, if Davis lived at the apartment that was searched. It turns out he did, with her, but she did not tell the police that. She lied, to deceive them into thinking Davis did not live there. McMannis testified at the suppression hearing that Davis lived at the apartment, and shared a room with her. But she admitted at the hearing that she had lied to the Sparks police when they asked her before the search if she knew where Davis lived. After she lied and told the police that she “did not know” where Davis lived, she called her roommate Stephanie Smith and told her the police were coming and not to open the door. McMannis, a twenty year old with a baby, also lied about where she lived. She told the police that she lived at her parents’ house in Sun Valley. And she apparently lied to police when she told them that she only signed the apartment lease to help her friend Stephanie Smith because Smith had credit problems, not because she was a co-tenant.
The police had no knowledge, so far as the record shows, that McMannis was lying to them. They went to the apartment having been informed that McMannis did not live there, and did not know where Davis lived. Nor did police know that McMannis was lying about her signature on the lease. For all they knew, Smith was the apartment’s only tenant. Thus, based on what McMannis had told them, they had no reason to think they were invading her privacy or Davis’s by looking into the room where McMannis and Davis lived or into the bag there that turned out to be Davis’s.
The woman who was in the apartment when the police came, Stephanie Smith, also lied, though not so egregiously as McMannis. Despite McMannis’s secret instructions, Smith let the police in when they arrived at the apartment. The police asked to see the lease to determine who rented the place and could consent to a search, and she showed it to them. Smith gave oral and written consent to a search, and did not restrict the scope of the search. Unlike McMannis, Smith told the police that Davis stayed in one of the bedrooms occasionally. Smith also indicated to the police that some of Davis’s belongings were in one of the rooms. But Smith told the police that the room where the bag was found was a “spare room.” Smith did not indicate in any way that anything in the apartment (including the “spare room,” which was actually McMan-nis’s room where Davis stayed) was “off limits” to her or to them, even though they specifically asked if anything in the apartment was “off limits” to her. Smith told the police that some of Davis’s belongings were in the “spare room,” but there is no evidence that Smith told the police that all or even a substantial portion of the items *1173in the room were Davis’s, or that the bag was Davis’s.
In the “spare room,” the police found a bag containing a shotgun, which furnished the basis for the felon in possession of a firearm charge for which Davis was convicted. But nothing in the record, nothing whatsoever, establishes factually that the bag was closed, or that there was a lock or even a fastener on the bag, or that the bag was marked with Davis’s name, or that Smith told the police that it was Davis’s bag.
Thus, nothing supports an inference that the police actually knew or should have known they were invading Davis’s privacy when they looked in the bag. What the police “knew” based on Smith’s story was that they were looking in a bag in a spare room of Smith’s apartment, a room where McMannis and Davis sometimes stayed and in which some of the things (which things were not specified) were Davis’s.
Although nothing in the record establishes anything about the bag, Davis’s counsel says in his brief that it was closed, black, and under the bed. This is based on an assertion of facts in defense counsel’s memorandum of law in the district court, with which government counsel concurred, that the policemen “opened” the bag under the bed. There is nothing asserting whether the flap was merely laying over the top of the contents, or the flap was fastened with the zipper 4 and no evidence suggests that the bag was zipped, fastened, or locked. That it was under the bed and turned out to contain a shotgun might just as reasonably support the inference that it was open, since that would make emergency access to the shotgun much more convenient.
For all the police knew, they were looking in a bag in which they might expect to find men’s or women’s hockey equipment, out-of-season ladies’ clothes, shoes that McMannis or Smith left bagged to keep the dust bunnies off them, or extra diapers and supplies for McMannis’s baby that Smith helped care for. There is no testimony that Smith ever told the police, “That’s Davis’s bag,” or that it was so marked. In short, there is nothing to suggest that the bag presented any objective features that would have identified the bag as belonging to Davis as opposed to Smith or McMannis.
The controlling Supreme Court decision is United States v. Matlock.5 In Matlock, the police searched a house pursuant to consent by one of the inhabitants, and found a diaper bag in the closet containing proceeds of a bank robbery. The decision does not say whether the bag was closed. The issue was whether the third party’s consent to the search of the bedroom made the diaper bag contents admissible against the bank robber. The answer was “yes,” because “the consent of one who possesses common authority over the premises or effects is valid as against the absent, non-consenting person with whom that authority is shared.”6 Matlock uses the common law tort language, though not the tort concept, of “assumption of the risk.”7 The decision expressly rejects application of the law of property as the basis for deter*1174mining whether consent to a search may be granted. Instead, Matlock teaches that the government may show valid consent to search by demonstrating that “permission to search was obtained from a third party who possessed common authority over or other sufficient relationship to the premises or effects sought to be inspected.”8 Thus, if persons have “joint access or control for most purposes ... it is reasonable to recognize that any of the co-inhabitants has the right to permit the inspection in his own right and that the others have assumed the risk that one of their number might permit the common area to be searched.”9 Because the third party’s consent was legally sufficient to permit the search of the bag, the Court did not reach the question of whether the officer’s reasonable belief as to the consent-giver’s authority would have sufficed.
In the case at bar, the district judge denied the motion to suppress' based on Matlock. In my opinion, he was right. This case is controlled by Matlock. Mat-lock does not reach “apparent authority,” the theory to which the majority opinion speaks, and the majority, oddly, does not reach “assumption of the risk,” the theory to which the Supreme Court speaks in Matlock.
There are two Ninth Circuit decisions upon which the majority opinion relies, United States v. Welch10 and United States v. Fultz.11 Both have to be distinguished, to keep Ninth Circuit law in conformity with the Supreme Court decision in Mat-lock.
In Welch, two gamblers, a man and a woman, were passing counterfeit $20 bills at a Las Vegas casino. Interrogating them separately, officers obtained the man’s consent to search his car. They found a woman’s purse, clasped shut, in the trunk, opened it, and a found another $500 in counterfeit twenties. We held that nothing about the woman’s purse manifested shared authority with the man to open it up and look inside it, nor did the man have apparent authority to look into her purse.12 Welch has no application to the bag found in Stephanie Smith’s “spare room.”
A woman’s purse is quite obviously a woman’s, and the man in Welch would not in the ordinary course of things have the woman’s consent to root around in it. A man and a woman can be married for decades, with the man not knowing what his wife keeps in her purse, and she not knowing what he keeps in his wallet. No reasonable police officer could assume that a man had shared access inside a woman’s purse, unless he told them he did. That is why under Welch there is no apparent authority and no manifestation of shared access.
The other Ninth Circuit case upon which the majority relies on United States v. Fultz. Following Welch, we again held that a third person’s consent, such as it was, did not authorize a search of a closed container. In Fultz, a woman who had let a man stay in her house consented to a police search of her house, and they found the defendant’s contraband in a closed cardboard box in the garage. We noted that there was “no evidence that [the woman] had use of and joint access to or shared control over Fultz’s boxes,” and that she “told the officers that the boxes and plastic bags that were segregated in one area of the garage were Fultz’s and not hers.”13 We rejected the claims of *1175authority and apparent authority because the woman “clearly told the officers that Fultz’s belongings were exclusively Fultz’s and not hers[so that] the officers were fully aware of the actual facts that establish [her] lack of authority to consent to the search of Fultz’s closed containers.” 14
The majority claims that the case at bar is materially indistinguishable from Fultz.15 I disagree. In Fultz, the consent-giver told the police that “only” the man’s things were in that part of the garage, and that the things in the boxes and bags were exclusively his and not the consent-giver’s. The police knew they were looking in containers, which we repeatedly emphasized were closed, in a segregated area, containing only someone else’s stored possessions, not the consent-giver’s. In the case at bar, the area where the bag was left was Stephanie Smith’s “spare room,” as she told them, and though Davis had “occasionally” stayed there, the police did not know if the bag was Smith’s or if it was not. But she nevertheless had access to its contents.
Thus, in Welch the police relied on a man’s authority to look into a woman’s purse, and in Fultz, on a homeowner’s permission to search a segregated area of her garage even though she expressly identified segregated closed containers as containing someone else’s effects and not hers. In the case at bar, they relied on the apartment tenant’s authority to search her own “spare room” and whatever things they may find there. Fultz is like a hotel allowing the police to open and search guest luggage in the stored baggage room — obviously impermissible. The case at bar is like Matlock, the occupant allowing a search of her home including the closets, where the incriminating diaper bag contents were found.
After Matlock, this is a fortiori a permissible consent-based search. In Mat-lock, at least the police knew that the defendant actually lived in one of the rooms in the house,16 but here all they knew was that Stephanie Smith lived in the apartment and used this as a “spare room” in which the defendant had occasionally stayed. The issue is not who owns the real estate, or the bag, but whether the reasonable officer would know that he is invading the privacy of someone other than the person who consented.
There is plenty of Ninth Circuit authority upholding the view that searches like the one in the case at bar are within the category of permitted consent searches. In United States v. Sledge,17 a search of an apparently but not actually abandoned apartment with the landlord’s consent, we laid down the correct theoretical framework in an opinion by then-judge Kennedy. Sledge holds that the expectation of privacy “should be measured in objective terms.”18 What matters in cases like the one at bar “is not precisely an actual expectation of privacy; [but] rather the exhibition of an actual expectation of privacy.” 19 In other words, “the defendant must have acted in such a way that it would have been reasonable for him to expect that he would not be observed.”20 Thus, a policeman cannot assume that a hotel clerk has a guest’s permission to authorize a search of his effects in his room, but can assume that a landlord has authority to let him search an apparently *1176abandoned apartment, because of the different “factually supportable inference of the occupant’s probable intent.”21
Likewise in United States v. Kim, we upheld a search of a locked storage unit by consent of a third party.22 The majority in the case at bar makes no attempt to distinguish or even discuss Kim. In Kim, one man had rented the locked storage units in which another, the defendant, stored stolen property, and we held that the lessees’s consent was good enough, even though he did not have a key and the locks had to be cut off for the police to get in. We explained that under Matlock and Sledge, “ ‘assumption of the risk’ analysis” applied.23 By instructing the consent-giver to rent the lockers in his own name and allowing him total control sometimes and partial control all the time over the lockers, the defendant assumed the risk that the consenter would allow access to others. Because such a manifestation gives the third person actual authority, we did not reach the issue of apparent authority to consent to the search.24
In the case at bar, as in Kim, Davis did not make an objective “exhibition of an actual expectation of privacy.” Nor did he act “in such a way that it would have been reasonable for him to expect that he would not be observed” as to the contents of what he left in the room, by Smith or whoever she let in. He “assumed the risk” that Smith would consent to a search, because of her “common authority over the premises or effects,” in the room, as in Kim and Sledge.
Because Davis made no objective manifestation of a reasonable expectation of privacy, the majority errs by analyzing the case in terms of apparent authority. The way the Supreme Court and we have analyzed such “assumption of the risk” cases is by not even reaching apparent authority, because by failing to make an objective manifestation of an expectation of privacy in the goods stored in another’s apartment or storage facility, the owner has actually assumed the risk that the third person would look at or permit someone else to look at the goods. For all we know, on this sparse record, Davis carefully and purposely avoided making an objective manifestation of an expectation of privacy in the contents of the bag, in contrast to a hotel guest putting his name on stored luggage, because he knew that by storing a firearm in the bag that was marked clearly as his, he would be admitting to commission of a felony. One storing contraband might purposely avoid objective manifestations of dominion to protect himself.
The lies by Jessica McMannis and Stephanie Smith make the case for allowing the search even more compelling under our precedents. Under United States v. Fiorillo, where the officer reasonably believes the consent-giver’s lie (or omission of a fact), which, if true, would provide the consent-giver with actual authority, we allow the search under the notion of “apparent authority.”25
Thus, the majority is not merely following or applying our holding in Fultz, be*1177cause the goods in Fultz were segregated and expressly identified to the officers as another person’s, not the consent-giver’s. Given the materially different facts here, the majority is extending Fultz. That might be permissible, were it not for Mat-lock. We have to follow the Supreme Court decision in Matlock. Fultz cannot be extended to searches of bags in an apartment to which consent has been given to search by a person with access to the whole apartment, where the bags have not been expressly identified as someone else’s goods, without conflicting with Matlock. Matlock limits the extension of Fultz. This case passes the limit.

. 439 U.S. 128, 143, 99 S.Ct. 421, 58 L.Ed.2d 387 (1978).

. 495 U.S. 91, 96-97, 110 S.Ct. 1684, 109 L.Ed.2d 85 (1990).

. 146 F.3d 1102 (9th Cir.1998).

.In the trial court, defense counsel stated in a memorandum that the bag was an “Easton sports bag.” On the internet, these bags are advertised as having zippers, see http://www.eastonsports.com (last visited May 29, 2003), but of course a statement in a memorandum combined with an internet search does not add up to a judicially cognizable fact.

. United States v. Matlock, 415 U.S. 164, 94 S.Ct. 988, 39 L.Ed.2d 242 (1974).

. Id. at 170, 94 S.Ct. 988.

. Id. at 171, 94 S.Ct. 988.

. Id.

. Id. at 171 n. 7, 94 S.Ct. 988.

.4 F.3d 761 (9th Cir.1993).

. 146 F.3d 1102 (9th Cir.1998).

. Welch, 4 F.3d at 764-65.

. Fultz, 146 F.3d at 1106.

. Id.

. Majority at 1170.

. Matlock, 415 U.S. at 166, 94 S.Ct. 988.

. 650 F.2d 1075 (9th Cir.1981).

. Id. at 1077.

. Id. at 1077 n. 2 (emphasis added).

. Id.

. Id. at 1077.

. 105 F.3d 1579 (9th Cir.1997).

. See id. at 1582,

. Id. at 1583.

. 186 F.3d 1136, 1144 (9th Cir.1999). Using "apparent authority” in this way is a stretch in terms of agency law, because only a principal can cloak an agent with "apparent authority.” A person cannot by a lie cloak himself in such authority, but as with property law, the technicalities of agency law do not control resolution of the Fourth Amendment criminal issue.