Court Opinion

ID: 9496788
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:35:14.548505+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:47.690548
License: Public Domain

FERGUSON, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
This case addresses the issue of whether the legitimacy of a government search may depend upon the results of that search. Because the Fourth Amendment prohibits such a rule, I dissent from Parts III, TV, and V of the majority opinion.
The majority opinion correctly notes that individuals have no legitimate expectation of privacy in “open fields,” with the exception of “the area immediately surrounding the home,” i.e., the home’s curti-lage. Oliver v. United States, 466 U.S. 170, 178, 104 S.Ct. 1735, 80 L.Ed.2d 214 (1984).
The majority also correctly concludes that the trailer on the Willow Tree Farm property was not a home. The federal agents who searched the trailer found no food .provisions, no dishes or utensils, and no cooking appliances inside. There were no sheets, blankets, pillows,, or sleeping bags on the beds. In short, there was nothing within the trailer to indicate that it was being used at, the time for a home.
Given that the trailer was not a home, the majority says,' “the natural clearing surrounding it was not protected.” They claim that federal agents had committed no Fourth Amendment violation because the clearing, including the area immediately adjacent to the trailer, was “open field” and not “curtilage” to a home.
However, the federal agents investigating the Willow Tree Farm property were not able' to obtain this information about the interior of the trailer until they stood immediately next to the trailer and peered through -a window with a flashlight. Before looking through the window, the agents did not know what they would find.
The majority has now decreed in this Circuit that when the validity of a search is in question, it is permissible to place the cart before the horse. If the results of the flashlight search had shown that the trailer was a home, then the area immediately surrounding the structure would have qualified as curtilage for the purposes of Fourth Amendment analysis.1 Consequently, peering through the window *1220would have been a Fourth Amendment violation because the officers who did so would have been present in the curtilage of a home without a search warrant.
For us to ratify the flashlight search in this case because the results of the search proved that the structure in question was not a home is to say that the presence or absence of a Fourth Amendment violation depends on what government agents find after looking through the window of a structure and not before.
This is the problem presented by the government’s action in this case, and it is a significant one. The majority’s opinion eliminates the problem by holding that “non-traditional structures,” such as those inhabited by “a guest in a residence or hotel, or an overnight camper,” have no curtilage, and such inhabitants have no “protected right to privacy in the open area surrounding his or her sleeping quarters.” In the majority’s view, then, the Fourth Amendment only prohibits the police from peering through the windows of homes which are “traditional structures.” On this view, government agents may look through the windows of campers, trailers, tents, and similar living spaces as much as they please without search warrants.
Under the majority’s holding, officials wishing to inspect the interior of a home through a window without a search warrant need only determine whether the structure is a “traditional” or “non-traditional” house. If the structure is traditional, the area around it may be curtilage and protected from government intrusion. If it is non-traditional, the area around it has no such protection (regardless of any efforts made by the inhabitants to prevent public observation) and agents are free to peer through the windows at any time without a warrant.
This “solution” to the problem is intolerable. If government agents cannot stand outside a traditional house in the suburbs and peer through the window without a search warrant, they should not be able to do so with a non-traditional structure that may serve as someone’s home, such as a trailer. As we stated in LaDuke v. Nelson, 762 F.2d 1318, 1326 n. 11 (9th Cir.1985), “the Fourth Amendment does not permit[a government agency] to differentiate on a per se basis in the privacy accorded different stocks of housing.”
The majority claims to agree that “there is no Fourth Amendment rule that provides for protection only for traditionally constructed houses” but contends that this principle has only been applied in cases which are distinguishable from the facts here. For instance, the majority says, La-Duke “involved a warrantless entry into the interior of a non-traditional structure” (emphasis in majority opinion) because “LaDuke’s privacy was violated by a flashlight search of his tent.” This reading of LaDuke ignores our finding in that case that “[t]he record ... contains incidents in which Border Patrol agents forcibly intruded, either physically or with a flashlight, into the housing units.” 762 F.2d at 1327-28 (emphasis added). We made it clear that both behaviors qualified as Fourth Amendment violations: “LaDuke’s privacy was violated by a flashlight search of his tent and a physical trespass while the Garcias’ privacy was violated only through trespass.” Id. at 1332 n. 192 (emphasis added).
*1221It is difficult to see how the flashlight searches in LaDuke were materially different from the flashlight search conducted here, especially since our LaDuke footnote references a deposition describing “lights shined through windows.” Id. The majority’s holding in this case suggests that, because tents such as the one occupied by the plaintiffs in LaDuke are non-traditional homes, government agents with flashlights may now peer through the tent windows at will.
Trailers, campers, tents, and other nontraditional structures typically used as (temporary or permanent) residences are entitled to the same Fourth Amendment protections as traditional houses, and an inhabitant of a non-traditional home has a protected right to privacy in the area surrounding his or her sleeping quarters.3 The concept of curtilage would only be irrelevant where government agents were able to conclusively establish, without first peering through the window, that the structure in question (whether a traditional or a nontraditional dwelling-place) was not being used as a home. Because the government would not have been able to do so in this case, I would hold that the District Court erred to the extent that its refusal to grant Barajas-Avalos’s motion to suppress was based on observations made by the government agents while peering through the trailer’s windows. Consequently, I dissent from Parts III and IV of the majority opinion.
I 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 case 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 *1222were 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 surveillance of the property. The agents had surveilled 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 surveilled 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.
I respectfully dissent from Parts III, IV, and V of the majority opinion.

. Determination of the extent of a curtilage area requires the four-factor analysis described in United States v. Dunn, 480 U.S. 294, 301, 107 S.Ct. 1134, 94 L.Ed.2d 326 (1987). As the majority notes, in such cases courts are required to evaluate: "the proximity of the area claimed to be curtilage to the home, whether the area is included within an enclosure surrounding the home, the nature *1220of the uses to which the area is put, and the steps taken by the resident to protect the area from observation.” Id. While these factors suggest that the curtilage of the trailer (had it been used as a home) would likely have encompassed the entire natural clearing in which the trailer was situated, at the very least, the land immediately adjacent to the trailer's windows would have been protected as curtilage from government intrusion.

. The text to which the footnote is attached reads: "The minor differences in which the *1221representative’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated does not render their claims atypical of those of the class.”

. The extent of the protected area, as with all such "curtilage questions,” would be resolved with reference to the four factors outlined in Dunn, 480 U.S. at 301, 107 S.Ct. 1134.