Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Tenth Circuit US v. Madden 10-6072

Decision here.

   I apologize in advance for the ridiculously long summary.  If this one gets too technical for your taste, just read the highlighted portion and then skip to the last two sentences.  The rest is pretty much filler.

   In 2005, Sgt. Balderrama of Oklahoma City PD noticed that Madden was sitting in a car parked in the loading dock area of a grocery store.  He thought that Madden was committing a parking violation, and he also thought it was suspicious because it was an unusual place for a car to be parked.  So he approached Madden, asked him what he was doing, and requested his driver's license.  Madden explained that he had run out of gas and he was waiting for a friend to bring fuel, and that he didn't have his license on him (driving without a license in one's possession is a violation of Oklahoma state law).

   Sgt. Balderrama instructed Madden to get out of the car, and detained him in the back seat of the patrol car while he investigated.  While Madden was in the back seat, Balderrama asked if there were weapons or drugs in the car (Madden said no), asked for consent to search (Madden said no), and asked about felony convictions (Madden admitted that he had just gotten out of prison after an armed robbery conviction).  Balderrama then discovered a couple of warrants for Madden's arrest, and arrested him.

   During a subsequent search of Madden's car, Balderrama found a gun.  Madden was charged with the Oklahoma version of POWPO, but at a preliminary hearing the charge was dismissed because the trial court held that the car had been improperly impounded and therefore illegally searched.  Bad search = suppressed gun = no case.

   In 2008 (after serving a two year sentence on unrelated drug charges), Madden was indicted in federal court for being a felon in possession of a firearm.  The charges were based on these events.  Madden filed a motion to quash the indictment based on Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment violations.  After his motion was denied, he conditionally pled guilty and appealed.  I won't go into too much detail on the Fifth and Sixth Amendment violations here (5th: due process.  He argued that filing the charges so far after the event was a due process violation because if the feds hadn't done that, he might have been able to serve his weapons possession sentence concurrently with the drug case.  The Tenth said that this isn't a due process violation.  6th: speedy trial.  Madden argued that the charges happened too far after his arrest.  The Tenth held that speedy trial calculation for federal charges begins with the arrest for federal charges, not with the arrest for state charges, even if the charges arise from the same behavior.  So both arguments failed).

   It's the Fourth Amendment stuff that we're really interested in, and there's a lot of it in this decision.  The essence of Madden's argument is that the entire stop was unjustified, and therefore Balderrama's search of his car was illegal and the gun should be suppressed.

   The Tenth Circuit reviewed the different legal justifications for police contact:

This court has previously identified three categories of police-citizen
encounters: (1) consensual encounters which do not implicate the
Fourth Amendment; (2) investigative detentions which are Fourth
Amendment seizures of limited scope and duration and must be
supported by a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity; and (3)
arrests, the most intrusive of Fourth Amendment seizures and
reasonable only if supported by probable cause


   The trial court had apparently ruled that Balderrama's encounter with Madden began as a consensual contact, and only became an investigative detention when Madden was removed from his car.  This is because up until that point, Balderrama had done nothing to communicate to Madden that he was not free to terminate the encounter, or that his request for a license was compulsory.

   By the time Madden was removed from his car, Balderrama had reasonable suspicion that Madden had been driving without his license in his possession.  The stop became an arrest shortly afterwards, when Balderrama learned of Madden's warrants.  Now on to the search: at the time that these events took place, clearly established case law established that the police could search the passenger compartment of a car incident to the arrest of an occupant.  Since that time, Gant has changed the way search of a car incident to arrest works, so that a search such as Balderrama's could not be justified that way.  But under the good faith exception, the exclusionary rule does not apply to evidence which is seized during a search which is objectively reasonable under current case law, even if the courts later rule that similar searches are unconstitutional.  This is because the whole point of the exclusionary rule is to discourage police misconduct, and suppressing evidence when the police were acting reasonably does not accomplish that goal.

   Madden argued that the good faith exception should not apply for a variety of reasons: first, he argued that Oklahoma doesn't recognize the good faith exception.  But the federal courts don't care what Oklahoma recognizes, and this was an appeal in a federal court.  Madden argued that Balderrama did not justify the search as a search incident to arrest, but as an inventory (prior to an impoundment which the state court had deemed improper).  But the good faith exception is an objective test; it doesn't matter what an officer's intent or understanding of the law is, what matters is whether the circumstances would justify his actions and whether a reasonable officer would have known this.  In other words, Balderrama thought he was able to search the car as an inventory prior to impound, but his actions were actually justified (at the time) as a search incident to arrest.  So the search was good, even if Balderrama didn't understand why.

   As an aside, the court noted that Balderrama at least partially justified the search as a search incident to arrest, and also noted that it wasn't bound by the state court's decision holding the impound to be improper.  Since the search was justified as a search incident to arrest, the court didn't bother to decide whether or not the search could also be justified as an inventory.  The court just pointed out that it could have decided that if it wanted to.

   Madden also argued that Balderrama had lied at a suppression hearing, and therefore acted in bad faith, and therefore the good faith exception should not apply.  The Tenth noted that the trial court had found Balderrama's account of when he actually found some ammo to be suspicious, but had not actually concluded that Balderrama lied.  More importantly, the court held that the good faith exception doesn't hinge on the individual officer's actual good faith.  It's an objective test, which hinges on whether or not the officer's actions at the time of the arrest were reasonable under then-existing law.

   So the Tenth Circuit affirmed the denial of Madden's motion, and his conviction stands.  Really, the most important lesson that cops can take from this case is just to keep your actions in line with currently binding case law.  Even if new decisions change the legal landscape before the case goes to court, the courts won't expect you to have seen the change coming.

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