Tenth Circuit US v. Salas-Garcia 11-2204

Decision here.

   With the help of a confidential informant, police were investigating Castaneda for selling drugs (brokering them, technically, but whatever).  Castaneda was supposed to deliver a lot of cocaine to a hospital parking lot for one such transaction.  Police followed in unmarked cars while Castaneda and Salas-Garcia drove separate cars from a tortilla factory to the hospital (and the officers later testified that using multiple cars like this is a common counter-surveillance technique used by drug dealers).  When the two cars got to the hospital, and parked in different parts of the parking lot, the CI told the police that the drugs had arrived.

   At the investigator's direction, marked cars showed up and stopped both cars.  They didn't conduct high-risk stops, but they did get Salas-Garcia out of the car, handcuff him, and search him (whilst informing him that he was not under arrest, but only being detained for an investigation).  Salas-Garcia was read the Miranda warnings, after which he admitted that there was a kilo of cocaine in the car he was driving.

   Salas-Garcia was released from handcuffs after about 5 minutes and told he could leave, but he agreed to stay.  Officers obtained a warrant and searched his car, found the drugs, and arrested him.  He later argued in court that his detention had been an illegal arrest and that the drugs and his statements should be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree.  The motion was denied, and he appealed.

   The Tenth Circuit held that Salas-Garcia's detention was both reasonable at its inception and reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified it.  The court also noted that the use of handcuffs does not necessarily convert a detention to an arrest (for fourth amendment purposes)*, and that particularly in this case where the officers were investigating a large drug transaction, where large drug transactions often involve guns, and where there were numerous other members of the public present, using handcuffs to restrain Salas-Garcia was reasonable (the court hinted that actually proning him out at gunpoint might not have been reasonable without more information, but didn't come right out and say that).  The denial of the motion to suppress was upheld.

* This is important because if the stop were converted to an arrest, it would need to be justified by probable cause which the police did not yet have, so the evidence would need to be suppressed.  It's also worth noting that the court pointed out that a Terry stop which exceeds its scope is converted to an arrest, and therefore must be justified by probable cause.