In United States v. Garcia, --- F.3d ---, No. 19-10073 (9th Cir. 2020), the Court reversed the denial of the defendant's suppression motion.
Officers violated the Fourth Amendment when they entered the defendant's home without a warrant, ostensibly to determine whether
someone inside posed a threat to their safety or required
emergency assistance.
Though the
officers knew nothing about Garcia before entering his
home, they discovered him inside, detained him at gunpoint,
took him outside in handcuffs, and ran a records check that
revealed he was subject to a supervised release condition
authorizing suspicionless searches of his residence.
After
discovering this condition, the same officers who had
conducted the initial unlawful entry reentered the home to
conduct a full search, during which they found
methamphetamine and other incriminating evidence.
The issue on appeal was "whether, under the attenuation doctrine,
the discovery of the suspicionless search condition was an
intervening circumstance that broke the causal chain
between the initial unlawful entry and the discovery of the
evidence supporting Garcia’s conviction in this case and the
revocation of supervised release in the underlying case."
The Court held it was not.
- The attenuation doctrine is an exception to the usual rule
of exclusion or suppression of the evidence. It applies when
“‘the connection between the illegality and the challenged
evidence’ has become so attenuated ‘as to dissipate the taint
caused by the illegality.’”
- In
determining whether an intervening event has sufficiently
purged the taint of a preceding Fourth Amendment violation,
we consider three factors: (1) “the ‘temporal proximity’
between the unconstitutional conduct and the discovery of
evidence,” (2) “the presence of intervening circumstances,”
and (3) “the purpose and flagrancy of the official
misconduct.”
The government conceded the first factor favored suppression.
As to the second factor, "[w]hile the
suspicionless search condition here granted the officers the
legal authority to search Garcia’s home without cause, it did
not—unlike the warrant in Strieff—require them to exercise
that authority. The officers’ decision to avail themselves of
the suspicionless search condition was volitional, not 'ministerial.' This distinction is important
because we have held that the attenuation doctrine does not
apply when an officer’s decision to exercise his discretionary
authority is 'significantly direct[ed]' by information learned
during an unlawful search."
And "when an officer’s exercise of discretionary
authority is 'significantly directed' by information learned
during an unlawful search, the mere existence of that
authority is not an intervening cause that purges the taint of
the earlier constitutional violation."
"[T]he Government did not present
any evidence regarding the officers’ reasons for entering
Garcia’s home the second time, much less evidence
sufficient to show that this decision had nothing to do with
what they saw inside the home minutes earlier, during their
unconstitutional search."
"The officers did not enter Garcia’s home with blinders
on. And the record shows that in the few minutes between
the two searches, the officers’ motives for entering the home
abruptly changed from non-investigatory to investigatory.
Yet the Government offers nothing more than its say-so to
explain this sudden shift. That is not enough to avoid
suppression. Cf. United States v. Bocharnikov, 966 F.3d
1000, 1007 (9th Cir. 2020) (Chhabria, J., concurring) (“To
rule in the government’s favor on this appeal would have
required us to bend over backwards, doing the government’s
work for it. Federal prosecutors should not need that kind of
help from the courts, nor should they expect to receive it.”).
In the absence of evidence showing that the officers’
decision to conduct the second search was untainted by what
they saw during the initial unlawful entry, we conclude that
the Government has not met its burden of showing that the discovery of the suspicionless search condition was a
sufficient intervening circumstance."
As to the third factor, "we find it particularly
significant that the officers entered Garcia’s home without
cause, detained him at gunpoint, and removed him from the
premises in handcuffs. The home is 'first among equals' for purpose of the Fourth Amendment, and it is no trifling matter for police to
storm a residence with guns drawn. Incursions of this nature
can have tragic results."
"Examining the totality of the circumstances, we
conclude that even accepting the district court’s finding that
the officers acted in good faith, this fact alone is not enough
to justify admission of the evidence."
