In United States v. Ngumezi, --- F.3d ---, No. 19-10243 (9th Cir. 2020), the Court reversed the district court’s denial of a motion to suppress a firearm found in a search of the defendant’s car and vacated his conviction for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
This is an excellent Fourth Amendment decision -- definitely worth reading.
In short, the Court held that officers who have reasonable suspicion sufficient to justify a traffic stop, but who lack probable cause or any other particularized justification, such as a reasonable belief that the driver poses a danger, may not open the door to a vehicle and lean inside.
The Court focused on the fact that the officer "entered the interior space of the vehicle when he leaned in across the plane of the door. As several recent Supreme Court decisions have confirmed, that physical intrusion is constitutionally significant."
"Although the intrusion here may have been modest, the Supreme Court has never suggested that the magnitude of a physical intrusion is relevant to the Fourth Amendment analysis. Jones, for example, involved the attachment of a GPS tracker that was “a small, light object that [did] not interfere in any way with the car’s operation,” yet the Court still held that the attachment effected a search. Nor do we see how courts could administer a test that would require them to distinguish between [the officer] leaning into the passenger-side area of Ngumezi’s car and, say, an officer crawling into the back of a car to look under the seats. Instead, we apply a bright-line rule that opening a door and entering the interior space of a vehicle constitutes a Fourth Amendment search."
"In the government’s view, opening a door and leaning into a car is less intrusive than ordering a driver to get out of a car, so if the latter is permissible, then the former must be permissible as well. Ordering a driver out of a car is indeed an 'intrusion into the driver’s personal liberty'—albeit one that the Court in Mimms described as a 'de minimis' intrusion that 'hardly rises to the level of a ‘petty indignity.’ But even if opening a door and leaning into the car is a lesser intrusion on the driver’s liberty, it is a greater intrusion on the driver’s privacy interest in the car’s interior. Indeed, the Court emphasized in Mimms that a driver ordered out of a car 'is being asked to expose to view very little more . . . than is already exposed,' something that is not true when an officer enters the vehicle."
As to remedy, the Court explained, "[t]he 'fruit of the poisonous tree' doctrine does not require a particularly tight causal chain between the illegal search and the discovery of the evidence sought to be suppressed."
And "[n]othing about this case calls
for a remedy other than '[t]he typical remedy for a Fourth
Amendment violation,' which 'is the exclusion of evidence
discovered as a result of that violation from criminal
proceedings against the defendant.'"
