U.S. v. Bailey

• Citation: 302 F.3d 652
• Decision Date: 04 September 2002
• Docket Number: No. 01-5438.,01-5438.
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Charles Dale BAILEY, Defendant-Appellee.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (6th Circuit)

302 F.3d 652

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Charles Dale BAILEY, Defendant-Appellee.

No. 01-5438.

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

Argued August 6, 2002.

Decided and Filed September 4, 2002.

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Dan R. Smith (argued and briefed), Assistant United States Attorney, Johnson City, TN, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

R. Jackson Rose (briefed), Harrogate, TN, Mark D. Edmonds (argued and briefed), Eastridge & Edmonds, Johnson City, TN, for Defendant-Appellee.

Before MOORE and GILMAN, Circuit Judges; ROSEN, District Judge.^*

OPINION

MOORE, Circuit Judge.

Appellant United States appeals the district court's grant of Appellee's motion to suppress. Appellee Charles Dale Bailey ("Bailey") was indicted for carrying certain firearms during and in relation to a drug trafficking offense, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(B)(i), and for possessing firearms as a convicted felon, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g). Bailey was arrested following searches of both his person and his car. He moved to suppress the evidence obtained in the searches, claiming that the initial stop of his car and the subsequent searches violated his Fourth Amendment rights. A magistrate judge recommended that Bailey's motion be denied, but the district court granted the motion. For the following reasons, we REVERSE the district court's grant of Bailey's motion to suppress and we REMAND for proceedings consistent with this opinion.

I. BACKGROUND

In the late evening and early morning of September 5 and 6, 1999, Police Officer Todd Davidson ("Davidson") and Police Captain Jerry Graham ("Graham") of the Morristown, Tennessee Police Department were investigating complaints of drug trafficking at the Royal Mobile Home Trailer Park in Morristown. According to Graham, the police were "making traffic stops where we'd get some probable cause to make the stop, if a traffic violation, of vehicles leaving the scene where they were, [sic] had the trailer under surveillance." Joint Appendix ("J.A.") at 59 (Graham Test.). Davidson and Graham were exiting the trailer park when they encountered Bailey; Davidson testified that Bailey's car entered the trailer park on the wrong side of the road, and Graham, who was driving the car, testified that Bailey's car "about hit me head on." J.A. at 60. Bailey testified that although the police car was "hogging" most of the narrow entrance road into the trailer park, "there was still enough room for me to go by." J.A. at 81 (Bailey Test.). After the cars passed each other, Davidson shouted at Bailey to stop his car; and when Bailey did not immediately stop his car, Davidson got out of the police car and pursued Bailey's car on foot.¹ Davidson testified that he stopped the car "[b]ecause it had turned in on our side of the road and I wasn't sure if [Bailey] was intoxicated or not." J.A. at 48 (Davidson Test.).

Bailey eventually stopped his car, and Davidson approached the driver's side of the car to talk to Bailey. According to Davidson, "Bailey kept reaching into the floorboard where he was seated in the vehicle, which [sic] he was the driver." J.A. at 49 (Davidson Test.). Davidson first asked Bailey to keep his hands to himself, and later Davidson asked Bailey to step out of the car. J.A. at 49 ("I asked him to step out of the vehicle because I was really nervous and, and I was aware that he, you know, was known to carry weapons, and which he did, he stepped out of the vehicle.").² Graham and Police Officer Dan Cox ("Cox") reached the scene soon thereafter, and with Davidson and Bailey they waited for Police Officer Chris Wisecracker ("Wisecracker") to bring in a drug dog. Wisecracker arrived in less than two minutes, and proceeded to "run the dog on the vehicle." J.A. at 50. While the dog sniffed for drugs in the car, Graham noticed that Bailey had put his hand in his pocket. Graham asked Bailey to remove his hand, and when Bailey did remove his hand, Graham saw the butt of a gun. The police officers on the scene then handcuffed and arrested Bailey. Immediately after Bailey was arrested, Cox, in an effort to calm Bailey down, told Bailey that "everything would be okay." J.A. at 75 (Cox Test.). To this statement, Bailey allegedly responded "no, everything won't be okay. There's three ounces of cocaine in the car." J.A. at 75. The search of the car, following the drug dog's alert in two areas, did in fact yield two more guns and three ounces of cocaine.³

Bailey was indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Tennessee on February 24, 2000, and a Superseding Indictment was entered against him by the same grand jury on September 27, 2000. The indictment charged Bailey with two counts: (1) knowingly and intentionally carrying certain firearms during and in relation to a drug trafficking offense, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(1)(B)(i); and (2) possessing firearms as a convicted felon in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g). On December 12, 2000, Bailey moved to suppress the evidence obtained in the search of the car and the search of his person. He alleged that the initial stop of his car, his arrest, and the searches were all in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. On December 19, 2000, a magistrate judge held a hearing on the motion, and on December 20, 2000, he issued a report and recommendation to deny the motion to suppress. On March 9, 2001, however, the district court granted Bailey's motion to suppress. The court found that "the officers' actions [in stopping and searching Bailey] were not justified at their inception, and their actions were not reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place...." J.A. at 45 (Mem.). Therefore, the court concluded that "the search incident to [the initial] stop was in violation of the defendant's Fourth Amendment rights." J.A. at 46. The government timely appeals.

II. ANALYSIS

A. Standard of Review

We review de novo the district court's legal conclusions in a suppression hearing, and we review the district court's findings of fact for clear error. United States v. Smith, 263 F.3d 571, 581 (6th Cir.2001). "A factual finding is clearly erroneous when the reviewing court is left with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been made." Id. (citation omitted). Where the district court grants a motion to suppress, this court views the evidence in the light most favorable to the defendant. Id. ("[T]he Court considers the evidence in the light most likely to support the district court's decision." (quotation omitted)).

B. Initial Stop of Bailey's Car

The district court concluded that the initial stop of Bailey's car by Davidson and Graham was not justified because it was "a pretext." J.A. at 46 (Mem.). By this, the court seems to have meant that although Davidson and Graham ostensibly stopped Bailey for a traffic violation — driving on the wrong side of the road while possibly intoxicated — they really stopped Bailey for other reasons. The court emphasized the portion of Graham's testimony in which he explained that the police were "making traffic stops" at the trailer park, where they had probable cause. The court also cited this court's opinion in United States v. Huguenin, 154 F.3d 547, 559 n. 10 (6th Cir.1998), for the proposition that "[a] pretextual stop occurs when the police use a legal justification to make a stop ... in order to search a person or his vehicle, or interrogate him, for an unrelated and more serious crime for which they do not have the reasonable suspicion necessary to support a stop." J.A. at 34.

It is well established, however, that an officer's actual motivation for making a traffic stop is irrelevant to the constitutionality of that stop. See Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 813, 116 S.Ct. 1769, 135 L.Ed.2d 89 (1996) ("these cases foreclose any argument that the constitutional reasonableness of traffic stops depends on the actual motivations of the individual officers involved"); United States v. Hill, 195 F.3d 258, 264 (6th Cir. 1999), cert. denied, 528 U.S. 1176, 120 S.Ct. 1207, 145 L.Ed.2d 1110 (2000) (citing Whren and explaining that pursuant to that decision, "an officer may stop a vehicle for a traffic violation when his true motivation is to search for contraband, as long as the officer had probable cause to initially stop the vehicle"); see also United States v. Ferguson, 8 F.3d 385, 391 (6th Cir.1993) (en banc), cert. denied, 513 U.S. 828, 115 S.Ct. 97, 130 L.Ed.2d 47 (1994). Therefore, it is irrelevant in this case whether Davidson's and Graham's initial stop of Bailey was "pretextual."⁴ The relevant question on this appeal is whether Davidson and Graham had probable cause to stop Bailey for a traffic violation.

We conclude that Davidson and Graham did have probable cause to stop Bailey for a traffic violation. Although the district court's findings of fact in this case simply consisted of excerpts of testimony from the suppression hearing, the court did label as "findings of fact" Davidson's and Graham's testimony that they stopped Bailey because he was driving on the wrong side of the road and Davidson's testimony that Bailey also seemed to be intoxicated. In a section of the opinion entitled "application of the law to the facts," the court later concluded that certain other facts "undermine the alleged reason for the `traffic stop.'" J.A. at 44 (Mem.). But the court does not appear in this section to question the existence of a traffic violation; the court simply concluded that the traffic violation was not the real reason for the stop. Moreover, the magistrate judge who presided over the suppression hearing specifically proposed a finding that Davidson's and Graham's testimony regarding the traffic violation was credible, and the district court did not reject this finding. J.A. at 15 (Report and Recommendation) ("At this juncture, the issue is purely one of credibility; who is to be believed — Officers...