U.S. v. Lanier

• Decision Date: 14 April 2011
• Docket Number: No. 09–1788.,09–1788.
• Citation: 636 F.3d 228
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff–Appellee,v.Denois E. LANIER, Defendant–Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

636 F.3d 228

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff–Appellee,

v.Denois E. LANIER, Defendant–Appellant.

No. 09–1788.

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

Argued: Jan. 18, 2011.Decided and Filed: April 14, 2011.

ARGUED: Lawrence J. Phelan, Haehnel & Phelan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Appellant. Jennifer L. McManus, Assistant United States Attorney, Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Lawrence J. Phelan, Haehnel & Phelan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Appellant. Jennifer L. McManus, Assistant United States Attorney, Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Appellee.Before: BATCHELDER, Chief Judge; MARTIN and SUTTON, Circuit Judges.

OPINION

SUTTON, Circuit Judge.

Denois Lanier rented a room in the Comfort Suites hotel in Benton Harbor, Michigan. A few minutes after the 11:00 a.m. check-out time, a housekeeper entered the room (after knocking and hearing no answer) and noticed what appeared to be a large quantity of drugs in the room. Management called the police and allowed an officer to search the room at 11:30 a.m., one half-hour after the check-out time but one half-hour before the end of the traditional grace period given to guests before the hotel deactivated their electronic keycards. The police found a considerable amount of cocaine and a scale. When Lanier later returned to the hotel, the police arrested him, after which Lanier challenged the search and arrest on Fourth Amendment grounds.

As we see it, and as the district court saw it, Lanier had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his hotel room at the time of the search. There is nothing unusual about a hotel housekeeper's entering a room after the check-out time and after no one responds to a knock on the door. And once the hotel learned of the presence of drugs in the room, it had every right to grant access to the police to determine whether the room was being used for illegal purposes. Because the police also had probable cause to arrest Lanier and because his below-guidelines sentence was reasonable, we affirm.

I.

On March 25, 2008, just after 11:00 a.m., Stephanie Price was completing her rounds as a housekeeper at the Comfort Suites hotel in Benton Harbor, Michigan. The hotel required guests to check out by 11:00 a.m., and Price was preparing the rooms for the next day's guests. She knocked on the door for Room 206 three or four times but heard no answer. Noting a “Do Not Disturb” sign hanging on the doorknob, Price called her manager, Stephanie Klein, to ask whether she should enter the room. Klein told her to do so.

Price entered the room, and after seeing some clothing hanging on a chair, she called the front desk to ask whether she should proceed to clean the room. The front-desk clerk, Jamie Marie Wilson, told her to “ ‘go ahead and clean the room, and we'll put [the clothing] in the lost and found.’ ” R.32 at 148. Near the microwave, Price found baggies containing what looked like crack cocaine and a larger Ziploc bag containing what looked like powder cocaine; and, in the trash can, she found a measuring scale. Wilson and Klein checked the room and the baggies for themselves, and Wilson called the police.

Between 11:20 and 11:30 a.m., State Trooper Matthew Churchill responded. Stephanie Price met Churchill in the lobby and took him to Room 206, where she showed him the scale as well as the crack and powder cocaine. Churchill and Price left the room to wait for another officer.

As Trooper Churchill waited outside Room 206 for the officer's arrival, he heard running footsteps on the floor above him. Rhoda Spears, another housekeeper, burst into the hallway, saying something like, “ ‘He's here, he's here, he's here,’ or ‘I think he's here, I think he's here,’ or ... ‘Here they come, here they come.’ ” R.65 at 7. Churchill pressed for more information: “Who?” or “Here who come[s]?” R.32 at 24; R.65 at 7. Spears responded, “The person in the room.” R.65 at 7.

Trooper Churchill walked to the stairway where Spears was standing. Spears told him, “They're parking. They are coming in the building right now.” R.32 at 25. Churchill heard a keycard sliding into a card reader, a beep and a door opening. Churchill walked down the stairs, saw Lanier and arrested him.

A federal grand jury charged Lanier with distributing crack and powder cocaine. See 21 U.S.C. §§ 841(a)(1), 841(b)(1)(B)(iii), 841(b)(1)(C). Lanier filed a motion to suppress the evidence discovered in the room and during the encounter. The district court upheld the search of the room because Lanier had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the room at the time of the search, and it upheld the seizure because the police had probable cause to arrest him at the time of the seizure. Lanier conditionally pleaded guilty to the crack-cocaine distribution charge, reserving the right to appeal the suppression ruling. The district court accepted Lanier's plea and granted the government's § 5K1.1 motion, which allowed the court to sentence Lanier below the mandatory minimum. The court calculated a guidelines range of 46–57 months and sentenced Lanier to 40 months.

II.

The Fourth Amendment prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures” by law enforcement, U.S. Const. amend. IV, and a hotel room may be “the object of Fourth Amendment protection as much as a home or an office.” Hoffa v. United States, 385 U.S. 293, 301, 87 S.Ct. 408, 17 L.Ed.2d 374 (1966); see also Stoner v. California, 376 U.S. 483, 490, 84 S.Ct. 889, 11 L.Ed.2d 856 (1964). To have standing to challenge the search of a hotel room, the guest must show (1) that he had “an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy” in the room and (2) that this expectation was “one that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’ ” Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 740, 99 S.Ct. 2577, 61 L.Ed.2d 220 (1979) (internal quotation marks omitted).

Did Lanier have a subjective expectation of privacy in Room 206 when the police searched it? On the one hand, he left clothing, to say nothing of a lot of cocaine, in his hotel room, along with a Do Not Disturb sign outside of it, all of which suggest he still thought the room, and the right to keep others out of it, remained his. That he returned to the hotel through the rear door with his keycard points in the same direction. On the other hand, the 11:00 a.m. check-out time had come and gone, and Lanier knew nothing about the one-hour grace period. Because it makes no difference to the outcome of this case, we will assume for the sake of argument that, when the police searched the room at 11:30 a.m. or so, Lanier still thought the room was his and that no one else, without his consent, could enter it.

Was this expectation of privacy objectively reasonable? Ours is not the first case to raise this issue, and the precedents offer a few guideposts.

The starting point is that a hotel guest has a periodic right to occupy a room, not a permanent one. “Once a hotel guest's rental period has expired or been lawfully terminated, the guest does not have a legitimate expectation of privacy in the hotel room or in any article therein of which the hotel lawfully takes possession.” United States v. Allen, 106 F.3d 695, 699 (6th Cir.1997) (internal quotation omitted). “[A] hotel guest's right to a room is limited to a predetermined period of occupancy,” and it is reasonable to presume as a general matter “that hotel guests will check out at the designated time and their right in the premises does not automatically continue for some indefinite period.” United States v. Washington, 573 F.3d 279, 285 (6th Cir.2009). Other circuits see it the same way. See United States v. Huffhines, 967 F.2d 314, 318 (9th Cir.1992) (“A guest in a motel has no reasonable expectation of privacy in a room after the rental period has expired.”); United States v. Larson, 760 F.2d 852, 854–55 (8th Cir.1985) (same); United States v. Parizo, 514 F.2d 52, 54 (2d Cir.1975) (same); United States v. Croft, 429 F.2d 884, 887 (10th Cir.1970) (same).

Yet a hotel's practices and communications with the guest may modify the general rule. “[T]he policies and practices of a hotel may result in the extension past checkout time of a defendant's reasonable expectation of privacy.” United States v. Dorais, 241 F.3d 1124, 1129–30 (9th Cir.2001); see also United States v. Gill, 16 Fed.Appx. 850, 854 (10th Cir.2001); United States v. Kitchens, 114 F.3d 29, 31–32 (4th Cir.1997); United States v. Owens, 782 F.2d 146, 149–50 (10th Cir.1986); Larson, 760 F.2d at 855; United States v. Watson, 783 F.Supp. 258, 263 (E.D.Va.1992); People v. Hardy, 77 A.D.3d 133, 907 N.Y.S.2d 244, 248 (N.Y.App.Div.2010). As relevant here, these practices often take two forms: giving a guest permission to stay until a later check-out time or generally acquiescing when a guest stays until a later check-out time.

Larson, Gill and Dorais illustrate the first form. In each case, the defendants asked, and received permission, to stay beyond the check-out time. They therefore had reasonable expectations of privacy in their hotel rooms through the extensions, though not when, as turned out in each case, they stayed beyond the new check-out time. Gill, 16 Fed.Appx. at 854; Dorais, 241 F.3d at 1130 & n. 4; Larson, 760 F.2d at 855.

Watson, Owens and Kitchens illustrate the second form. In Owens and Watson, the hotels on previous nights had allowed the defendants to stay beyond the check-out time and to pay after check-out time for continued occupancy. Owens, 782 F.2d at 149–50; Watson, 783 F.Supp. at 263. The defendants therefore reasonably believed that the hotels would allow them to do so again, permitting them to retain a privacy interest in their rooms. Owens, 782 F.2d at 149–50; Watson, 783 F.Supp. at 263; see also Hardy, 907 N.Y.S.2d at 248–49. In Kitchens, because the defendants had no “pattern or practice of staying past check-out time” that would give rise to an expectation of privacy after the expiration of their rental period, the Fourth Circuit held that they...