United States v. Baker

• Decision Date: 13 June 2013
• Docket Number: No. 12–6624.,12–6624.
• Citation: 719 F.3d 313
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff–Appellee, v. Mario N. BAKER, Defendant–Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

719 F.3d 313

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff–Appellee,

v.Mario N. BAKER, Defendant–Appellant.

No. 12–6624.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued: May 14, 2013.

Decided: June 13, 2013.

ARGUED: John W. Akin, University of Virginia School of Law, Charlottesville, Virginia, for Appellant. Michael F. Murray, Office of the United States Attorney, Alexandria, Virginia, for Appellee. ON BRIEF:Neal L. Walters, Benjamin P. Kyber, Third Year Law Student, University of Virginia School of Law, Charlottesville,Virginia, for Appellant. Neil H. MacBride, United States Attorney, Alexandria, Virginia; Richard D. Cooke, Assistant United States Attorney, Office of the United States Attorney, Richmond, Virginia, for Appellee.

Before WILKINSON, GREGORY, and KEENAN, Circuit Judges.

Affirmed by published opinion. Judge WILKINSON wrote the opinion, in which Judge GREGORY and Judge KEENAN joined.

WILKINSON, Circuit Judge:

Defendant Mario Nathaniel Baker was convicted of multiple federal firearm and drug offenses based on evidence that police officers uncovered while searching his vehicle during a traffic stop. Baker's counsel never challenged the constitutionality of the search, either through a suppression motion or on direct appeal. After his conviction became final, Baker filed a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 seeking to vacate, set aside, or correct his sentence partly on the ground that his counsel had been unconstitutionally ineffective in failing to challenge the search on direct appeal under Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332, 129 S.Ct. 1710, 173 L.Ed.2d 485 (2009), which the Supreme Court decided while his appeal was still pending. The district court rejected this claim, and we affirm for the reasons stated herein.

I.

A.

We take the facts pertinent to this appeal from the evidence presented at Baker's trial, construed in the light most favorable to the government. See Bereano v. United States, 706 F.3d 568, 571 n. 5 (4th Cir.2013).

On March 3, 2008, Shawn Nelson, an officer with the Henrico County, Virginia, Police Department, stopped a vehicle that had a broken taillight and an expired license plate. Baker was driving the vehicle, and Dashawn Brown occupied the front passenger seat. On checking Baker's driver's license against state records, Nelson learned that Baker was the subject of an outstanding federal arrest warrant. While verifying the warrant, Nelson called for backup. Once additional officers arrived, Nelson arrested Baker and handed him over to one of the other officers, who searched him and, finding no contraband, secured him in a police car.

While the other officer was dealing with Baker, Nelson turned his attention to Brown, asking him to exit the vehicle. Brown did so but then began to walk away. Nelson ordered Brown to put his hands on the vehicle and started frisking him. When Nelson felt a handgun in Brown's pocket, Brown attempted to reenter the vehicle—claiming at the time that he wanted to retrieve his cellphone, which was on the passenger-side floorboard. Nelson struggled with Brown, wrestled him to the ground, and arrested him for possessing the handgun. He then searched Brown incident to the arrest, finding 0.90 grams of heroin, 0.40 grams of crack cocaine, $980 in cash, and a small digital scale on his person.

After securing Brown in a police car, Nelson searched the passenger compartment of Baker's vehicle, starting with the center console, where he found 20.6 grams of heroin, 0.24 grams of crack cocaine, 12.2 grams of methadone, and a burnt marijuana cigarette. He also found another handgun in the glove box.

B.

Based on the evidence found during the search of his vehicle, Baker was indicted for various federal firearm and drug offenses. See18 U.S.C. §§ 922(g)(1), 924(c); 21 U.S.C. § 841. He was also charged with an additional firearm count stemming from a previous run-in with the police, in 2007. Although Baker's lawyer moved (unsuccessfully) to sever this additional count, he never filed a suppression motion challenging the search of Baker's vehicle. Baker was convicted by a jury of all counts and was sentenced by the trial court to 185 months' imprisonment.

Baker appealed his convictions and sentence to this court, with his lawyer filing an opening brief on March 16, 2009. On April 21, 2009, the day before the government filed its response brief, the Supreme Court decided Arizona v. Gant, which held that, under the Fourth Amendment, the “[p]olice may search a vehicle incident to a recent occupant's arrest only if the arrestee is within reaching distance of the passenger compartment at the time of the search or it is reasonable to believe the vehicle contains evidence of the offense of arrest.” 556 U.S. 332, 351, 129 S.Ct. 1710, 173 L.Ed.2d 485 (2009). We affirmed Baker's convictions and sentence on August 7, 2009. See United States v. Baker, 340 Fed.Appx. 145 (4th Cir.2009), cert. denied,559 U.S. 955, 130 S.Ct. 1548, 176 L.Ed.2d 139 (2010). At no point between when the Supreme Court decided Gant and when this court decided Baker's appeal did Baker's lawyer argue that the search of Baker's vehicle violated the Fourth Amendment under Gant.

C.

Proceeding pro se, Baker subsequently filed a motion to vacate, set aside, or correct his sentence under 28 U.S.C. § 2255. His motion asserted four claims for relief, all of which the district court rejected. See United States v. Baker, No. 3:08cr88, 2012 WL 620240 (E.D.Va. Feb. 24, 2012). Specifically, as relevant to this appeal, the district court found that Baker's counsel had not been unconstitutionally ineffective in failing to challenge the search of Baker's vehicle under Gant on direct appeal “[b]ecause the evidence found as a result of the search ... still would be admissible under the good faith exception to the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule,” meaning that Baker could not “show that counsel's failure to argue Gant on appeal prejudiced him.” Id. at *2 (footnote omitted).

The district court denied a certificate of appealability for all four of Baker's claims. See id. at *3; 28 U.S.C. § 2253(c). While agreeing with the district court that three of the claims did not merit our review, we granted a partial certificate of appealability to consider the question whether Baker's lawyer was ineffective in failing to raise a Gant argument on direct appeal.

II.

Warrantless searches “are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment—subject to only a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions.” Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 357, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967) (footnote omitted). Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332, 129 S.Ct. 1710, 173 L.Ed.2d 485 (2009), addressed when the exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement for searches incident to a lawful arrest justifies a search of the passenger compartment of the vehicle in which an arrestee is traveling. As a general matter, a search incident to a lawful arrest may extend only to “the arrestee's person and the area ‘within his immediate control’—construing that phrase to mean the area from within which he might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence.” Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752, 763, 89 S.Ct. 2034, 23 L.Ed.2d 685 (1969). Before Gant, the Supreme Court had interpreted this rule in the context of vehicle searches to mean that “when a policeman has made a lawful custodial arrest of the occupant of an automobile, he may, as a contemporaneous incident of that arrest, search the passenger compartment of the automobile” as well as “any containers found within the passenger compartment.” New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454, 460, 101 S.Ct. 2860, 69 L.Ed.2d 768 (1981) (footnote omitted); see also Thornton v. United States, 541 U.S. 615, 124 S.Ct. 2127, 158 L.Ed.2d 905 (2004).

The federal courts of appeals tended to construe the Court's pronouncement in Belton capaciously. Although a few circuits cabined Belton 's holding to permit a search of a vehicle incident to the arrest of an occupant only when the arrestee could actually reach the vehicle's passenger compartment, most espoused a broader interpretation, according to which police officers could search the vehicle regardless of the arrestee's location at the time of the search. See Gant, 556 U.S. at 341–43 & nn. 2–3, 129 S.Ct. 1710 (collecting cases). This court adopted the broad reading, upholding, for instance, the search of a vehicle as a search incident to an arrest where the arrestee had been handcuffed and removed from the vehicle when the search occurred. See United States v. Milton, 52 F.3d 78, 80 (4th Cir.1995), overruling recognized by United States v. Wilks, 647 F.3d 520, 522 (4th Cir.2011).

Without purporting to overrule Belton and its progeny, Gant rejected the lower courts' capacious reading of that decision, making clear that the exception for searches incident to an arrest authorizes vehicle searches only in two specific circumstances. The first circumstance is “when the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance of the passenger compartment at the time of the search.” Gant, 556 U.S. at 343, 129 S.Ct. 1710. The second is “when it is ‘reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be found in the vehicle.’ ” Id. (quoting Thornton, 541 U.S. at 632, 124 S.Ct. 2127 (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgment)). “When these justifications are absent,” the Court concluded, “a search of an arrestee's vehicle will be unreasonable unless police obtain a warrant or show that another exception to the warrant requirement applies.” Id. at 351, 129 S.Ct. 1710.

It is important to recognize those aspects of Fourth Amendment doctrine that Gant did not change. The decision addressed only the exception to the warrant requirement for searches incident to a lawful arrest, as applied to vehicle searches. It left unaltered other exceptions that might authorize the police to search a vehicle without a warrant even when an arrestee is secured beyond reaching...