United States v. Taylor
| Decision Date | 14 January 2015 |
| Docket Number | No. 14–1981.,14–1981. |
| Citation | 776 F.3d 513 |
| Parties | UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff–Appellee, v. Dwan Rashid TAYLOR, Defendant–Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
Barry D. Glickman, Attorney, Office of the United States Attorney, Indianapolis, IN, for Plaintiff–Appellee.
Sara J. Varner, Attorney, Indiana Federal Community Defenders, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, for Defendant–Appellant.
Before WILLIAMS, SYKES, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.
Dwan Taylor appeals the denial of his motion to suppress drugs and guns that the police found in his storage locker pursuant to a search warrant. Indianapolis police learned the location of the storage locker by monitoring a Global Positioning System (“GPS”) unit that they attached to his car without a warrant in 2011. That was before the Supreme Court held that attaching a GPS device to a car for purposes of gathering information was a search under the Fourth Amendment. See United States v. Jones, ––– U.S. ––––, 132 S.Ct. 945, 181 L.Ed.2d 911 (2012). Because the officers used the GPS monitor in objectively reasonable reliance on binding appellate precedent in effect at the time, the suppression motion was properly denied.
In June 2011 Detective Sergeant Garth Schwomeyer of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department received a tip that Taylor possessed cocaine and firearms. Schwomeyer checked Taylor's criminal history and learned that he had been convicted in 1997 for possessing cocaine. Schwomeyer then conducted surveillance at an address in Indianapolis that was linked to Taylor and observed what he believed to be a drug deal. He did not recognize the people involved, but when he ran the license plates of their cars, he discovered that two cars were registered to men who also had been convicted of possessing or trafficking cocaine.
Schwomeyer continued to investigate Taylor over the next three months. A confidential informant reported that Taylor was trafficking kilogram quantities of cocaine, and a fellow officer told Schwomeyer that Taylor associated with cocaine traffickers. In addition, Taylor's phone records reflected that his most frequent contact had been convicted in 2006 of dealing cocaine.
Based on Schwomeyer's investigation, a deputy prosecutor for Marion County submitted a petition to the Marion County Superior Court in September 2011 requesting judicial approval to attach a GPS unit to Taylor's car for a period of 60 days. The petition stated that the GPS device would be attached to the exterior of the car (“inside of a fender”) with “a magnet and/or straps,” that it would be installed and later removed “while the vehicle was either in a public place or upon private property where members of the general public would have access to [the] vehicle,” and that the device “would be powered either by an internal battery or by connecting [it] to the battery of the vehicle.” In support of the petition, the deputy prosecutor submitted an affidavit from Schwomeyer describing his investigation and also an affidavit from Officer Chris Cavanaugh, who explained the operation of the GPS unit. Officer Cavanaugh attested that the GPS device could collect location data at a specific interval (for example, every four seconds) and that officers could later retrieve that data through the Internet “by having the GPS tracking unit transmit its stored data.”
A Marion County Superior Court judge granted the petition on these terms, and a GPS unit was attached to Taylor's car. About two weeks later, police learned from the GPS data that Taylor had traveled to a storage facility in Indianapolis. Schwomeyer spoke to both the manager and the owner of the storage facility and learned that Taylor rented a storage locker there. He went to the facility with a drug-detection dog, and the dog alerted just outside of Taylor's locker.
Schwomeyer then applied for a warrant to search the storage unit. In an affidavit submitted to the Marion County Superior Court, Schwomeyer described the investigation and stated that he had learned the location of Taylor's storage locker through “surveillance.” He did not mention that the surveillance involved GPS tracking of Taylor's car.
A different Marion County judge reviewed the warrant application and authorized a search of Taylor's storage locker. The police searched the locker and found 752.61 grams of cocaine, four firearms, and digital scales. Taylor was charged in federal court with one count of possessing with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of a mixture or substance containing cocaine, 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1), (b)(1)(B)(ii), and four counts of possessing a firearm as a felon, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g).
Taylor moved to suppress the storage-locker evidence as the fruit of an unlawful search. He maintained that the warrantless tracking of his car via GPS violated the Fourth Amendment. He relied on the Supreme Court's decision in Jones, which held that the installation of a GPS device on a car is a search for Fourth Amendment purposes. 132 S.Ct. at 949. Taylor also argued that the search warrant was invalid because Schwomeyer had omitted from the affidavit any reference to GPS tracking. (Taylor raised other arguments, but he has abandoned them on appeal.)
Because Jones was issued three months after the police tracked Taylor's car via GPS, the government opposed the suppression motion based on the good-faith exception established in Davis v. United States, which held that the exclusionary rule does not apply “when the police conduct a search in objectively reasonable reliance on binding appellate precedent.” ––– U.S. ––––, 131 S.Ct. 2419, 2434, 180 L.Ed.2d 285 (2011). Davis's good-faith exception applied, the government argued, because the police had reasonably relied on this court's pre-Jones decisions upholding warrantless GPS tracking. See United States v. Garcia, 474 F.3d 994 (7th Cir.2007) ; United States v. Cuevas–Perez, 640 F.3d 272 (7th Cir.2011). The government also noted that the police officers had consulted with a deputy prosecutor and reasonably relied on judicial approval before installing and monitoring the GPS device. Finally, the government maintained that the search warrant for Taylor's storage locker was valid because Schwomeyer had not omitted any material fact in his warrant affidavit.
Taylor countered that reliance on Garcia and Cuevas–Perez was not reasonable because the use of the GPS unit in this case was more intrusive than in those cases. Unlike Garcia and Cuevas–Perez, law enforcement here had “asked for and received permission to enter onto private property, to use the vehicle's battery power, and to monitor Taylor's vehicle for 60 days.”
The district court agreed with Taylor that Davis's good-faith exception did not apply but nonetheless denied Taylor's motion to suppress on the ground that law enforcement had reasonably relied on judicial authorization when using the GPS. The court explained that Garcia and Cuevas–Perez were distinguishable because the GPS devices used in those cases did not draw power from the car's battery, were not installed while the car was parked on private property, and did not track the car's movement for 60 days. Thus, the court observed, “law enforcement could not have objectively relied on Garcia and Cuevas–Perez when the cases do not explicitly, or for that matter implicitly, authorize the specific actions taken here.” But suppression was unwarranted, the court held, because the officers had obtained judicial authorization to use the GPS device and their reliance on that authorization was objectively reasonable. The judge also explained that applying the exclusionary rule was not appropriate because the rule is meant to deter culpable conduct by law enforcement and there was no culpable conduct in this case. Finally, the judge rejected Taylor's argument that the warrant was defective because Schwomeyer's affidavit had omitted material facts.
While Taylor's case was still pending in the district court, we issued United States v. Brown, 744 F.3d 474 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, ––– U.S. ––––, 135 S.Ct. 378, 190 L.Ed.2d 255 (2014), which applied Davis's good-faith exception to the use of a GPS device to track a car in 2006, before Garcia or Cuevas–Perez were decided. The GPS device in Brown was installed with the consent of the car's owner, but it was used to track a driver who had not consented. Id. at 476. Our decision in Brown confirmed that Garcia and Cuevas–Perez were binding appellate precedent in this circuit establishing “that installation of a GPS device, and the use of the location data it produces, are not within the scope of the [F]ourth [A]mendment.” Id. And even though the GPS tracking in Brown predated Garcia and Cuevas–Perez, we concluded that there was nonetheless binding appellate precedent in 2006 for the purpose of Davis's good-faith exception: to wit, the Supreme Court's decisions in United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 103 S.Ct. 1081, 75 L.Ed.2d 55 (1983) (), and United States v. Karo, 468 U.S. 705, 104 S.Ct. 3296, 82 L.Ed.2d 530 (1984) (). See Brown, 744 F.3d at 477–78.
Soon after we decided Brown, the district judge issued a “Supplemental Entry” that is at the center of this appeal. In that docket entry, the judge explained that Brown 's “characterization of Garcia and Cuevas–Perez ” differed from her earlier analysis and supported the government's position that Davis's good-faith exception did apply to the GPS tracking of Taylor's car. Thus, the judge concluded, Davis's good-faith exception supplied additional support for denying Taylor's motion to suppress.
Taylor pleaded guilty to the drug-trafficking crime, see § 841(a)(1), (b)(1)(B)(ii), but preserved his right to...
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