U.S. v. Thomas

• Citation: 955 F.2d 207
• Decision Date: 28 January 1992
• Docket Number: No. 91-5387,91-5387
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Craig Lawrence THOMAS, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

Page 207

955 F.2d 207

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Craig Lawrence THOMAS, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 91-5387.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued Oct. 3, 1991.

Decided Jan. 28, 1992.

Denise Benvenga, Federal Public Defender's Office, Baltimore, Md., argued (Fred Warren Bennett, Federal Public Defender, Shirley M. Watts, Asst. Federal Public Defender, on brief), for defendant-appellant.

Raymond Allen Bonner, Asst. U.S. Atty., Baltimore, Md., argued (Richard D. Bennett, U.S. Atty., Stephen S. Zimmerman, Asst. U.S. Atty., on brief), for plaintiff-appellee.

Before ERVIN, Chief Judge, SPROUSE, Circuit Judge, and MERHIGE, Senior District Judge for the Eastern District of Virginia, sitting by designation.

OPINION

ERVIN, Chief Judge:

A jury convicted Craig Lawrence Thomas of robbing a Sovran Bank branch office in Baltimore. On appeal, Thomas contends that the district court erred in denying his Motion to Suppress Evidence seized from his hotel room. Agreeing with Thomas that the inevitable discovery exception does not apply to these facts and that his consent to search was invalid, we reverse.

I.

At 2:00 a.m. on June 19, 1990, Thomas and a friend, Lawrence Henry, checked into the Hotel Belvedere in Baltimore. A third man actually registered for the room, because neither Thomas nor Henry had any identification. Thomas pulled a wad of cash larger than a baseball from his pocket and paid for the week in advance, peeling seven brand new hundred dollar bills from the wad. Thomas also requested no maid service for the week and tipped the bellhop who carried his bags $60. Later that morning, a front desk clerk saw Henry carrying a stack of newspapers into the hotel. These facts led the front desk Office Manager, Jeffrey Sterling, to suspect Thomas and Henry were going to deal drugs from their hotel room. Sterling knew of a prior incident of drug trafficking at the hotel, which is located in downtown Baltimore.

Sterling called the Baltimore City Police Department (BCPD). Two BCPD officers came to the hotel and spoke with Sterling. Sterling gave them a list of approximately 15 phone numbers dialed from Room 416, Thomas and Henry's room. The officers returned to police headquarters and found that a number of the calls were to apartment complexes. Thinking that Thomas and Henry were drug dealers who were about to change their locale, the BCPD officers returned to the hotel without getting a search warrant.

Along with a hotel security officer, three BCPD officers went to Room 416. They knocked, called out "hotel security," and waited. Loud music was playing in the room, and no one answered. The hotel passkey did not work, and the officers had to obtain another key from a hotel maid. Finally, they opened the door. The officers searched Room 416, which consisted of a living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. The rooms were unoccupied. In the bathroom, instead of drugs, the BCPD found a bag containing thousands of dollars of cash in Sovran Bank wrappers. The government concedes that this first search of Room 416 was illegal, as no exception to the search warrant requirement applied.

After learning that a Sovran Bank branch had been robbed the previous day, the BCPD requested Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) assistance and began surveillance of Room 416 from Room 421 across the hall. Next, Henry and his uncle, Lawrence Phifer, entered Room 416 and stayed for about 10 minutes. As they left, the BCPD stopped and handcuffed them. FBI agents then arrived on the scene and took Henry and Phifer into Room 421, where they questioned Henry.

Henry's testimony about what happened next in Room 421 conflicted with the FBI agents' accounts. Henry claimed he was questioned for about 45 minutes, kept in handcuffs for much of the time, and threatened with a jail term of 25 years. The agents denied using threats and handcuffs and stated that Henry quickly became eager to exculpate himself. On one point there was agreement: The FBI agents confronted Henry with the fact that they had found money in Room 416. Henry said it belonged to Thomas. Then Henry signed a consent to search form, giving the agents his consent to search Room 416. During the second search of Room 416, Henry identified a blue bag as belonging to Thomas. The agents did not search the bag. Henry also called Thomas to find out when he would return.

Thomas then returned to the hotel and began to enter Room 416. Seven FBI agents immediately emerged from inside Room 416, arrested Thomas, handcuffed him, and took him into the living room. At first, Thomas was belligerent. He asked about Henry, who was in the bedroom with his uncle, both of them handcuffed. Thomas became more cooperative, signed a form waiving his Miranda rights, and then signed a form giving his consent to search the room. In Thomas' blue bag, FBI agents found clothes and tennis shoes matching the description of the robber given by the two bank employees who were robbed the day before.

Before his trial for armed robbery, Thomas filed a Motion to Suppress Evidence seized from Room 416 of the Hotel Belvedere. The district court conducted a motions hearing, heard an argument on the motion, ordered an additional argument, and considered supplemental memoranda. The court then denied Thomas' Motion to Suppress, applying the inevitable discovery exception to the exclusionary rule. At trial, on September 28, 1990, a jury convicted Thomas of bank robbery, armed bank robbery, and use of a firearm during a crime of violence.

II.

Thomas challenges the district court's decision to admit evidence under the inevitable discovery exception, requiring this court to consider whether the district court properly applied the exception to the facts of this case. The Supreme Court first recognized the inevitable discovery rule in Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431, 104 S.Ct. 2501, 81 L.Ed.2d 377 (1984). In Nix, a detective violated a defendant's right to counsel when he persuaded the defendant to reveal the location of the body of a girl he had murdered. However, because an intense, meticulously planned search was underway for the girl's body, with search teams just hours from finding it, the Court agreed that the body would inevitably have been discovered. Therefore, the rationale of the exclusionary rule, which is the deterrence of police misconduct, did not clearly apply. The girl's body was admissible as evidence, although the suspect's statement was not. The Court held that evidence unlawfully obtained is admissible "[i]f the prosecution can establish by a preponderance of the evidence that the information ultimately or inevitably would have been discovered by lawful means." Id. at 444, 104 S.Ct. at 2509. This court discussed the rationale behind the inevitable discovery rule in United States v. Whitehorn, 813 F.2d 646 (4th Cir.1987), cert. denied, 487 U.S. 1234, 108 S.Ct. 2898, 101 L.Ed.2d 931 (1988). In Whitehorn, the court stated:

[T]he premise of the inevitable discovery doctrine is that the illegal search played no real part in discovery of incriminating evidence. Only then, if it can be shown that the taint did not extend to the second search, would the product of the second search be admissible.

Id. at 650 n. 4. The statement in Whitehorn is sensible; otherwise, if the illegal first search did taint the second search, the prosecution would profit from its own wrongdoing.

To argue the evidence in Room 416 inevitably would have been discovered, the government has relied on a string of conjecture: (1) no illegal entry, (2) surveillance from across the hall, (3) stopping of Henry for questioning, (4) Henry's implication of Thomas and consent to search, and (5) Thomas' consent to search. The government's chain of inevitability has at least two broken links. First, there was an illegal entry. The initial step in the government's theory is to say, "If we hadn't done it wrong, we would have done it right." It is an inescapable fact that BCPD officers searched first and set up surveillance later. That suggests the second flaw, Henry's implication of Thomas and consent to search. Henry allegedly became cooperative only after the FBI questioned him about the money found in Room 416. If instead the BCPD, suspecting drug dealing, had stopped Henry for questioning, there is no reason to believe Henry would have connected Thomas to a bank robbery or given consent to search. In short, unlike Whitehorn, the invalid first search of Room 416 tainted what followed.

Alternatively, the government argues that the hotel staff's own investigation would have inevitably turned up the evidence in Room 416:

It would defy logic--the underpinning of...