MATTER OF NINETY-ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS

• Decision Date: 20 June 1989
• Docket Number: Misc. No. 88-174 P.
• Citation: 715 F. Supp. 423
• Parties: In the Matter of NINETY-ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS IN UNITED STATES CURRENCY.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Rhode Island

715 F. Supp. 423

In the Matter of NINETY-ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS IN UNITED STATES CURRENCY.

Misc. No. 88-174 P.

United States District Court, D. Rhode Island.

June 20, 1989.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

David N. Cicilline, Providence, R.I., for petitioners Myra Blanco and Katia Garcia.

Michael Iannotti, Asst. U.S. Atty., Providence, R.I., for U.S.

OPINION AND ORDER

PETTINE, Senior District Judge.

This case is before the Court on petitioners' Fed.R.Crim.P. 41(e) Motion for Return of Property concerning currency seized by agents of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration ("DEA") in the course of a warrantless search stemming from a drug enforcement action. The sole issue to be decided is whether this Court lacks jurisdiction to order the return of the currency pursuant to Rule 41(e) in light of the government's initiation of administrative forfeiture proceedings against the currency, pursuant to 21 U.S.C. Sec. 881(d) and 19 U.S.C. Sec. 1607, six weeks after petitioners' filed their Rule 41(e) Motion but before this Court had heard or decided the matter. For the reasons set forth below, this Court concludes that, under the facts and circumstances of this case, it would be imprudent to exercise its jurisdiction to decide petitioners' Motion and thus declines on equitable grounds to rule, permitting the matter to be addressed instead in the context of the Section 881(d) forfeiture proceeding.

I. BACKGROUND OF PETITIONERS' MOTION

On December 12, 1988, Alphonso Blanco was arrested and charged with distributing, attempting to distribute and conspiring to distribute cocaine. Incident to the arrest, DEA agents seized $1,020.00 in United States currency from Blanco's person and also obtained a search warrant for Blanco's residence. Prior to the execution of the warrant, however, DEA agents stopped a vehicle operated by Myra Blanco and containing a passenger, Katia Garcia. After Myra Blanco was told by the agents that they had a warrant to search her residence, the government contends, Ms. Blanco gave the agents her consent to search the trunk of the vehicle. There the agents discovered and seized $81,259.00 in United States currency. Sometime thereafter, pursuant to the execution of the search warrant for the Blanco residence, agents seized an additional $4,570.00. In addition, DEA agents obtained a second search warrant for the home of Katia Garcia and there found and seized $3,245.00. Neither Myra Blanco nor Katia Garcia were arrested or charged with any criminal offense.

On December 27, 1988, Myra Blanco and Katia Garcia joined in filing a Rule 41(e) Motion for Return of Property, alleging that the government had illegally stopped and searched their vehicle and illegally seized and retained their property,¹ and demanding the currency's return. The government objected on January 5, 1989, arguing that this Court lacked jurisdiction to decide the Rule 41(e) Motion since administrative forfeiture proceedings had been initiated against the currency by the DEA and thus petitioners' remedy lay in the administrative realm. In actuality, however, it was not until February 8, 1989, six weeks after claimants' filed their Rule 41(e) Motion but six days before this matter came on for hearing, that the government filed formal Notice of Forfeiture pursuant to 19 U.S.C. Sec. 1607. Finally, on February 14, 1989, this Court held the hearing on petitioners' Rule 41(e) Motion, which it continued in order to receive supplemental memoranda of law regarding the implications for the disposition of the Motion of the recently decided case of Floyd v. United States, 860 F.2d 999 (10th Cir. 1988). The supplemental memoranda having been received February 16, 1989, this Court now decides the case.

II. RELEVANT LAW

A. Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41(e)

Rule 41(e) provides in its entirety:

(e) Motion for Return of Property. A person aggrieved by an unlawful search and seizure may move the district court for the district in which the property was seized for the return of the property on the ground that such person is entitled to lawful possession of the property which was illegally seized. The judge shall receive evidence on any issue of fact necessary to the decision of the motion. If the motion is granted the property shall be restored and it shall not be admissible in evidence at any hearing or trial. If a motion for return of property is made or comes on for hearing in the district of trial after an indictment or information is filed, it shall be treated also as a motion to suppress under Rule 12.

Viewed in the context of the whole of Fed.R.Crim.P. 41, Rule 41(e) is best understood as one element of a system of procedural and remedial protections designed to safeguard the right, guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures.² A codification of prior statutory and decisional law on the matters that it touches,³ Rule 41 both articulates procedures for executing constitutionally permissible searches and seizures,⁴ and provides remedies for cases in which property has been obtained in violation of the law.⁵ More specifically, with regard to the remedies enumerated in the Rule, Sections 41(e), providing for the return of property unlawfully seized, and 41(f), providing for the suppression in any trial or hearing of evidence seized in contravention of the Fourth Amendment,⁶ restate judicial practices that for seventy-five years⁷ have been among the principle tools through which the federal courts have implemented the Fourth Amendment guarantees,⁸ focusing in particular on rectifying unlawful governmental takings. See generally WRIGHT, FEDERAL PRACTICE AND PROCEDURE: CRIMINAL 2d Secs. 661-678.

On its face, a Rule 41(e) motion for return of property is sweeping in scope, providing a remedy to any "person aggrieved by an unlawful search and seizure." The gravaman of the motion, however, is petitioner's dual assertion that the search and seizure procedures employed by law enforcement officials in a particular situation violated petitioner's Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights and deprived the complainant of property to which she was lawfully entitled. Thus, although the Rule is ostensibly broad enough to reach any unlawful seizure, a movant has no right to the return of property that is contraband or from which she has been somehow legally dispossessed.⁹ See, e.q., Shea v. Gabriel, 520 F.2d 879, 882 (1st Cir.1975) (movant who made no showing that things seized were his lawful property, and not components of an illegal gambling business, not entitled to return of property); Marger v. Bell, 510 F.Supp. 9, 11-12 (D.Me. 1980) (movant not entitled to return of seized money assigned to him in violation of Federal Anti-Assignment Statute).

In addition, courts have returned repeatedly to the question of whether the Rule, cast as it is as a rule of criminal procedure, reaches situations in which a claimant, although under investigation, has not yet been indicted or situations in which the claimant is simply never subject to any criminal proceeding, the situation in the case at bar. In explicating this question, federal courts have variously found the authority to hear pre-indictment motions for return of property not only in the statutory grant of jurisdiction embodied in Rule 41(e) but also in the longstanding, non-statutory doctrine of equitable or "anomalous" jurisdiction,¹⁰ typically relying on some amalgam of these jurisdictional bases to hear such motions without definitively ruling on exactly which theory applies in a particular case. Compare, e.g., Centracchio v. Garrity, 198 F.2d 382, 385-86 (1st Cir.), cert. denied, 344 U.S. 866, 73 S.Ct. 108, 97 L.Ed. 672 (1952) (petitioner's independent proceeding for return of property allegedly obtained by unconstitutional search and seizure, properly addressed to inherent power of the court to discipline its officers and properly entertained even prior to indictment, dismissed as lacking in equity) with Shea v. Gabriel, 520 F.2d 879 (1st Cir.1975) (petitioner who sought pre-indictment return of allegedly illegally seized currency, by filing both complaint invoking federal court's jurisdiction under its inherent power to discipline its officers and Rule 41(e) motion, not entitled to its return on either equitable or Rule 41(e) grounds).

Even more to the point in the context of this case, federal courts have relied on the same jurisdictional amalgam to justify hearing motions for the return of property when the movant is at substantial risk not for criminal prosecution but for entanglement in a subsequent administrative or civil proceeding. Thus, for example, the First Circuit Court of Appeals has opined in helpful dicta both that "Rule 41(e) ... while designed for a criminal setting ... arguably could cover a situation where civil administrative proceedings would occur in a different forum" and that the concept of anomalous jurisdiction, "although nurtured in a criminal setting," could confer upon a court "independent power to curtail the abuse of its own process" by ordering that property illegally seized not be retained for use in some subsequent civil proceeding. In re Worksite Inspection of Quality Products, 592 F.2d 611, 614-17 (1st Cir.1979) (holding that, even if district court had subject matter jurisdiction to decide motion for suppression of evidence brought by employer faced with OSHA administrative enforcement proceeding, it should in equity have refrained from doing so where constitutionality of evidence's seizure by OSHA inspectors could be adequately adjudicated in anticipated proceeding). See also Richey v. Smith, 515 F.2d 1239, 1243 (5th Cir.1975) (suit for return of property unlawfully seized by IRS agents can be maintained in equity even though filed prior to initiation of any civil or criminal proceeding flowing from seizure of the property); Hunsucker v. Phinney, 497 F.2d 29 (5th Cir.1974), cert....