Ray v. United States, 7583.
| Decision Date | 24 May 1958 |
| Docket Number | No. 7583.,7583. |
| Citation | 255 F.2d 473 |
| Parties | Lonnie RAY and James William Leasure, Appellants, v. UNITED STATES of America, Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit |
J. Raymond Gordon, Charleston, W. Va., for appellants.
Percy H. Brown, Asst. U. S. Atty., Charleston, W. Va. (Duncan W. Daugherty, U. S. Atty., Huntington, W. Va., on the brief), for appellee.
Before SOBELOFF, Chief Judge, and SOPER and HAYNSWORTH, Circuit Judges.
Defendants were indicted for removing and concealing contraband whiskey and for aiding and abetting such removal and concealment. James Leasure entered a plea of guilty and Lonnie Ray, pleading not guilty, was found guilty by a jury after a trial.1
On February 22, 1957, an agent of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the Treasury Department, travelling from Fayetteville to Beckley, West Virginia, passed a Cadillac, known by him to belong to Lonnie Ray, parked near a place which had been reported to him to be used as a wholesale source of contraband whiskey. He knew Lonnie, for within the four preceding months, he had twice arrested her for violation of the liquor laws at her home and motel in Beckley. The agent proceeded to Beckley, alerted two other agents, and set up a watch near Lonnie's establishment. When she drove up, her forward progress was obstructed by the agents' car. She undertook to back her car away, but was prevented by one of the agents, who threw open the door by the driver's seat and applied the emergency brake. Meanwhile, James Leasure, a shell-shocked epileptic, who worked for Lonnie in the management of her motel, alighted from the right side of the front seat of Lonnie's car, a large shopping bag in his hand, and began to walk rapidly away from the scene. One of the agents stopped James, patted the bulky shopping bag, felt hard round objects inside, and, removing a loaf of bread from the top, found two gallons of contraband whiskey in the bag. The two defendants were then placed under arrest.
Complaint is first made that, under these circumstances, search of the shopping bag, without a warrant, was unreasonable and unlawful. The knowledge of the agents of the previous activities of the defendants, however, their observation of Lonnie's car at a place which had been reported to them as a source of wholesale moonshine whiskey, Lonnie's attempt to reverse the car and evade the agents and James' effort to make a hurried departure with the bulky bag in his hands furnished probable cause for the investigation of the contents of the bag. Having found whiskey in the bag, the subsequent search of the automobile was clearly warranted.
If we consider the act of the agent in opening the door of the automobile and applying the emergency brake as the beginning of the search of the automobile, rather than as an act of detention for interrogation, and the discovery of the whiskey in James' hands as the result of the search of the automobile, we still come to the same conclusion. Probable cause for the search of the automobile was not dependent upon anything occurring after the arrival of the automobile at the motel. The vehicle had been seen by the officer parked, in a rural area, at a place which the agent had reason to believe was a source of supply of illegal whiskey. From that point it was driven by Lonnie to her motel, which, because of his recent arrests of Lonnie and confiscations of whiskey, the officer regarded as her retail outlet. Those circumstances amply justified the conviction that the probable purpose of her trip was not innocent, but the transportation of whiskey from the source of supply to her retail outlet. Brinegar v. U. S., 338, U.S. 160, 69 S.Ct. 1302, 93 L.Ed. 1879; Carroll v. U. S., 267 U.S. 132, 45 S.Ct....
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