State v. Navarro

• Decision Date: 22 June 2017
• Docket Number: No. 20150832-CA,20150832-CA
• Citation: 400 P.3d 1120
• Parties: STATE of Utah, Appellee, v. Chance Aric NAVARRO, Appellant.
• Court: Utah Court of Appeals

400 P.3d 1120

STATE of Utah, Appellee,

v.Chance Aric NAVARRO, Appellant.

No. 20150832-CA

Court of Appeals of Utah.

Filed June 22, 2017

Gary W. Pendleton, Attorney for Appellant.

Sean D. Reyes, Jeanne B. Inouye, and Jeffrey S. Gray, Salt Lake City, Attorneys for Appellee.

Judge Stephen L. Roth authored this Opinion, in which Judges David N. Mortensen and Jill M. Pohlman concurred.

Opinion

ROTH, Judge:

¶ 1 This case is about the reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment of a warrantless vehicle search which uncovered weapons, drugs, and drug paraphernalia. Chance Aric Navarro appeals the district court's denial of his motion to suppress the evidence. We affirm.

¶ 2 One night in August 2013, Officer Parry of the Washington County Drug Task Force was conducting surveillance of a St. George tire shop, trying to find a person for whom the task force had an arrest warrant.¹

Parry never found his target, but he did watch Navarro and several others as they hung out at the shop and in its parking area. At one point, Navarro opened the front door of his SUV, and, when he did so, Parry noticed the SUV's window was darkly tinted. Parry "was very confident that the window was too dark" and "believed it was going to be a tint violation."²

¶ 3 Later, Navarro opened the SUV's rear hatch and Parry saw "what appeared to be a rifle case." The case concerned Parry because he "believed that Mr. Navarro was a felon, and he may have [had] a weapon with him."³ Parry's belief was based on his personal involvement in a proceeding from several years earlier in which Navarro had agreed to plead guilty to felony charges.⁴ Parry was also concerned that Navarro might have a gun because the drug task force had information from two sources that Navarro "was involved with the distribution of drugs," was "in possession of weapons," and "was possibly looking to shoot it out with officers ... if he was caught."

¶ 4 A short time before midnight, Navarro got in his SUV and left the tire shop in a convoy with three other cars. Parry used his radio to alert other members of the task force to Navarro's presumed tint violation and to warn them to use caution dealing with him. Officers Jessop and Nutchatelli responded to the radio call and paralleled the convoy as it stopped briefly at a Wendy's restaurant. The convoy broke up in the Wendy's parking lot, with Navarro's SUV and another car driving to a nearby Denny's restaurant.

¶ 5 Jessop and Nutchatelli followed both cars into the Denny's parking lot and turned on their patrol car's lights to initiate a traffic stop of the vehicles. Both Navarro's SUV and the other vehicle stopped. The other driver got out of her car and headed quickly for the Denny's. Jessop and Nutchatelli, with the assistance of other officers arriving on the scene, stopped her and then approached Navarro's SUV. After a short delay, Navarro complied with officer requests to show his hands and get out of his vehicle. Navarro notified the officers that he had a knife on his belt and a firearm in the SUV; they frisked Navarro for other weapons, found none, and then placed him in handcuffs.

¶ 6 Around this time, Parry left his surveillance position, went to Navarro's location, and discussed the possible tint violation with him. Because none of the officers on the scene had a tint meter with them, the officers waited for one to arrive so they could confirm their suspicion that Navarro's window tint violated the statute.

¶ 7 While the officers were waiting for the tint meter, several other things happened. First, an officer with a computer arrived and determined that Navarro was not a felon by running a criminal history check. Second, Parry called an officer with a drug dog, who arrived shortly after the call. The dog alerted on Navarro's SUV, and the officers searched it. The search uncovered two guns, drug paraphernalia, and a substance alleged to be methamphetamine. Eventually, a tint meter arrived and confirmed that the SUV's windows were tinted too darkly. The State charged Navarro with two counts of possession of a dangerous weapon by a restricted person,⁵ possession or use of a controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia, and illegal window tinting.

¶ 8 Navarro moved to suppress the evidence of drugs and weapons on the ground that the police search of his vehicle was illegal under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Navarro's basic argument was that the police stopped him on the pretext of a window tint violation, but they immediately detoured into an investigation for drugs and weapons without doing any of the normal activities associated with clearing a traffic stop for a tint violation. This investigatory detour, he claimed, was outside the scope of a reasonable investigation necessary to resolve the window tinting pretext, and thus was illegal under the Fourth Amendment. Navarro requested an evidentiary hearing on the issue.

¶ 9 At the suppression hearing, the trial court heard testimony from officers Parry, Jessop, and Nutchatelli. Much of the testimony related to the timeline of events before and during the stop, the search of Navarro's SUV, and the pretextual nature of the stop. Testimony showed that Navarro left the tire shop at 11:39 p.m. Several minutes passed before he arrived at the Denny's, where he was stopped at roughly 11:45 p.m. Parry testified that, based on his phone records, he had called for the drug dog at 12:03 a.m. and that the search of Navarro's SUV began at 12:12 a.m. after the dog alerted to the possible presence of drugs. No officer was able to remember when the tint meter was requested or who requested it, but Nutchatelli testified that he had been informed that Parry "was going to get ahold of a St. George police officer" to bring a tint meter before the stop began. Parry testified that he did not remember requesting the meter, but "[i]t very well could have been me. It would make sense."

¶ 10 Likewise, no officer could pinpoint when the tint meter arrived in relation to the drug dog. Parry testified that the meter arrived sometime between the initiation of the stop at 11:45 p.m. and the beginning of the vehicle search at 12:12 a.m., although he could not say whether the dog or the meter arrived first. Jessop testified that "[he] would guess" the dog arrived "less than five minutes" after Navarro was stopped. He also estimated that it took "20 minutes" "from the time we made contact [with Navarro] to when [the tint meter] arrived on scene and we confirmed the tint." Because his "attention was drawn away" by the other stopped vehicle, Nutchatelli was not sure how long after the initial stop it took for the drug dog to arrive, but he thought it was "[l]ess than 15 minutes." He estimated the tint meter arrived "within 20 minutes" of the stop.

¶ 11 At the close of the hearing, the trial court described how it had weighed the evidence presented:

There appeared to be reasonable suspicion of a tint violation; that a tint meter was requested; that it arrived probably in the neighborhood of 20 minutes after the stop; that the drug dog arrived in the neighborhood of probably 10 or 15 minutes after the stop. [The dog] did sniff [Navarro's SUV] prior to the time the tint meter got there.

¶ 12 Both parties submitted briefing after the suppression hearing, and the court thereafter denied the motion to suppress in a brief written decision:

The Court finds that the stop of [Navarro's] vehicle for a window tint violation was constitutional at its inception. The Court further finds that both a tint meter and a K-9 unit were requested shortly after the stop, and that the tint meter did not arrive until after the arrival of the K-9 unit. Once the K-9 alerted on the defendant's vehicle, the detectives had reasonable suspicion of additional serious criminal activity, and could appropriately expand the investigative scope of the initial stop.

¶ 13 The case proceeded to trial and a jury convicted Navarro on two counts of possession of a dangerous weapon by a restricted person and possession of drug paraphernalia.⁶ Navarro timely appealed.

¶ 14 According to Navarro, the "only issue on appeal" is whether, under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, "the district court erred in denying [his] motion to suppress evidence" found during the search of his vehicle. "We review a trial court's decision to grant or deny a motion to suppress for an alleged Fourth Amendment violation as a mixed question of law and fact." State v. Fuller , 2014 UT 29, ¶ 17, 332 P.3d 937. "While the court's factual findings are reviewed for clear error, its legal conclusions are reviewed for correctness, including its application of law to the facts of the case." Id.

¶ 15 Navarro concedes that the traffic stop of his SUV was justified at its inception based on the officers' reasonable suspicion of an equipment violation, namely the dark tinting of his windows. He contends, however, that the police "impermissibly exploited the traffic stop" by immediately "embarking upon [a] narcotics investigation" that was unrelated to the purpose of the stop. Because it was unrelated to the suspected equipment violation that justified the stop, he claims the narcotics investigation exceeded the bounds of the Fourth Amendment and the evidence uncovered should have been suppressed under State v. Lopez , 873 P.2d 1127 (Utah 1994). Under Lopez , both "the length and the scope of the detention must be strictly tied to and justified by the circumstances which rendered its initiation permissible." Id. at 1132 (brackets, citation, and internal quotation marks omitted).

¶ 16 Given that Navarro concedes the stop's initial validity, the only question presented on appeal is "whether the detention following the stop was reasonably related in scope to the circumstances that justified the interference in the first place." See State v. Baker , 2010 UT 18, ¶ 12, 229 P.3d 650 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). On that question, Navarro argues...