State v. Sanchez
| Decision Date | 23 July 2020 |
| Docket Number | NO. S-1-SC-37555,S-1-SC-37555 |
| Parties | STATE of New Mexico, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Gabriel SANCHEZ, Defendant-Appellee. |
| Court | New Mexico Supreme Court |
Hector H. Balderas, Attorney General, Margaret Jayne Crabb, Assistant Attorney General, John J. Woykovsky, Assistant Attorney General, Santa Fe, NM, for Appellant
Bennett J. Baur, Chief Public Defender, E. Craig Hay, III, Assistant Public Defender, Sydney K.L. West, Assistant Public Defender, Santa Fe, NM, for Appellee
{1} Defendant Gabriel Sanchez was indicted for first-degree murder, tampering with evidence, and aggravated burglary in connection with the death of William Jimerson. In two pretrial orders, the district court 1) suppressed evidence consisting of the contents of Sanchez's cell phone because the extraction of those contents violated the requirement under Rule 5-211(C) NMRA that a warrant be executed within ten days of its issuance and 2) excluded several pieces of Rule 11-404(B) NMRA evidence, including evidence of a fire at Jimerson's home allegedly set by Sanchez the night before Jimerson's death. The State filed an interlocutory appeal pursuant to NMSA 1978, Section 39-3-3(B)(2) (1972) (), and State v. Smallwood , 2007-NMSC-005, ¶ 11, 141 N.M. 178, 152 P.3d 821 (). Following oral argument, and to allow the proceedings below to continue, we issued an order reversing the district court's suppression of the evidence from the cell phone and affirming the district court's exclusion of evidence of the fire allegedly set by Sanchez. We issue this opinion to explain our holdings.
{2} First, we conclude that when a warrant is issued to search an electronic device, that warrant is executed when the device is seized or the data is copied on-site, which must occur within Rule 5-211(C) ’s ten-day time limit. Rule 5-211(C) ’s ten-day time limit applies only to the seizure of the device and not any subsequent data extraction or review. Because Sanchez's cell phone had already been seized by the police when the police obtained the warrant to search the phone, it was not a violation of Rule 5-211(C) for the police to successfully unlock the phone and extract its contents after the ten-day time limitation in the rule. Accordingly, we reverse the district court's suppression of the evidence obtained from the cell phone. Second, because no admissible evidence connected Sanchez to the fire at Jimerson's home, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion by excluding evidence of the fire.
{3} We first address the State's argument that the district court erred by granting Sanchez's motion to suppress evidence consisting of the contents of Sanchez's cell phone. For the reasons that follow, we agree with the State and reverse the district court's suppression of that evidence.
{4} The investigation in this case began on December 18, 2017, when Jimerson was found dead in his home from multiple gunshot wounds
to the head. New Mexico State Police (NMSP) Agent Joey Gallegos learned that Jimerson had called the police the day before to report a fire at his home that he believed Sanchez had set. Jimerson thought that Sanchez wanted to kill him because of his relationship with Sanchez's ex-fiancé. Agent Gallegos spoke to Sanchez's ex-fiancé and learned that Sanchez had previously threatened and attacked Jimerson.
{5} Later that day, Santa Clara Tribal Police informed NMSP that Sanchez was in a residence on the Santa Clara Pueblo. NMSP obtained a warrant from Santa Clara Pueblo Tribal Court to search the residence and remove Sanchez from the Pueblo. Pursuant to the search warrant, police seized a cell phone, among other items.
{6} The next day, December 19, 2017, Agent Gallegos obtained a warrant to search Sanchez's phone. NMSP Agent Andrew Jorgenson took the cell phone to the Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory (RCFL) to make a digital copy of the phone's contents but was unable to bypass the lock code on the phone. Agent Jorgenson then returned the phone to the NMSP evidence vault.
{7} The cell phone remained in the NMSP evidence vault until November 2018, when Agents Gallegos and Jorgenson learned that the technology used to extract data from cell phones at the RCFL had been updated and could potentially bypass the lock code. On November 5, 2018, Agent Jorgenson took the cell phone back to the RCFL and was able to unlock it. He extracted the phone's contents and stored them on an external hard drive, which was placed in the NMSP evidence vault along with the cell phone.
{8} In December 2018, NMSP Agent Jesse Whittaker took over the investigation from Agent Gallegos. When Agent Whittaker took over the case, Agent Gallegos told him that he should obtain a warrant to search Sanchez's phone. On December 26, 2018, Agent Whittaker filed an affidavit for a new search warrant. In support of the warrant, Agent Whittaker copied Agent Gallegos's affidavit and indicated Agent Gallegos as the original affiant. He further stated that officers had been "able to forensically by-pass the password and preserve the evidence from the device" in November 2018, but that the contents had not yet been reviewed. Agent Whittaker obtained a second search warrant for Sanchez's phone on December 26, 2018. After that warrant was issued, Agent Jorgenson filed a return and inventory stating that NMSP had seized a digital copy of Sanchez's phone on November 5, 2018, pursuant to the search warrant obtained on December 26, 2018.
{9} On January 8, 2019, the State filed a motion to continue the trial, mentioning the large number of text and media messages, calls, search logs, and numerous other files recently extracted from Sanchez's cell phone. Sanchez subsequently filed a motion to suppress the evidence extracted from his cell phone, raising two arguments. First, Sanchez claimed that the extraction of the data from his cell phone on November 5, 2018, was a warrantless search because it occurred eleven months after the first warrant was issued on December 19, 2017, but before the second warrant was issued on December 26, 2018. Sanchez argued that this violated Rule 5-211(C), which provides that a warrant must be executed within ten days after its issuance. Second, Sanchez contended that the information in the warrant issued on December 19, 2017, was stale and did not support probable cause to search his phone. He argued that a year had passed and the investigation in that time had revealed new facts which should have been presented in Agent Whittaker's affidavit in support of the warrant issued on December 26, 2018. In response, the State's primary contention was that the warrant issued on December 19, 2017, was still valid when the data was extracted from Sanchez's phone.
{10} At the hearing on the suppression motion, the district court rejected Sanchez's probable cause argument and concluded that the affidavits provided probable cause to search the cell phone. The district court instead granted suppression of the contents of the cell phone based on Sanchez's argument that Rule 5-211(C) required police to execute the search warrant within ten days of its issuance. In a written order, the district court found that police obtained a warrant to search Sanchez's cell phone on December 19, 2017, and searched that phone when they extracted its data on November 5, 2018. The district court concluded that, pursuant to Rule 5-211(C), the warrant did not authorize the search because the search was conducted eleven months after the police obtained the warrant. Accordingly, the district court concluded that the search of the cell phone was warrantless and granted Sanchez's motion to suppress. In this interlocutory appeal, the State seeks review of the district court's order suppressing the evidence extracted from the cell phone.
{11} On appeal, there is no dispute that a warrant was required to search Sanchez's phone. See Riley v. California , 573 U.S. 373, 401, 134 S.Ct. 2473, 189 L.Ed.2d 430 (2014) (). Additionally, Sanchez did not challenge the seizure of his phone pursuant to the Santa Clara Pueblo warrant or argue that the first warrant to search his phone was invalid for any reason when issued on December 19, 2017. Instead, the only issue before us in the State's interlocutory challenge to the district court's order is whether the delay in extracting the data from the phone violated the ten-day time limit of Rule 5-211(C).
{12} Review of suppression rulings generally State v. Paananen , 2015-NMSC-031, ¶ 10, 357 P.3d 958 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). In this case, the issues do not turn on factual disputes but instead on the interpretation of Rule 5-211(C), a legal question that we review de novo. See Allen v. LeMaster , 2012-NMSC-001, ¶ 11, 267 P.3d 806. "When construing our procedural rules, we use the same rules of construction applicable to the interpretation of statutes." Id. "We begin by examining the plain language of the rule as well as the context in which it was promulgated, including the history of the rule and the object and purpose." State v. Aslin , 2020-NMSC-004, ¶ 9, 457 P.3d 249 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted).
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