U.S. v. Rheault

• Citation: 561 F.3d 55
• Decision Date: 27 March 2009
• Docket Number: No. 06-1978.,06-1978.
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Nicholas RHEAULT, Defendant, Appellant.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (1st Circuit)

561 F.3d 55

UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Nicholas RHEAULT, Defendant, Appellant.

No. 06-1978.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Heard December 4, 2007.

Decided March 27, 2009.

Edward J. Juel, for appellant.

David Hennessy, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Michael J. Sullivan, United States Attorney, was on brief, for appellee.

Before LIPEZ and HOWARD, Circuit Judges, and GELPÍ,^* District Judge.

HOWARD, Circuit Judge.

Appellant Nicholas Rheault ("Rheault") was charged with one count of conspiring to distribute ecstasy, three counts of possession of ecstacy with intent to distribute, and one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm.¹ Rheault moved to suppress the drugs and gun that formed the basis of the charges, claiming that they were discovered pursuant to a search that violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The district court denied the motion, and Rheault subsequently pled guilty to all five counts, conditioned on his right to appeal the denial of the suppression motion.² The court sentenced Rheault to 132 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Rheault appeals from the denial of the motion to suppress and his sentence. We affirm.

I. FACTUAL BACKGROUND

A. The arrest and search

The facts essential to deciding this appeal are largely not in dispute. In late 2004 Donald Whitney met on several occasions with a drug purchaser to discuss the sale of ecstasy tablets. Unbeknownst to Whitney, the buyer was an undercover agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency ("DEA"). In connection with each sale, agents saw Whitney enter a three-decker at 122-124 Middle Street in Leominster, Mass.—later determined to be Rheault's residence—and then proceed to meet the undercover agent to consummate the sale. On one occasion, Whitney mentioned that his supplier lived there. On another, agents saw Rheault circling the location in his car where the drug deal was taking place inside. Agents also observed Rheault watching a sale from a distance.

DEA agents arrested Whitney on February 1, 2005. He quickly agreed to cooperate with them. Following the agents' instructions, Whitney called Rheault several times to arrange a purchase of 200 ecstacy pills. Here the versions of events diverge slightly. At his change-of-plea hearing, Rheault denied that he agreed to this sale. The government claims to the contrary, and further states that Rheault told Whitney that he could not deliver the drugs until the following morning. Regardless, the agents did not want to delay Rheault's arrest. Accordingly, after procuring an arrest warrant they set off to apprehend him, forewarned by Whitney that Rheault carried a nine-millimeter handgun with a laser sight.

Upon their arrival at 122-124 Middle Street, agents tried to lure Rheault outside by having his car towed. That proved ineffective, so agents entered the building by a back stairway to Rheault's second-floor apartment. One of Rheault's two roommates, Alex Archambault, opened the apartment door and was greeted by agents with drawn weapons. After restraining Archambault, determining that Rheault was not in the apartment, and hearing sounds from above, the agents asked for and received Archambault's key to a door that led to a different stairway. Agents went up to a third-floor landing, where they found Rheault attempting to hide behind a bookcase and took him into custody. In a disabled washing machine³ about seven feet from Rheault's hiding spot, agents discovered a nine-millimeter pistol with a laser sight, a bag containing 44 ecstasy pills, ecstasy in powder form, cocaine and LSD.

B. The apartment

Because the layout of 122-124 Middle Street is crucial to our inquiry, we recount the physical characteristics of the premises, based on testimony presented at the two-day suppression hearing.

As previously noted, 122-124 Middle Street was a three-story building. There was one apartment on each floor, and Rheault lived in the second-floor apartment. The front door of the building— which was left unlocked—opened to a landing that contained the mailboxes for the three apartments. From this landing, two doors were accessible. One door was to the apartment on the first floor; the other led to an interior stairway shared by the second and third floor apartments ("the front stairway"). This interior stairway door had a lock accessed from the outside by a skeleton key⁴, and a deadbolt lock that could only be accessed from the inside, in other words, only by tenants or other people already within the apartments on the second or third floor. There was conflicting testimony as to whether this deadbolt was usually locked. The landlord testified that the deadbolt was not supposed to be locked, while Rheault's roommate, Archambault, testified that it was almost always locked.⁵ Both Rheault's apprehension and the discovery of the gun and drugs in the washing machine took place on the third floor landing of the front stairway.

The more accessible stairway was in the rear of the building. It served all three apartments and was not locked from the street. While tenants were permitted to use both stairways, the testimony suggested that tenants on the second and third floor relied almost exclusively on the rear stairway, as did delivery persons and guests. The two stairways were not connected. Thus, to get from the back stairway to the front stairway, it was necessary to go through the second or third-floor apartment, as the officers did when they sought to arrest Rheault.

The landlord testified that he occasionally used the front stairway to allow, for example, cable television personnel access to the basement. He also testified that tenants were not permitted to use the front stairway and landings for storage, as such use would create a fire hazard.⁶ Instead, each apartment had its own storage area, which was large enough for a washing machine or bookshelf. On occasion, he had asked tenants to remove stored items from the front stairway landings.

The landlord testified that, although he had asked the third-floor tenants to remove the washing machine from the third-floor landing about a month prior to Rheault's arrest, they had not done so. Moreover, additional items had been placed there, including tables, chairs, a damaged couch, an unhinged door and a desk. True to the maxim that "one man's trash is another's treasure," Archambault testified that he took the desk from the third-floor landing down to his own room in the second floor apartment. Archambault also testified that he understood that the front stairway and landings were to be kept clear. The third-floor landing area, and the washing machine that was located in it, are the focus of our inquiry.

II. LEGAL DISCUSSION

A. The motion to suppress

Rheault filed a motion to suppress the gun, and later amended the motion to include the drugs. The gist of the motion was that the arresting officers had no legitimate basis to search the area where they arrested Rheault.⁷ The government's objection did not reach Rheault's substantive points, but instead argued that the evidentiary haul was lawful because Rheault had no legitimate expectation of privacy in the contraband's location.⁸ In a lengthy oral ruling, the district court denied Rheault's motion.

We review the district court's denial of a motion to suppress for clear error as to questions of fact; we apply de novo review as to the application of law to those facts and to conclusions of law. United States v. Boskic, 545 F.3d 69, 77 (1st Cir. 2008); Vilches-Navarrete, 523 F.3d at 12. Rheault has the burden of establishing that "his own Fourth Amendment rights were violated by the challenged search or seizure." Rakas 439 U.S. at 131 n. 1, 99 S.Ct. 421; United States v. Mancini, 8 F.3d 104, 107 (1st Cir.1993). His threshold burden is to prove that he had a legitimate expectation of privacy in "the place searched or the thing seized." United States v. Thornley, 707 F.2d 622, 624 (1st Cir.1983) (citing United States v. Hershenow, 680 F.2d 847, 855 (1st Cir.1982)). The Supreme Court has set out a two-part test for analyzing the expectation question: first, whether the movant has exhibited an actual, subjective, expectation of privacy; and second, whether such subjective expectation is one that society is prepared to recognize as objectively reasonable. Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 740, 99 S.Ct. 2577, 61 L.Ed.2d 220 (1979).

The government argues that Rheault satisfied neither part of the test. As to Rheault's subjective expectation of privacy, a matter on which the district court did not rule, we disagree with the government. The government premises its argument on the fact that Rheault failed to testify that he had an actual expectation of privacy in the third-floor landing or washing machine. While this is an accurate accounting of Rheault's hearing testimony, we do not attach the same legal significance to the failure that the government does. The relevant question is whether Rheault was "seek[ing] to preserve as private" the evidence at issue. Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967). We have little doubt that Rheault satisfies this criterion. Indeed, we have held that a defendant meets the subjective expectation test where his "purpose" in placing a box of contraband documents in a particular location "was to hide them and their incriminating contents after [a] grand jury subpoena issued." Thornley, 707 F.2d at 624; see also Hershenow, 680 F.2d at 855 (defendant's subjective expectation of privacy demonstrated because "his purpose in taking the box to [a hiding place] shortly after the search warrant was executed at his office was to hide it and its incriminating contents."). We are satisfied that Rheualt's decision to place the gun and drugs inside the washing machine on the third-floor landing sufficiently evidences an intent to hide them, and thus demonstrates a subjective expectation...