U.S. v. Santa
| Decision Date | 02 June 1999 |
| Docket Number | Docket No. 98-1566 |
| Citation | 180 F.3d 20 |
| Parties | UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Anthony SANTA, Defendant Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit |
COLLEEN P. CASSIDY, The Legal Aid Society, Federal Defender Division, Appeals Bureau, New York, NY, for defendant-appellant.
WILLIAM M. SCHRIER, Assistant United States Attorney, New York, N.Y. (Mary Jo White, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Cathy Seibel, Assistant United States Attorney, New York, NY, on the brief), for appellee.
Before: WINTER, Chief Judge, NEWMAN and SOTOMAYOR, Circuit Judges.
Judge Newman concurs by separate opinion.
Defendant-appellant Anthony Santa appeals from a judgment of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Parker, J.) convicting him, following a bench trial, of violating 21 U.S.C. §§ 812, 841(a)(1) and 841(b)(1)(C) by possessing crack cocaine with intent to distribute. In April 1997, officers of the Spring Valley Police Department arrested Santa and seized from his possession several dozen plastic bags containing crack cocaine. The officers made this arrest based on a police computer record, which indicated that Santa was wanted on an outstanding warrant. Unbeknownst to the arresting officers, however, the warrant had been vacated seventeen months earlier, but remained in the statewide police computer network because court employees failed to notify the proper law enforcement agency to remove it.
Prior to trial, Santa moved to suppress the drug evidence, arguing that it was the product of an unlawful arrest on an invalid warrant. The district court denied Santa's motion on the basis of the Supreme Court's decision in Arizona v. Evans, 514 U.S. 1, 115 S.Ct. 1185, 131 L.Ed.2d 34 (1995), which established an exception to the exclusionary rule where law enforcement officers rely on police records that contain erroneous information resulting from clerical errors of court employees. Santa contends on appeal that the Evans exception does not apply under the circumstances of this case. We disagree and affirm the judgment of the district court.
Spring Valley, New York is a village located entirely within the Town of Ramapo. The Spring Valley Police Department and the Ramapo Police Department are both authorized to make arrests in Spring Valley. The two departments are, however, separate agencies that operate independently of one another. The Spring Valley Village Court ("Village Court") has jurisdiction over cases arising in Spring Valley.
On August 13, 1995, Ramapo Town Police Officer John Lynch arrested Santa in Spring Valley in connection with an alleged theft and assault that occurred in Ramapo. Police subsequently searched a vehicle involved in the crime and recovered a jacket containing eight vials of a white powder that field-tested positive for cocaine. Officer Lynch transported Santa to the Ramapo Police Department and prepared a criminal complaint charging Santa with petty larceny, assault, criminal impersonation and criminal possession of a controlled substance. These charges were filed on the same day in the local criminal court in Ramapo. On October 5, 1995, however, at the direction of the Assistant District Attorney for Rockland County, Officer Lynch refiled the criminal impersonation and criminal possession charges in the Spring Valley Village Court.
On October 23, 1995, the Village Court, for reasons not apparent from the record, issued a warrant directing the Ramapo Police Department to arrest Santa on the criminal impersonation and possession charges. 1 Three days later, the Ramapo Town Police, as the complaining law enforcement agency with respect to these charges, entered the warrant in the New York State Police Information Network ("NYSPIN"), a statewide computer database that contains outstanding warrants and other information relevant to law enforcement. Two weeks later, on November 8, 1995, the Village Court issued a request to vacate the warrant. The Village Court, however, misdirected the request to the Spring Valley rather than the Ramapo Police Department.
Typically, when the Spring Valley Police Department receives a request to vacate a warrant, the desk officer or dispatcher on duty first determines whether the Spring Valley Police Department is the complaining agency. If it is, the desk officer or dispatcher promptly removes the warrant from NYSPIN and then forwards the vacatur request to the records officers, who delete the warrant from the internal stationhouse computer. The internal computer contains only those warrants that belong to the Spring Valley Police Department, i.e., warrants as to which the Spring Valley Police Department is the complaining agency.
Once every few months, as in this case, the Spring Valley Police Department mistakenly receives a request to vacate a warrant belonging to another police department. Only the complaining law enforcement agency that initially enters a warrant in NYSPIN is authorized to remove it. 2 Thus, when the Spring Valley Police Department receives a misdirected vacatur request:
[i]t is [the] Department's practice to return the request to the Village Court where it can be directed to the complaining party. [The Department] sometimes also send[s] or fax[es] a copy directly to the complaining party as a courtesy.
The Village Court and the Spring Valley Police Department are located across the hall from each other in the same building, and warrants and warrant vacatur requests are typically hand-delivered.
The record contains no direct evidence of whether the Spring Valley Police Department followed its practice in this case. The record is clear, however, that the Village Court never sent its request to vacate Santa's warrant to the Ramapo Police Department. In April 1996, the Ramapo Town Police, unaware that the Village Court had vacated the warrant, lodged the warrant at the Otisville Correctional Facility ("Otisville"), where Santa was incarcerated for an unrelated parole violation. On April 10, 1996, Santa wrote to the Ramapo Justice Court seeking a "final disposition" of the criminal impersonation and possession charges that had been filed in connection with his August 8, 1995 arrest. The Ramapo Justice Court made a notation on Santa's letter that the charges had been dismissed, and returned the letter to Santa at Otisville. Otisville then contacted Maylin Ward, Senior Clerk of the Court, who confirmed that the case against Santa had been dismissed on November 8, 1995. On April 18, 1996, Otisville returned the warrant to the Village Court along with a letter noting that the case had been dismissed. The Village Court apparently took no further action with respect to the warrant.
On April 9, 1997, after Santa was released from Otisville, Spring Valley Police Officer Jorge Marciano observed Santa at the Spring Valley bus station, a "known ... drug trafficking location." Officer Marciano recognized Santa, but did not know his name. Marciano was aware, however, that Santa had been the subject of previous criminal investigations. Marciano approached another officer on the scene, Officer Gibson, who knew Santa by name. Gibson radioed the dispatcher at the Spring Valley Police Station and requested a "wanted person check" on Santa. The dispatcher checked NYSPIN and learned that Santa was wanted by the Ramapo Town Police on an outstanding arrest warrant. The dispatcher then contacted the Ramapo Police Department, which verified that according to its records, the warrant was still active. The Ramapo Police Department also faxed a copy of the warrant to the Spring Valley Police Department. The dispatcher radioed this information back to Officers Marciano and Gibson at the bus station.
Officer Marciano later observed Santa leaving the bus station in a taxi. Marciano stopped the taxi and arrested Santa on the purportedly outstanding warrant. Incident to Santa's arrest, the officers searched Santa and seized approximately fifty clear plastic bags, approximately thirty of which contained a white, "chunky" substance that appeared and was later confirmed to be crack cocaine. The officers then took Santa to the Spring Valley Police Station to process his arrest. After he was arrested and the drug evidence seized, Santa informed the officers that his arrest warrant had been vacated, but the court was closed and the officers were unable to verify the status of the warrant.
Santa was indicted on September 18, 1997, in federal court on one count of possessing approximately 2.95 grams of crack cocaine with intent to distribute, in violation of 21 U.S.C. §§ 812, 841(a)(1) and 814(b)(1)(C). Prior to trial, Santa moved to suppress the drug evidence and dismiss the indictment. Santa claimed that the arrest and search violated his rights under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution because the warrant that provided the basis for the arrest had been vacated seventeen months earlier. Santa argued that the evidence seized incident to his arrest should therefore be suppressed as "fruit of the poisonous tree." In response, the government argued that even though the warrant had been vacated, the arresting officers acted in objectively reasonable reliance on the NYSPIN record. Because court employees were responsible for the failure to remove Santa's warrant from NYSPIN, the government contended, suppression was unwarranted under Evans, 514 U.S. at 14-16, in which the Supreme Court announced an exception to the exclusionary rule where police officers act in objectively reasonable reliance on erroneous police records resulting from "clerical errors of court employees."
The district court referred Santa's motion to Magistrate Judge George A. Yanthis, who held an evidentiary hearing on December 17, 1997, at which Officers Marciano...
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