U.S. v. Strahan

• Decision Date: 23 March 1982
• Docket Number: No. 81-1440,81-1440
• Citation: 674 F.2d 96
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Richard STRAHAN, Defendant, Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

Page 96

674 F.2d 96

UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Richard STRAHAN, Defendant, Appellant.

No. 81-1440.

United States Court of Appeals First Circuit.

Argued Feb. 10, 1982.

Decided March 23, 1982.

Paul P. Hayes, Jr., Quincy, Mass., by appointment of the Court, with whom Hayes & Hayes, Quincy, Mass., was on brief, for defendant, appellant.

Robert B. Collings, Asst. U. S. Atty., Chief, Crim. Div., Boston, Mass., with whom William F. Weld, U. S. Atty., Boston, Mass., was on brief, for appellee.

Before ALDRICH and BREYER, Circuit Judges, and TORRUELLA, ^* District Judge.

BREYER, Circuit Judge.

Appellant Richard Strahan was convicted of various crimes connected with fraudulent school loan applications. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 1014 (false statements to a bank), 1341 (mail fraud) and 1342 (use of a false name in a mail fraud scheme). He attacks his convictions on the ground that the principal evidence against him-documents discovered in an automobile "inventory" search-was improperly obtained. The court below denied Strahan's motion to suppress, holding that Strahan lacked standing to challenge the evidence under Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U.S. 128, 99 S.Ct. 421, 58 L.Ed.2d 387 (1978), and that, in any event, the evidence was legally obtained under South Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U.S. 364, 96 S.Ct. 3092, 49 L.Ed.2d 1000 (1976). We affirm Strahan's convictions.

I

On the morning of October 21, 1980, while driving a two-tone brown Volkswagen van borrowed from a man named John Meyers, appellant Strahan was involved in a car accident near the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts. Strahan apparently left the scene hastily, and a report of a "hit and run" accident, which included a description of the van, went out over the police radio.

Officer Sullivan of the campus police heard the report, spotted the van almost immediately, and managed to stop it on a road near the university. Strahan was the driver and the only occupant. He showed Sullivan his driver's license, but he did not have a vehicle registration for the van. He produced what appeared to be a "title" to the van in the name of "Meyers," but the back of the "title" document suggested that the van had been sold to someone else. Strahan insisted that Meyers had lent him the van, but was apparently unable to tell Sullivan where Meyers lived or what his phone number was. To make matters worse, during the exchange between Sullivan and Strahan, Sullivan's partner discovered through a radio check that there was a state police warrant out of Monson, Massachusetts, for Strahan's arrest and that Illinois had no record of the number on the van's Illinois license plates.

Sullivan arrested Strahan on the outstanding warrant and took him to the campus police station. At the station, Strahan was informed of his Miranda rights and placed in the custody of other officers. Sullivan immediately returned to the van, which had been left with his partner, and proceeded to search it. According to his unchallenged testimony, the search was aimed at inventorying the van's contents before it was towed away to a private garage and at determining who owned the van, which, at that point, the police had good reason to believe was stolen.

When Sullivan reached the van, he found a variety of papers scattered about on the van's floor. Although he noticed among the papers a second Massachusetts driver's license and several checkbooks in Strahan's name, Sullivan did not examine any of the papers closely at this time. Instead, he simply gathered up all the documents, placed them in a plastic bag and brought them to the police station. The van was then towed.

At the station, and still within hours of Strahan's arrest, Sullivan prepared a "preliminary" inventory report of the items discovered in the search. The report consists of a single page of handwritten entries on a standard police form. At about 11:30 that morning, Sullivan gave the documents to Detective Stewart, another campus police officer, who put them into an "evidence locker" without examining the documents himself.

Strahan was booked and charged with three crimes-using a motor vehicle without authority, operating an unregistered and uninsured motor vehicle, and leaving the scene of an accident. After the booking, Sullivan returned to the campus police station. There, at about 3:00 p. m., he examined the documents once again and prepared a considerably more detailed "final" inventory list. Before making this final inventory, Sullivan did not suspect Strahan of any crimes other than those arising out of his use of the impounded van. However, neither did Sullivan know at that point who owned the van. As his testimony makes clear, he hoped by examining the documents to find an answer to that question.

In the course of the more detailed "final" inventory, which resulted in a lengthy handwritten list of documents on several pages of the same standard police form used to prepare the "preliminary" inventory, Sullivan came to suspect the documents implicated Strahan in some sort of misconduct unrelated to the van. Sullivan completed the inventory and once again turned the documents over to Detective Stewart. Stewart then examined the documents himself. He too came to believe the documents implicated Strahan, as in fact they did, in criminally fraudulent conduct. ¹

After having been released on his own recognizance, Strahan returned to the campus police station at about 5:45 in the afternoon. He was accompanied by John Meyers, who claimed to have lent Strahan the van as Strahan had maintained all along. Meyers had a valid Illinois registration for the van, and Detective Stewart therefore released the vehicle to him. Stewart then apparently sought to talk to Strahan about the documents that had been found in the van, but Strahan refused. Strahan asked for the documents back, but Stewart likewise refused.

The next day Stewart spoke to an official in the United States Department of Education. The conversation apparently strengthened his suspicions about the documents, and sometime during the next several days he photocopied all of them. The copies were made available to federal authorities and eventually resulted in appellant's conviction. The originals were returned to appellant on November 3, less than two weeks after they were first seized.

II

At the outset, it is important to understand precisely what it is about the police conduct in this case that appellant challenges. Strahan concedes that his arrest on October 21 was proper. He also concedes that after his arrest, it was proper to take the van into police custody and to have it towed to a private garage. And, under South Dakota v. Opperman, supra, he concedes that at least the initial search and the "preliminary" inventory of the contents of the van were also proper. He does not attack the regularity of the procedures followed in that initial search and does not claim the "inventory" was in any way a pretext used to "conceal( ) an investigatory police motive." Id., 428 U.S. at 376, 96 S.Ct. at 3100.

What Strahan does challenge is everything after the "preliminary" inventory. Opperman, in his view, does not support the close and detailed examination (first by Officer Sullivan in preparing his "final" inventory report, and then by Detective Stewart later that same afternoon) of the documents taken from the van. Opperman may justify the preliminary search of the van. It may even justify the collection, cataloging and storage for safekeeping of the van's contents while the van was in police custody. But, Strahan argues, Opperman does not sanction the detailed scrutiny of papers, checkbooks and documents found in the course of a routine inventory. And, it certainly does not support the retention and photocopying of the documents in the face of a specific demand for their return. Strahan recognizes that, if the police had inadvertently come across evidence of criminal conduct in the course of an otherwise legitimate inventory search, then the "plain view" doctrine would justify the seizure of that evidence, see Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U.S. 443, 91 S.Ct. 2022, 29 L.Ed.2d 564 (1971). But he argues that the "plain view" doctrine applies only if it is "immediately apparent to the police that they have evidence before them," id. at 466, 91 S.Ct. at 2038. He claims that it does not apply where it is not apparent to the police that they have evidence until after an otherwise unjustified exploratory search, or detailed examination of what later turns out to be incriminating evidence. See 2 LaFave, Search and Seizure § 7.5(b) at 593-95 (1978).

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