U.S. v. Trayer, 89-3050

• Decision Date: 27 March 1990
• Docket Number: No. 89-3050,89-3050
• Citation: U.S. v. Trayer, 898 F.2d 805, 283 U.S. App. D.C. 208 (D.C. Cir. 1990)
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Walter E. TRAYER, Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — District of Columbia Circuit

Page 805

898 F.2d 805

283 U.S.App.D.C. 208

UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Walter E. TRAYER, Appellant.

No. 89-3050.

United States Court of Appeals District of Columbia Circuit.

Argued March 5, 1990.

Decided March 27, 1990.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (Criminal No. 88-00323-01).

Michael S. Lieberman, Boston, Mass., (appointed by this court), for appellant.

Richard L. Edwards, Asst. U.S. Atty., with whom Jay B. Stephens, U.S. Atty., John R. Fisher, Helen M. Bollwerk and Theodore A. Shmanda, Asst. U.S. Attys., Washington, D.C., were on the brief, for appellee.

Before GINSBURG, SILBERMAN and SENTELLE, Circuit Judges.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge SILBERMAN.

SILBERMAN, Circuit Judge:

Appellant Walter E. Trayer challenges an order of the district court denying his motion to suppress evidence (cocaine) that police found in a nonconsensual search of his train roomette. The officers conducted the search because of information gathered from a computerized Amtrak reservation list and the results of a dog sniff of the exterior of Trayer's roomette. On the facts found by the district court, we agree that the officers had probable cause to believe that appellant's roomette contained illicit drugs. We therefore affirm appellant's conviction.

I.

On August 2, 1988, Officer Sauve of the Amtrak Police Department in Washington, D.C. learned, by examination of Amtrak records, that a passenger identified as W. Trayer would be traveling round trip from Delray Beach, Florida to Philadelphia, stopping in Washington's Union Station for 20 minutes the next day. The train manifest recorded that on the evening of August 1, Trayer reserved a first class private roomette for his trip to Philadelphia but only a coach seat for his return on August 25, that he had purchased his ticket approximately 30 minutes before the train's scheduled departure time on August 2, that he had paid the $327 fare in cash, and that he had provided a call-back telephone number that, when called by Officer Sauve, was not in service.

Based on this information, Officer Sauve decided to interview Trayer when his train arrived at Union Station. At Sauve's request, the Washington Metropolitan Police Department sent Detectives Buss, Cassidy, Dione, and a trained narcotics dog, Ben II to assist him with his investigation. Ben II is a Golden Retriever and 1987 graduate of the Metropolitan Police Department's K-9 Division training school. Officer Buss attended the school with Ben II and became his handler. By August 3, 1988, the two had investigated suspected contraband approximately sixty times.

Amtrak changed the train's engines at Union Station on the morning in question, causing a temporary electric power shut down while the train was in the station. So, after boarding the train, Officer Sauve used a flashlight to illuminate the numbers on the roomette doors until he found Trayer's roomette, # 7, approximately 15 feet down the corridor from the vestibule where the officers had embarked. Sauve then returned to the vestibule and asked Officer Buss to have the dog sniff the rooms in the corridor. After passing several roomettes, Ben II froze at # 7 and pointed at the air vent at the bottom of the door. Officer Buss and Ben II then returned to the vestibule, and Officer Buss told Officer Sauve that the dog had alerted to drugs in roomette # 7. Officer Buss admitted that when he escorted the dog down the corridor he was aware that roomette # 7 was under suspicion.

Officer Sauve knocked on Trayer's door, and when Trayer answered, told him that a narcotics dog had indicated the presence of drugs inside his roomette. When Sauve asked for consent to search the roomette, Trayer offered him his suit bag but did not consent to a search of the room. Sauve nevertheless searched the room, finding a leather briefcase secreted behind a collapsible seat. Trayer also refused to consent to a search of the briefcase, saying that he did not have the combination to its lock. While Sauve continued to search the roomette, another agent took the briefcase to the platform and asked Officer Buss to have Ben II sniff it. The dog responded by prancing around the briefcase and biting at its corners. The officers then arrested Trayer and took him and his luggage to the police office at the train station. After they obtained a warrant to search the briefcase, the officers opened it and found one kilogram of cocaine.

At the suppression hearing, Trayer called Thomas A. Knott, who, from 1970 to 1986, had been a trainer for the Baltimore City K-9 Corps in charge of training dogs to detect narcotics. Knott testified that, in order to prevent a handler from conveying knowledge to his dog--even unconsciously--the handler should not know where the target of the search is. He also opined that after the dog alerted outside the roomette, the proper procedure would have been to bring the dog inside the roomette to define the target in order to show whether the dog alerted to a residue of drugs that might have been in the roomette. On cross-examination, however, Knott testified that he had not heard anything to indicate that Officer Buss suggested to Ben II that there was cocaine in roomette # 7.

The district court denied Trayer's motion to suppress. United States v. Trayer, 701 F.Supp. 250 (D.D.C.1988). The court held that, considering the reduced expectation of privacy that a passenger has in a train roomette, the exigencies of the situation, ¹ and the government's interest in thwarting drug traffic, a search was permissible if the officers had reasonable suspicion to believe the roomette contained drugs. The court also held, however, that the officers had probable cause to search the room. The district court rejected appellant's challenges to the manner in which the search was conducted. Addressing appellant's claim that the dog should have been brought into the compartment to define the scope of the search, the court held that since the facts before it made clear that the officers had probable cause to search the entire compartment, the failure to have the dog sniff within the compartment was irrelevant.. As for the claim that it was inappropriate for Buss to know which roomette was under suspicion, the court noted that appellant's expert witness had conceded that there was no evidence that Buss had actually conveyed any inappropriate cues to Ben II and refused to adopt the expert's opinion as to the...