U.S. v. Valencia Amezcua

• Decision Date: 22 January 2002
• Docket Number: No. 00-30365.,00-30365.
• Citation: 278 F.3d 901
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Javier VALENCIA-AMEZCUA, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

278 F.3d 901

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Javier VALENCIA-AMEZCUA, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 00-30365.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Argued and Submitted November 7, 2001.

Filed January 22, 2002.

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William S. Labahn, Eugene, OR, for defendant-appellant.

Pamela Holsinger, Assistant United States Attorney, Portland, OR, for plaintiff-appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Oregon, Anna J. Brown, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CR-00-82-04-BR.

Before: HUG, T.G. NELSON and GOULD, Circuit Judges.

OPINION

GOULD, Circuit Judge.

Javier Valencia-Amezcua appeals his conviction for manufacturing more than 500 grams of methamphetamine, in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1) and 841(b)(1)(A)(viii). He challenges the denial of his pre-trial motions to suppress evidence and the admission of expert testimony at trial. He also claims that sufficient evidence did not exist to support his conviction and that his sentence should be reversed in light of Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466, 120 S.Ct. 2348, 147 L.Ed.2d 435 (2000). We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291, and we affirm.

I

On January 24, 2000, two officers with the Tillamook, Oregon narcotics team, Sheriff Deputy Mark Groshong and Detective Neil Martin, observed suspected drug offender Juan Valencia-Rodriguez ("Valencia-Rodriguez") drive to a car wash and hand an envelope to a man who was under investigation for narcotics violations. Later that day, other Tillamook police officers conducted a traffic stop of this other man, and a search revealed that the envelope transferred by Valencia-Rodriguez contained methamphetamine. Meanwhile, Officers Groshong and Martin had stopped Valencia-Rodriguez after he left the car wash, and had questioned him. When asked what he was doing at the car wash, he said that he went there to vacuum his car. Still later that day, and understandably in light of the contraband found in the envelope given by Valencia-Rodriguez to the other man, Officer Groshong went to Valencia-Rodriguez's house where Valencia-Rodriguez told Officer Groshong that other adults were present and gave Groshong verbal permission to enter the house. Valencia-Rodriguez then led Groshong to an upstairs bedroom. There, the appellant, Javier Valencia-Amezcua ("Amezcua")¹ was found sitting on a bed with two other men. A television set in this room was turned off. Groshong asked the three men to go to the front porch. On the porch, Groshong, Valencia-Rodriguez and his wife, Rosa, and the three men from the upstairs bedroom waited for other narcotics officers to arrive. After these other officers arrived, they obtained a written consent to search the house from both Javier and Rosa Valencia-Rodriguez. The officers then proceeded to conduct a search.

In a first floor bathroom, the officers found a man sitting in the dark, on the edge of the bathtub. A search of this bathroom revealed several bags of methamphetamine and a set of electronic scales. In a bedroom on the first floor, the officers found electric fryers, large plastic garbage cans and several cans of denatured alcohol, a substance used to make methamphetamine. In the upstairs bedroom where Amezcua and the other two men were found, the officers found a hidden door covered in wall paneling. The door was visible because it was partly open. This disguised door was blocked by the bed on which Amezcua and the two other men were sitting when first discovered by the officers. The officers moved the bed away from the wall and opened the hidden door. Lo and behold, they discovered a secret room complete with a five foot tall metal gas cylinder, several plastic tubs, and a large plastic storage container full of a suspicious white ground powder. Bolstered by the incriminating fruits of their initial search, the officers arrested Amezcua, the Valencia-Rodriguezes and the other men in the house on drug charges. The next day, state police officers conducted a more thorough search of the residence and surrounding premises with agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency ("DEA").

After he was arrested, Amezcua was taken to the local jail. There, his clothing was removed for inventory and chemical analysis. Cashier receipts for rubber gloves, multiple gallons of denatured alcohol, paper towels and ziploc bags were found inside his coat pocket and inventoried. Household goods of the quantity and type indicated on these receipts are commonly used to support methamphetamine lab operations. These receipts came from stores located near the residence listed on Amezcua's Mexican consulate and Oregon state identification cards, which had been found in his wallet. The receipts indicated that the items had been purchased two days before the search of the Valencia-Rodriguez house.

On February 10, 2000, Amezcua was charged with manufacturing methamphetamine (Count 1) and possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute (Count 2), both counts in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1). Amezcua filed a motion to suppress the results of the chemical test of his clothes as evidence seized as a result of an illegal arrest. The district court granted the motion, finding that the officers lacked probable cause to arrest Amezcua on January 24. Amezcua later filed motions to suppress the ID cards and the coat pocket receipts. The district court denied these motions, holding that this evidence would have been inevitably discovered by agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service ("INS"). The district court held that, if the officers had not arrested Amezcua on drug charges, they inevitably would have called INS agents to investigate Amezcua's immigration status. The district court concluded that the INS agents would have detained Amezcua on immigration violations, conducted a search of his wallet and coat pockets in the routine course of investigation, and found the challenged ID cards and receipts.

At trial the government called Juan and Rosa Valencia-Rodriguez to testify. Both alleged that Amezcua had taken part in methamphetamine production at their house on January 24 and that he had been to their house on prior occasions. The government also proffered the expert testimony of a DEA agent who testified on the structure and operations of large-scale, clandestine methamphetamine labs. Throughout the trial, Amezcua claimed that he had been taken by a friend to the Valencia-Rodriguez house for the first time on January 24 and that he was not involved in drug production activity at the house. The jury returned a verdict convicting Amezcua of Count 1, manufacturing methamphetamine, and acquitting him of Count 2, possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine. Amezcua was sentenced to 151 months of imprisonment followed by a five-year period of supervised release.

Amezcua appeals, challenging, inter alia, the admission at trial of the coat pocket receipts and his ID cards as fruit of the poisonous tree following an illegal arrest. He asks us to hold that the district court erred in applying the inevitable discovery doctrine. Because we conclude that Amezcua's arrest was not illegal, we affirm the admissibility of the receipts and ID cards on a ground different than that relied upon by the district court.²

II

A. Probable Cause for Arrest

The dispositive issue for us is whether the narcotics officers made a legal arrest of Amezcua, after finding him in the upstairs bedroom of Valencia-Rodriguez's house. Whether the police had probable cause to arrest Amezcua is a mixed question of law and fact, which we review de novo. United States v. Buckner, 179 F.3d 834, 837 (9th Cir.1999).

There is no doubt that police may arrest a person with out a warrant if the arrest is supported by probable cause. See United States v. Hillison, 733 F.2d 692, 697 (9th Cir.1984). Our precedent requires a conclusion that the officers had probable cause to arrest Amezcua if "under the totality of the circumstances known to the arresting officers, a prudent person would have concluded that there was a fair probability that [Amezcua] had committed a crime." United States v. Garza, 980 F.2d 546, 550 (9th Cir.1992) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted).

It is also well established that the judgments made by law enforcement officers in the heat of their battle against crime need not be assessed in the abstract; weight may be given to the experienced judgment of the officers. As we have previously made clear: "In drug investigations, the court may consider the experience and expertise of the officers involved. This experience and expertise may lead a trained narcotics officer to perceive meaning from conduct which would otherwise seem innocent to the untrained observer." Buckner, 179 F.3d at 837 (citations omitted).

These legal principles are dispositive in assessing the legality of Amezcua's arrest. Here, the narcotics officers were presented with incriminating evidence encouraging them to arrest Amezcua. The officers had the consent of Valencia-Rodriguez to search his house. Valencia-Rodriguez was a suspected drug trafficker recently observed in a suspicious transaction. During the consented-to search, Amezcua was found in a bedroom with a hidden door covered in wall paneling. Amezcua was sitting with others just in front of the door on a bed that may have been placed there to obscure the door. Behind the hidden door lay a secret room, which contained tools, equipment and supplies illicitly used to make methamphetamine.

The district court found these facts insufficient to create probable cause for the arrest of Amezcua because (1) the methamphetamine lab equipment was hidden from view; (2) no methamphetamine odor emanated prior to the commencement of the search; and (3) none of the men on the bed appeared to exercise control over the house. The district court concluded that Amezcua's mere presence in the bedroom...