United States v. Critten
| Decision Date | 20 September 2021 |
| Docket Number | 20-3703 |
| Parties | United States of America, Appellee, v. Thomas Critten, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit |
UNPUBLISHED OPINION
SUMMARY ORDER
RULINGS BY SUMMARY ORDER DO NOT HAVE PRECEDENTIAL EFFECT. CITATION TO A SUMMARY ORDER FILED ON OR AFTER JANUARY 1, 2007, IS PERMITTED AND IS GOVERNED BY FEDERAL RULE OF APPELLATE PROCEDURE 32.1 AND THIS COURT'S LOCAL RULE 32.1.1. WHEN CITING A SUMMARY ORDER IN A DOCUMENT FILED WITH THIS COURT, A PARTY MUST CITE EITHER THE FEDERAL APPENDIX OR AN ELECTRONIC DATABASE (WITH THE NOTATION "SUMMARY ORDER"). A PARTY CITING TO A SUMMARY ORDER MUST SERVE A COPY OF IT ON ANY PARTY NOT REPRESENTED BY COUNSEL.
At a stated term of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, held at the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, 40 Foley Square, in the City of New York, on the 20th day of September, two thousand twenty-one.
Appeal from a judgment of the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York (Suddaby, C.J.).
FOR APPELLANT: MELISSA A. TUOHEY, Assistant Federal Public Defender, for Lisa A. Peebles, Federal Public Defender for the Northern District of New York, Syracuse, NY.
FOR APPELLEE: PAUL D. SILVER, Assistant United States Attorney for Antoinette T. Bacon, Acting United States Attorney for the Northern District of New York, Albany, NY.
PRESENT: DENNIS JACOBS, SUSAN L. CARNEY, RICHARD J. SULLIVAN Circuit Judges.
UPON DUE CONSIDERATION, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED, AND DECREED that the judgment entered on October 21 2020, is AFFIRMED.
Defendant-Appellant Thomas Critten appeals from the judgment entered following his guilty plea to one count of possession with intent to distribute cocaine base, see 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1), (b)(1)(B), having preserved his challenge to the district court's denial of his motion to suppress physical evidence. We assume the parties' familiarity with the underlying facts, procedural history, and arguments on appeal, to which we refer only as necessary to explain our decision to affirm.
Critten argues on appeal that the district court should have suppressed evidence obtained following the traffic stop that resulted in his 2018 arrest in Massena, New York. He cites two reasons in support. First, Critten asserts that the stop was extended beyond the time required to complete the mission of addressing the traffic violation, and that the extension was unlawful because the officers did not have reasonable suspicion that he was engaged in criminal activity. Second he submits that the search of his person was unlawful because it took place despite the absence of reasonable suspicion that he was armed and dangerous, and without probable cause for believing that he had committed false personation, the crime with which he was soon after charged.
Critten's arguments depend almost entirely on his challenge to the credibility of Detective Arthur Shattuck of the St. Lawrence County Drug Task Force ("Task Force"), who participated in the arrest. Several months after the traffic stop, Shattuck testified during an evidentiary hearing on the motion to suppress. Critten emphasizes in particular the discrepancy he perceives between Shattuck's testimony that the stop was conducted in part based on two tips Shattuck received and the undisputed fact that the contemporaneous police reports make no reference to any such tips.
On review of a motion to suppress, we examine the district court's findings of fact for clear error, affording particularly strong deference to its credibility determinations. United States v. Williams, 943 F.3d 606, 610 (2d Cir. 2019). The Supreme Court has instructed that "when a trial judge's finding is based on his decision to credit the testimony of one of two or more witnesses, each of whom has told a coherent and facially plausible story that is not contradicted by extrinsic evidence, that finding, if not internally inconsistent, can virtually never be clear error." Anderson v. Bessemer City, 470 U.S. 564, 575 (1985).
Shattuck testified that he and other officers on the Task Force would sometimes sit at bus stops in areas like Massena, known as a destination for drug trafficking, and "look[] for people getting off the bus from one of our source cities," such as Syracuse and Jersey City, with little or no luggage. App. 96. The lack of luggage is suspicious, he explained, because Massena is the end of the bus line, so those disembarking there would generally be staying "at least overnight." App. 97. On the morning of Critten's arrest, Shattuck and St. Lawrence County Deputy Sheriff John Jones, among others, waited at stops for the bus to Massena for this very reason. Shattuck recounted that he received a call around 8:30 that morning from Department of Homeland Security Special Agent Christopher Revord, who advised him that an African American man without luggage was traveling by bus from Syracuse to Massena under the name "Jamal Clay." In response, Shattuck sent one or two other Task Force officers to the first bus stop in St. Lawrence County, located in Gouverneur, to wait for the bus and then follow it to the next stop. The officers monitored the bus at each of the seven stops in the county, ending in Massena. When the bus arrived in Massena around 11:00 a.m., Critten disembarked without luggage and waited for seven or eight minutes for a taxi. Shattuck instructed Jones, who was in a marked police vehicle, to follow the taxi out of the lot, because Critten (whom Shattuck then believed to be named "Jamal Clay") was a "person of interest." App. 98.
Shattuck further testified that he and two other officers, all in unmarked vehicles, followed Jones and the taxi out of the bus lot. While he was following Jones, Shattuck received a second tip, this one from the owner of Massena Transport, which employed the taxi driver who was transporting Critten. The Massena Transport owner informed Shattuck that his driver had just picked up an African American male at the Massena bus stop and that the individual had asked to be driven to 6A Parker Avenue, an address that the owner said did not exist. Shattuck then contacted an investigator with the Massena Police Department, who advised that he, too, "did not know of" any location with the address 6A Parker Avenue. App. 106. Shattuck testified that Parker Avenue, only a few miles from the Massena bus lot, was a known area for dealing narcotics, and he said that he had done "a couple of cases on that [street] in the last few years." App. 107.
The bus driver also testified that she had been recruited by Special Agent Revord to provide tips about passengers who appeared to "come from New York all the way to Massena and they don't have any bags."[1] App. 145. She had given about "half a dozen" tips in the preceding "two or three years," App. 146-47, though she did not specifically recall giving a tip about Critten to Agent Revord.
The police reports prepared after the traffic stop do not reflect that Shattuck received tips from Revord or the owner of the taxi company. Critten focuses on those omissions as probative of his position that Shattuck's testimony was not credible and that the stop that followed-and its prolongation beyond the few minutes necessary resolve the taxi driver's traffic violation-did not comport with Fourth Amendment standards.
We identify no clear error in the district court's credibility determination. Although Shattuck's testimony regarding the two tips is not fully corroborated in the...
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