United States v. Cruz-Mercedes

• Citation: 945 F.3d 569
• Decision Date: 18 December 2019
• Docket Number: No. 19-1082,19-1082
• Parties: UNITED STATES, Appellee, v. Hector Antonio CRUZ-MERCEDES, a/k/a Pedro Colon, a/k/a Hector Cruz, Defendant, Appellant.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (1st Circuit)

945 F.3d 569

UNITED STATES, Appellee,

v.Hector Antonio CRUZ-MERCEDES, a/k/a Pedro Colon, a/k/a Hector Cruz, Defendant, Appellant.

No. 19-1082

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

December 18, 2019

John F. Palmer, Boston, MA, for appellant.

Yael T. Epstein, Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice, with whom Andrew E. Lelling, United States Attorney, Richard E. Zuckerman, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, S. Robert Lyons, Chief, Criminal Appeals & Tax Enforcement Policy Section, Stanley J. Okula, Jr., Attorney, and Alexander P. Robbins, Attorney, were on brief for appellee.

Before Lynch, Stahl, and Lipez, Circuit Judges.

STAHL, Circuit Judge.

During a law enforcement sting targeting a Stolen Identity Refund Fraud ("SIRF") scheme, Hector Antonio Cruz-Mercedes was administratively arrested for unlawful presence in the United States. Following the arrest, he was fingerprinted during a routine booking. Subsequently, the government charged him with multiple counts related to his involvement in the fraud scheme. Prior to trial, Cruz-Mercedes moved to suppress his booking fingerprints as the "fruit" of what he contended was an unlawful arrest.

The district court determined that Cruz-Mercedes was arrested without probable cause prior to his admission of unlawful presence in the United States. Nonetheless, the court admitted the fingerprint evidence under the doctrine of inevitable discovery. Following the district court's ruling, Cruz-Mercedes conditionally pleaded guilty, reserving the right to appeal the denial of his suppression motion as to the fingerprint evidence's admission.

We affirm the district court's denial of the motion to suppress, albeit on different grounds. Specifically, we find on these facts that the fingerprints were obtained for routine booking purposes. Thus, there is no basis in the record of this case for suppression of the fingerprint evidence, and accordingly we need not reach the district court's probable cause or inevitable discovery determinations.

I. Factual Background

The relevant facts are drawn primarily from the district court's findings, see United States v. Cruz-Mercedes, 379 F. Supp. 3d 24, 29-34 (D. Mass. 2019) (" Cruz-Mercedes I"),¹ "consistent with record support, with the addition of undisputed facts drawn from the suppression hearing," United States v. Hernandez-Mieses, 931 F.3d 134, 137 (1st Cir. 2019).

A. The Arrest

In March 2012, the Department of Homeland Security's Homeland Security Investigations ("HSI") office in Boston received information from a confidential informant ("CI") about a fraudulent tax return scheme. According to the CI, the implicated individuals allegedly used Social Security numbers stolen from Puerto Rican residents to file false tax returns and fraudulently obtain refund checks.² On three separate occasions between April and May 2012, the CI met with one individual involved in the scheme, Odalis Castillo-Lopez, with the goal of purchasing fraudulent refund checks. Subsequently, the CI arranged to meet with Castillo-Lopez on June 7, 2012 under the guise of purchasing approximately $160,000 in fraudulently obtained checks. Agents from HSI and the Secret Service established surveillance of the June 7 meeting with the intention of arresting Castillo-Lopez. The agents convened in a parking lot adjacent to a McDonald's in South Attleboro, Massachusetts.

Castillo-Lopez arrived at the McDonald's in a white Volkswagen Passat accompanied by an unknown passenger, later identified as Cruz-Mercedes. Alma Martinez, the sister of Cruz-Mercedes's girlfriend Betty Sanchez, was later identified as the owner of the Passat. The two men exited the vehicle and entered the McDonald's, followed closely by Special Agents John Soares and Michael Riley of HSI and Special Agent Fred Mitchell of the Secret Service. Soares and Mitchell approached Castillo-Lopez inside the McDonald's, asked him some questions, escorted him outside, arrested him, and took him to the Boston HSI office for processing. The officers seized two cell phones from Castillo-Lopez during his arrest.

At the same time, Agent Riley briefly conversed with Cruz-Mercedes inside the McDonald's, but there is no record evidence of the substance of that conversation. At some point, Riley escorted Cruz-Mercedes out of the McDonald's, and Special Agent Cronin of HSI subsequently questioned Cruz-Mercedes in the parking lot.³

Outside the McDonald's, Cruz-Mercedes identified himself to Cronin as "Pedro Colon" and displayed identification documents bearing that name, including a Massachusetts driver's license and a Social Security card. Cronin asked Cruz-Mercedes if the documents were, in fact, his. Cruz-Mercedes responded that his name was actually Hector Cruz-Mercedes, that he was a native of the Dominican Republic, and that he had unlawfully entered the United States. Cronin then formally arrested Cruz-Mercedes for unlawful presence in the United States. A search of Cruz-Mercedes incident to that arrest uncovered two cell phones, which were then seized. At no point during the interaction did law enforcement advise Cruz-Mercedes of his rights under Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966).

Cruz-Mercedes was then transported to the Boston HSI office for processing. There, Agent Cronin created an alien file for Cruz-Mercedes, who had not previously encountered immigration authorities and thus had no file. Cronin fingerprinted Cruz-Mercedes and placed the fingerprint exemplars into his alien file.

B. Investigation of the SIRF Scheme

Agents impounded the Passat and transported it to the garage in Boston's O'Neill Federal Building. There, Mitchell and Soares searched the vehicle and discovered an envelope tucked into the headliner above the driver's seat containing ten United States Treasury checks. The envelope also contained a list of individuals and their personally identifiable information, including names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers corresponding to the payees of the checks.

The search also uncovered a personal check and a bank deposit slip listing the associated checking account as belonging to "Anna Cruz," later identified as Cruz-Mercedes's aunt. Through text messages, Castillo-Lopez had instructed the CI to deposit proceeds from cashing the fraudulent Treasury checks into that bank account, as well as a bank account belonging to Maria Martinez, the mother of Cruz-Mercedes's girlfriend, Betty Sanchez. HSI sent the evidence obtained from the Passat to the Massachusetts State Police for fingerprint testing. Those tests recovered one latent fingerprint clear enough for identification, which matched a fingerprint taken from Cruz-Mercedes during his booking.

As part of his investigation, Agent Soares obtained a photograph of the real Pedro Colon from the Puerto Rico Registry of Motor Vehicles and compared it to Cruz-Mercedes, deducing that the two visibly were not the same person. On August 16, 2012, Cruz-Mercedes was arrested in Bronx County, New York for the deceptive use of a Social Security number in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 408(a)(7)(B) (2012),⁴ based on his falsely identifying himself to Cronin as Pedro Colon and his producing a Social Security card bearing that name. Following arraignment, Cruz-Mercedes was released on a $10,000 bond and ordered to appear in the District of Massachusetts on or before August 24, 2012. Instead, he fled the United States and returned to his native Dominican Republic.

Separately, Soares obtained and executed a warrant to search one of Castillo-Lopez's seized cell phones on August 9, 2012. In one set of text communications, an unidentified phone number instructed Castillo-Lopez to make deposits into a bank account belonging to Maria Martinez. Castillo-Lopez had relayed those deposit instructions to the CI. Responding to a grand jury subpoena, the cellular service provider for the unidentified phone number gave to Soares the unique identifier of the number's affiliated device, which matched that of one of the cell phones seized from Cruz-Mercedes on June 7.

Following Cruz-Mercedes's failure to appear in court on August 24, 2012, Soares attempted to locate him at his last known address. While there, Soares interviewed Cruz-Mercedes's girlfriend, Betty Sanchez, who provided two cell phone numbers belonging to Cruz-Mercedes. One of the provided numbers was the same phone number that directed Castillo-Lopez to make bank deposits. Relying on that information and the unique identifier provided by the cellular provider, on November 9, 2012, Soares obtained a search warrant for one of Cruz-Mercedes's seized cell phones. The resulting search confirmed that the number associated with the device matched the phone number that had provided Castillo-Lopez with deposit instructions.

II. Procedural Background

On February 26, 2014, a grand jury in the District of Massachusetts indicted Cruz-Mercedes on twenty counts related to the SIRF scheme, one count for fraudulent use of a Social Security number, and one count for failure to appear on August 24, 2012.⁵ Cruz-Mercedes was arrested in the Dominican Republic on January 25, 2017 and subsequently extradited to the United States. He made his initial appearance on December 1, 2017. Cruz-Mercedes I, 379 F. Supp. 3d at 33.

In anticipation of trial, Cruz-Mercedes moved to suppress all evidence obtained as a result of his June 7, 2012 arrest. Id. He argued that his arrest was unlawful because it was unsupported by probable cause and that the relevant evidence constituted the fruits of an unlawful seizure requiring suppression under Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 83 S.Ct. 407, 9 L.Ed.2d 441 (1963). Cruz-Mercedes I, 379 F. Supp. 3d at 33. The district court held a suppression hearing on August 29, 2018. Id.

On September 11, 2018, the district court determined that Cruz-Mercedes was under de facto arrest when he was removed from the McDonald's and questioned by Cronin in the parking lot without a Miranda war...