United States v. Debruhl

• Decision Date: 23 February 2012
• Docket Number: No. 09–CO–1208.,09–CO–1208.
• Citation: 38 A.3d 293
• Parties: UNITED STATES, Appellant, v. Lorenzo Ali DEBRUHL, Appellee.
• Court: D.C. Court of Appeals

38 A.3d 293

UNITED STATES, Appellant,

v.Lorenzo Ali DEBRUHL, Appellee.

No. 09–CO–1208.

District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Argued Jan. 20, 2012.Decided Feb. 23, 2012.

Elizabeth Trosman, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Ronald C. Machen Jr., United States Attorney, and Roy W. McLeese III, Assistant United States Attorney, were on the brief, for appellant.

Thomas W. Farquhar for appellee.

Mikel–Meredith Weidman, Public Defender Service, with whom James Klein, Samia Fam, and Chris Kemmitt, Public Defender Service, were on the brief for Amicus Curiae Public Defender Service.Before THOMPSON, Associate Judge, and FERREN and REID, Senior Judges.

On Petition for Rehearing

FERREN, Senior Judge:

After our initial hearing of this case, the court ruled in favor of the defendant-appellee, Lorenzo Ali Debruhl.¹ We affirmed the trial court's pre-trial ruling that the federal “exclusionary rule,” rather than the “good faith exception” to that rule, should be applied retroactively to enforce the Supreme Court's decision in Arizona v. Gant.² Thus, we affirmed suppression at trial of the drugs and related contraband found by the police in a warrantless search of Debruhl's car. After our decision, the Supreme Court addressed the good-faith exception in Davis v. United States, ³ and sustained its application in the very post- Gant context presented in Debruhl. We therefore granted rehearing to determine whether, in light of Davis, our decision in Debruhl can be reaffirmed. We now reverse and remand.

I.

On January 11, 2009, Metropolitan Police Department officers saw an Oldsmobile traveling with its lights off between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. in the 900 block of Hamilton Street, N.E. They conducted a traffic stop, ran a license plate check, and discovered no listing for the tags. Upon checking the driver's license and registration, the officers found that the registration matched the license plate but not the car. A check of the vehicle identification number revealed that the car was unregistered. One of the officers asked the sole occupant, the driver, Debruhl, to step out of the car, placed him under arrest, secured him with handcuffs, and placed him behind the car. The other officer searched the passenger compartment and found a brown paper bag under the driver's seat containing a pair of gloves, a digital scale, razor blades, some currency, and a clear plastic bag with a white rock substance inside that field-tested positive for cocaine. A grand jury indicted Debruhl on one count each for possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute and for possession of drug paraphernalia. Before trial, Debruhl filed a motion to suppress the drugs and drug paraphernalia, which the trial court granted in September 2009.

Meanwhile, three months or so after Debruhl's arrest and the related search of his car, the Supreme Court in Gant clarified the reach of New York v. Belton.⁴ It declared unconstitutional the warrantless seizure of evidence from the passenger compartment of a vehicle from which the occupants—like Debruhl—had been removed, handcuffed, and sequestered.⁵ No one disputes that, by virtue of Griffith v. Kentucky,⁶ Gant's interpretation of the Fourth Amendment would apply not only to Gant's trial and future cases but also to all cases, such as Debruhl's, that were “not yet final” ⁷ when Gant was decided. In Debruhl I, however, we acknowledged that the exclusionary rule will not always accompany a retroactive application of the Fourth Amendment.⁸ Rather, the good-faith exception will apply, we said, when police officers who unlawfully seize evidence from a car, without a warrant, have relied on settled appellate precedent that permitted their search under Belton before the Supreme Court added Gant's clarification to the contrary.⁹ Our decision therefore turned on whether, at the time of arrest and seizure, there was settled precedent in this jurisdiction, under Belton, that justified the warrantless search of Debruhl's car. We held that there was not, because no case in this jurisdiction was “settled as to all the material facts” the officers faced. ¹⁰

A material fact, in the context here, is any fact necessary to justify-or forbid-the warrantless search of an automobile compartment under Belton. After the Supreme Court in Gant added sequestration of the occupants as a material consideration for the scope of a search, the officers in Debruhl—for the good-faith exception to apply—must have relied on pre- Gant precedent holding that this now material fact was immaterial at the time of their search. If the officers searched without a warrant in the absence of such settled precedent, then Debruhl's case itself, we noted, would contain a factual variant-sequestration of the occupants—that had not yet been addressed by this court, and thus was not part of our “settled” jurisprudence justifying warrantless car searches.¹¹ With this understanding, we elaborated our decision as follows.

In Belton, the Supreme Court announced a “ ‘bright-line’ rule” ¹² permitting the warrantless search of an automobile passenger compartment. The Court held that “when a policeman has made a lawful custodial arrest of the occupant of an automobile, he may, as a contemporaneous incident of that arrest, search the passenger compartment of that automobile.” ¹³ This was intended as a practical rule, justified only because of its close approximation to the scope of a warrantless search of an individual permitted by Chimel v. California.¹⁴ The rationale justifying a Chimel search, and thus a search under Belton, was the dual need to protect the arresting officer against a “weapon” the suspect might have within his “immediate control,” as well as to preserve “destructible evidence” the suspect might otherwise dispose of.¹⁵ Eventually, however, Belton's bright-line rule became problematic.¹⁶ As we demonstrated in Debruhl I,

bright-line rules do not easily remain radiant. Although Belton was ... intended for simple, clear cut application, it is evident from Belton's history that such rules are often likely to remain truly “bright line” only for a limited period of time as factual scenarios test their limits. Belton has become a classic case of a rule beclouded over time by exceptions generated by unique facts that pushed decisions beyond the “bright line” license-as evidenced by ... three federal circuits that anticipated Gant.¹⁷

The three federal precursors of Gant, and then Gant itself, focused upon the reality that once all occupants had been removed from a vehicle, handcuffed, and sequestered, Chimel's dual rationale-protection of officer and preservation of evidence—had been satisfied; the reasons for a warrantless, protective search had been eliminated. Thus came Gant's clarification limiting Belton searches to those in which one or more occupants were still in the vehicle or, if removed, were not yet sequestered in a manner that assuredly would protect officers and preserve evidence. ¹⁸ Hence the question in Debruhl: was there an appellate decision in this jurisdiction,¹⁹ authorizing a Belton search after all occupants of the car had been handcuffed and sequestered, that would justify our application of the good-faith exception to permit introduction at trial of the contraband seized from Debruhl's car despite the officers' Fourth Amendment violation in seizing it?

The two decisions of this court approximating the facts in Debruhl, and on which we principally relied for analysis at the government's urging, are Staten v. United States²⁰ and United States v. Harris. ²¹ Unlike Debruhl I, however, both dealt with protective searches of automobiles either before all occupants had been removed ( Harris ) or before all occupants had been sequestered ( Staten ). We summarily distinguished three other Belton cases cited by the government,²² none of which involved protective searches, on the grounds that one focused on the “contemporaneous incident” element of Belton,²³ another turned on the “inevitable discovery” doctrine,²⁴ and the third held the motion to suppress untimely filed and thus addressed Belton only in dictum. ²⁵ Accordingly, because neither Staten nor Harris included a fact—sequestration before a Belton search—that was material, indeed determinative, in Gant, we found no relevant, “settled” precedent on which the police officers in Debruhl could have relied to support the good-faith exception. We held, therefore, that the exclusionary rule applied in Debruhl I.

II.

Then came Davis.²⁶ Like Gant and Debruhl, Davis concerned situations in which the police—before the Gant decision came down—removed, handcuffed, and sequestered the occupants of a car and “then searched the passenger compartment,” finding the contraband at issue.²⁷ According to Davis, the police

followed the Eleventh Circuit's Gonzalez²⁸ precedent to the letter. Although the search turned out to be unconstitutional under Gant, all agree that the officers' conduct was in strict compliance with then-binding Circuit law and was not culpable in any way.²⁹

Then, in affirming the circuit court's ruling based on the good-faith exception, the Supreme Court held that “when the police conduct a search in objectively reasonable reliance on binding appellate precedent, the exclusionary rule does not apply.” ³⁰

By premising the good-faith exception on “strict compliance” with “binding appellate precedent,” and by noting that the search was justified by police reliance “to the letter” on precedent that would later be held unconstitutional under Gant, the Court was saying, we believe, that the precedent ( Gonzalez ) on which the police relied for the good-faith exception in Davis, embraced all the facts material to the decision in Davis, including handcuffed and sequestered occupants.³¹ Otherwise, as we emphasized in Debruhl I, there would have been no “explicit protection or ‘cover’ ” from the appellate court on which the officer could rely to block application of the...