United States v. Perez
| Docket Number | 22-1121 |
| Decision Date | 28 December 2023 |
| Parties | UNITED STATES, Appellee, v. GILBERT PEREZ, Defendant, Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit |
1
UNITED STATES, Appellee,
v.
GILBERT PEREZ, Defendant, Appellant.
No. 22-1121
United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit
December 28, 2023
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MAINE [Hon. D. Brock Hornby, U.S. District Judge]
Jamesa J. Drake, with whom Drake Law LLC was on brief, for appellant.
Brian S. Kleinbord, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Darcie N. McElwee, United States Attorney, was on brief, for appellee.
Before Barron, Chief Judge, Howard and Montecalvo, Circuit Judges.
BARRON, CHIEF JUDGE
Gilbert Perez seeks to vacate his federal drug conviction on the ground that the United States District Court for the District of Maine wrongly denied his motion to suppress the fruits of a warrantless search of his backpack. The District Court rested the denial on our decision in United States v. Eatherton, 519 F.2d 603 (1st Cir. 1975), which upheld a similar warrantless search under the search-incident-to-arrest exception to the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, id. at 609-11. Because we reject Perez's contention that intervening decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States have stripped Eatherton of controlling force, we affirm the judgment of conviction.
I.
When reviewing the denial of a motion to suppress evidence, "'we recite the facts as found by the district court, consistent with record support,' including the testimony from the motion hearing." United States v. Tom, 988 F.3d 95, 97 (1st Cir. 2021) (quoting United States v. Soares, 521 F.3d 117, 118 (1st Cir. 2008) (cleaned up)). Massachusetts State Trooper Jason Conant was conducting a patrol on the evening of August 30, 2019, when he saw a pickup truck with Maine license plates stop in a McDonald's
parking lot in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The driver was later identified as Perez.
Perez exited the truck, donned a backpack, and walked towards a residential area near the parking lot. Conant became suspicious of the out-of-state truck, as well as Perez's behavior, and alerted other state troopers in the area to watch for Perez.
Minutes after Perez left the parking lot, a second Massachusetts state trooper, Shawn McIntyre, saw Perez exiting a taxi on a nearby street. McIntyre watched Perez start to walk in the direction of the McDonald's where the truck was parked.
McIntyre stopped the taxi and saw large quantities of cash at the feet of the taxi's passenger. McIntyre then radioed Conant, informing him of the cash and the suspicion that Perez had participated in a drug transaction with the taxi's passenger.
Perez, still wearing the backpack, returned to the McDonald's parking lot. Conant pulled his (unmarked) car into the parking lot and exited the car. Roughly simultaneously, Conant began to yell "state police," and Perez began to run from the parking lot. Conant gave chase.
About twenty yards from the parking lot, Perez tripped and fell. Conant caught up to Perez after his fall and pinned him to the ground. A third state trooper, Ryan Dolan, pulled up in a patrol car.
Conant removed the backpack from Perez as Dolan was handcuffing Perez's hands behind his back. Dolan then sat Perez on the pavement.
After Perez was handcuffed, Conant placed the backpack on Dolan's car and opened and searched the backpack. Perez was not in reaching distance of the backpack when the search of the backpack took place.
Conant discovered fentanyl and cocaine in the backpack. Perez was then searched and formally arrested.
Perez was indicted on March 12, 2020, on a federal drug-related charge. He moved to suppress the drugs, contending that the backpack's search violated the Fourth Amendment.[1]
The government opposed the motion on the ground that the search was constitutional under Eatherton. The government also argued that, in any event, the search was conducted in good-faith reliance on Eatherton. See Davis v. United States, 564 U.S. 229, 232 (2011) (holding that "[police] searches conducted in objectively reasonable reliance on binding appellate precedent are not subject to the exclusionary rule").
The District Court denied Perez's motion without reaching the good-faith issue. See United States v. Perez, Crim. No. 2:20-CR-39-DBH-01, 2021 WL 2953671 (D. Me. July 14, 2021).
The District Court found that "[t]he police had probable cause to arrest Perez when they handcuffed him," and it "treat[ed] [the police] as having effectively arrested him then," although the District Court also found that it was only later that Perez was "formally" arrested. Id. at *2. The District Court separately found, moreover, that Perez's handcuffing occurred "as" Conan "ripped the backpack off" of Perez. Id. With that factual predicate in place, the District Court reasoned that the search of the backpack was lawful because, when there is probable cause for an arrest, Eatherton allows for the warrantless "search [of] a container found on a person being arrested," id. at *3, and our Court had not "'unmistakably' cast Eatherton 'into disrepute,'" id. at *4 (quoting Eulitt ex rel. Eulitt v. Me., Dep't of Educ., 386 F.3d 344, 349 (1st Cir. 2004)).
Perez entered a conditional guilty plea, which preserved his right to appeal his conviction based on the District Court's Eatherton-based denial of his motion to suppress. He then filed this timely appeal. We review the District Court's "factual findings for 'clear error'" and its "legal conclusions . . . de novo." United States v. Rodriguez-Pacheco, 948 F.3d 1, 6 (1st Cir. 2020) (quoting United States v. Camacho, 661 F.3d 718, 72324 (1st Cir. 2011)).
II.
The Fourth Amendment protects "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" by providing that "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause." U.S. Const. amend. IV. Our focus is on the exception to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement for a search incident to an arrest. See United States v. Robinson, 414 U.S. 218 (1973).
Perez does not dispute that the exception covers his backpack's search if Eatherton remains good law. He contends only that Eatherton does not because of either United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1 (1977), or Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332 (2009), or both together.
Under the law of the circuit doctrine, newly constituted panels must follow the rulings of preceding panels that are "directly (or even closely) on point," United States v. Guzman, 419 F.3d 27, 31 (1st Cir. 2005), "even where the succeeding panel disagrees with the prior one," United States v. Guerrero, 19 F.4th 547, 552 (1st. Cir 2021). The doctrine recognizes an exception, however, when "[a]n existing panel decision [is] undermined by controlling authority, subsequently announced, such as an opinion of the Supreme Court, an en banc opinion of the circuit court, or a statutory overruling," Williams v. Ashland Eng'g Co., 45 F.3d 588, 592 (1st Cir. 1995), or when an "authority that postdates the
original decision, although not directly controlling, nevertheless offers a sound reason for believing that the former panel, in light of fresh developments, would change its collective mind," United States v. Barbosa, 896 F.3d 60, 74 (1st Cir. 2018) (quoting Williams, 45 F.3d at 592).
The latter exception is very limited, as it applies only when the new authority "provides a clear and convincing basis" to conclude that the prior panel would have changed its mind. Guerrero, 19 F.4th at 552. For that reason, we have described cases that trigger this exception as "hen's-teeth-rare." San Juan Cable LLC v. P.R. Tel. Co., 612 F.3d 25, 33 (1st Cir. 2010).
We begin by reviewing Eatherton and describing its rationale. We then explain why we conclude that Eatherton still controls.
A.
The defendant in Eatherton was Gilbert Eatherton. 519 F.2d. at 605. A suspected bank robber, he was walking down a street while carrying a briefcase when agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") spotted him. Id. at 609.
The FBI agents called for Eatherton to come to their car, and he did so. Id. When he was "close to the vehicle the agents told him he was under arrest [and] instructed him to drop the briefcase and [lie] spread eagle on the ground." Id. He complied with the commands, and the FBI agents "thoroughly frisked"
him, handcuffed him, and placed him in the back of their vehicle. Id. The FBI agents then picked up the briefcase, opened it, and found a loaded gun and three brown ski masks, all of which were later admitted as evidence at trial. Id.
Eatherton did not dispute that there was probable cause to arrest him, and he "concede[d] that the agents could have seized the briefcase consonant with the [F]ourth [A]mendment." Id. at 610. But he argued that the agents "should have obtained a search warrant before investigating [the briefcase's] contents," and that, because the agents did not, the search of his briefcase violated the Fourth Amendment. Id. He thus argued that the fruits of the search of the briefcase had to be suppressed because that search could not be justified merely by the fact of his arrest and the right to search his person that his arrest entailed. Id.
Eatherton relied chiefly on the Supreme Court's decision in Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969). There, the Court held that the bare fact that an arrest occurred inside a home did not justify a warrantless search of the entirety of the premises. Id. at 763. The Court also held that although a warrantless search of the area of the home within the "immediate control" of the arrestee was reasonable if justified "by the need to seize weapons and other things which might be used to assault an officer or effect an escape" or "by the need to prevent the destruction of evidence of the crime," these "justifications are absent where a
search is remote in time or place...
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