United States v. Quinones

• Decision Date: 02 November 2015
• Docket Number: 13-CR-83S
• Parties: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. ONEIL QUINONES et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Western District of New York

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. ONEIL QUINONES et al., Defendants.

13-CR-83S

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT WESTERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK

November 2, 2015

REPORT AND RECOMMENDATION AND DECISION AND ORDER

I. INTRODUCTION

The Hon. William M. Skretny referred this case to this Court under 28 U.S.C. § 636(b). (Dkt. No. 15.) Pending before the Court are various pretrial motions filed by each of the defendants, including certain motions to suppress evidence. The Court has held oral argument and hearings for the motions; transcripts for the hearing proceedings are available at Docket Nos. 150, 208, 209, 244, 245, 248, and 301.

The Court now issues its rulings for the non-dispositive motions submitted and its recommendations for the dispositive motions. The following table of contents should help the reader navigate the motions that each defendant filed:

I. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 1

II. BACKGROUND ........................................................................................................ 3

III. DISCUSSION ........................................................................................................ 3

A. Oneil Quinones ...................................................................................................... 3

i. Compel Video Annotations—Non-dispositive ..................................................... 3

ii. Suppression of Photo Arrays—Dispositive ......................................................... 7

iii. Primary Custody Designation—Non-dispositive ............................................... 12

B. Jorge Quinones ................................................................................................... 12

i. Omnibus Pretrial Motions—Non-dispositive ..................................................... 12

ii. Suppression of Statements—Dispositive ......................................................... 17

C. Oscar Romero ..................................................................................................... 18

i. Omnibus Pretrial Motions—Non-dispositive ..................................................... 18

ii. Bruton Motion—Dispositive .............................................................................. 19

iii. Suppression of Wiretap Evidence—Dispositive ............................................... 19

D. Ellis Colon ........................................................................................................... 20

i. Omnibus Pretrial Motions—Non-dispositive ..................................................... 20

ii. Suppression of Search at 219 Fenton Street—Dispositive ............................... 20

E. Edwin Sanchez .................................................................................................... 25

F. Jose Rivera ......................................................................................................... 25

i. Omnibus Pretrial Motions—Non-dispositive ..................................................... 25

ii. Suppression of Wiretap Evidence—Dispositive ............................................... 25

iii. Suppression of Traffic Stop Evidence—Dispositive ......................................... 30

iv. Suppression of Search of 1517 Ashland—Dispositive ..................................... 32

G. Angel Sanchez .................................................................................................... 36

H. Raul Ramirez Vargas .......................................................................................... 36

I. Josbel Garcia ...................................................................................................... 36

J. Miguel Manso ...................................................................................................... 36

IV. CONCLUSION .................................................................................................... 37

V. OBJECTIONS ......................................................................................................... 37

II. BACKGROUND

This case concerns allegations that defendants ran a street gang in the City of Buffalo called the Loiza Boys and that the gang's activities included extensive narcotics distribution. Pre-indictment complaints (Dkt. Nos. 1(1), 1(2), 1(3)) detail how some of the defendants possessed firearms in furtherance of the gang's activities and sold narcotics to confidential informants. The Government filed an indictment on April 5, 2013. (Dkt. No. 10.) The indictment contains 12 substantive counts plus two forfeiture notices. In the substantive counts, the Government accuses different combinations of defendants with drug conspiracy, maintaining a drug-involved premises, possession with intent to distribute and distribution on different occasions, and possession of firearms in furtherance of drug trafficking. The Court arraigned most defendants on April 10, 2013; arraigned defendant Miguel Manso on May 2, 2013;¹ and arraigned defendant Oscar Romero on April 4, 2014.

The Court will provide further case background as needed with each motion below.

III. DISCUSSION

A. Oneil Quinones

i. Compel Video Annotations—Non-dispositive

Defendant Oneil Quinones ("Oneil") filed a motion on April 7, 2015 (Dkt. No. 273) for an order directing production of indexes, summaries, logs, notes, orother reports associated with certain video discovery that the Government produced. The discovery in question comprises approximately 3,240 hours of continuous video footage captured by a pole camera in the vicinity of 10th Street in the City of Buffalo. Oneil objects that the video footage does not identify the people, bicycles, automobiles, license plates, or other traffic in and around the area recorded. The video footage, according to Oneil, came with no annotations identifying which defendants appear at what times. Given the volume of the video footage, the lack of identifications or other annotations forces counsel to choose between leaving the footage unusable and investing potentially thousands of hours reviewing all the footage, creating original annotations, and then discussing the footage with his client in the presence of an interpreter. The Government responds that, to accompany the video footage, it produced a compact disc to all counsel containing handwritten notes that agents took while observing activity through the pole camera.

"[A]s the technology becomes more prevalent, the Government and defendants will come to produce more and more [electronically stored information] (as the original source for evidence, such as in crimes involving computers, or as a means to compile evidence) along with other, traditional forms of discovery." U.S. v. Briggs, No. 10CR184S, 2011 WL 4017886, at *7 (W.D.N.Y. Sept. 8, 2011) (Scott, M.J.). A collection of thousands of hours of continuous video footage is an example of discovery not possible as recently as10-15 years ago, because the recording and storage technology either did not exist yet or was prohibitively expensive. As technology expands the volume and the range of potential discovery in criminal cases, courts have started to recognize that the Government needs to impose at least some minimal organization on voluminous discovery to comply with the spirit of its statutory and constitutional obligations. See, e.g., U.S. v. Warshak, 631 F.3d 266, 296-97 (6th Cir. 2010) (finding no discovery abuses where, inter alia, "the government furnished the defendants with a detailed room-by-room inventory of all items seized from the company, including a listing of the various computers that were imaged") (internal quotation marks omitted); U.S. v. Huntress, No. 13-CV-199S, 2015 WL 631976, at *28 (W.D.N.Y. Feb. 13, 2015) (Skretny, C.J.) (denying a motion for a bill of particulars where the Government "has produced 137,000 pages of discovery on DVDs that are 'readily loadable into a searchable format' and accompanied by an index of these materials"); U.S. v. Vujanic, No. 3:09-CR-249-D (17), 2014 WL 3868448, at *2 (N.D. Tex. Aug. 6, 2014) (finding no Brady violation where the Government "has stated that it will identify the sources of seized items; and it has advised Vujanic's counsel that all email and instant message chats involving Vujanic are located within 8 terabytes or 2 terabytes of data rather than within the entire universe of discovery"); U.S. v. Weaver, 992 F. Supp. 2d 152, 156 (E.D.N.Y. 2014) (denying a motion to identify Brady materials where "the government has provided detailed indices for all the materials itproduced, the majority of which were provided in both PDF and 'load-ready' file format that could be easily searched"); U.S. v. Chen, No. C05-375 SI, 2006 WL 3898177, at *3 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 9, 2006) (ordering a bill of particulars where discovery "includes non-documentary evidence reflected in at least 22 CDs containing approximately 111,250 TIFF images, 25 CDs containing approximately 1,250 photographs, 22 CDs containing approximately 5,800 minutes of audio recordings, and 30 CDs containing approximately 900 minutes of video surveillance"). That said, "the government is under no duty to direct a defendant to exculpatory evidence within a larger mass of disclosed evidence." U.S. v. Skilling, 554 F.3d 529, 576 (5th Cir. 2009) (citations omitted), vacated in part on other grounds, 561 U.S. 358 (2010).

For now, the Court will take a measured approach to addressing Oneil's motion. The Government presumably would not play 3,240 hours of video at trial; if it plays any video footage at all then it likely would identify which defendants appear where in the footage as part of its preparation. The Court directs the Government to share with all defendants some kind of annotation that identifies which of them appears on camera at any given time. At least for now, the Court will not wade into the details of how that invitation should look or how much of the video footage needs to be annotated,...