United States v. Vasquez-Algarin

• Decision Date: 02 May 2016
• Docket Number: No. 15–1941.,15–1941.
• Citation: 821 F.3d 467
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America v. Johnny VASQUEZ–ALGARIN, Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Third Circuit

821 F.3d 467

UNITED STATES of America

v.Johnny VASQUEZ–ALGARIN, Appellant.

No. 15–1941.

United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit.

Argued: Feb. 11, 2016.

Filed: May 2, 2016.

Ronald A. Krauss, Esq., Frederick W. Ulrich, Esq., (Argued), Office of Federal Public Defender, Harrisburg, PA, for Appellant.

Daryl F. Bloom, Esq., (Argued), Stephen R. Cerutti, II, Esq., Office of United States Attorney, Harrisburg, PA, for Appellee.

Before: FUENTES, KRAUSE, and ROTH, Circuit Judges.

OPINION OF THE COURT

KRAUSE

, Circuit Judge.

Law enforcement officers need both an arrest warrant and a search warrant to apprehend a suspect at what they know to be a third party's home. If the suspect resides at the address in question, however, officers need only an arrest warrant and a “reason to believe” that the individual is present at the time of their entry. This case sits between these two rules and calls on us to decide their critical point of inflection: how certain must officers be that a suspect resides at and is present at a particular address before forcing entry into a private dwelling?

A careful examination of the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment jurisprudence reveals that the standard cannot be anything less than probable cause. Because here, law enforcement acted on information that fell short of the standard, we will vacate the conviction and remand to the District Court.

I. Background

A. Facts

In 2010, an arrest warrant was issued for Edguardo Rivera,¹ a suspect in a homicide case. Deputy U.S. Marshal Gary Duncan, a member of the Dauphin County Fugitive Task Force, received information from another law enforcement officer and from street informants that Rivera was “staying” or “residing” at an address on North 13th Street in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. App. 25–26, 35–36. With the arrest warrant for Rivera in hand, Deputy Marshal Duncan and officers from the Harrisburg Bureau of Police and the Dauphin County Drug Task Force arrived at the apartment and knocked on the door.

They received no response but “heard a lot of movement inside,” as well as a phone ring once or twice and stop ringing and a dog bark and cease barking, giving the officers the impression that a person had manually silenced the phone and muzzled the dog. App. 29–30. The officers then forcibly entered the home.

As it turned out, however, the sought fugitive, Rivera, did not live in the apartment and was not present.² Instead, upon entering, the officers saw Appellant Johnny Vasquez–Algarin, and, during a protective sweep, they identified in plain view sandwich baggies, a razor blade, and what appeared to be powder cocaine. After Vasquez–Algarin declined to grant consent for a search, one officer obtained a search warrant while the other officers waited at the apartment. During the subsequent search conducted pursuant to the warrant, the officers discovered ammunition, unused plastic bags, and hundreds of small black bands, as well as a cell phone in the master bedroom that was later searched pursuant to another search warrant. At some point during the search, the officers identified a set of car keys, which they used to open a stolen Mazda located across from the apartment. Vasquez–Algarin, who had no outstanding warrants, was then arrested.

B. Proceedings

Vasquez–Algarin and the two brothers with whom he shared the apartment were each charged with distribution and possession with intent to distribute cocaine in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1)

and (b)(1)(A)(ii) and conspiracy to do the same in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 846. In October 2013, Vasquez–Algarin pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The month before trial, Vasquez–Algarin moved to suppress the evidence seized from the North 13th Street residence, arguing that law enforcement's forced entry into the apartment was unconstitutional. At his suppression hearing, the Government presented three witnesses, all officers involved in various stages of Vasquez–Algarin's apprehension and arrest. Two witnesses, Deputy Marshal Duncan and Middletown Borough Police Detective Dennis Morris, testified about the sounds that officers heard coming from inside the residence on their arrival, but only Deputy Marshal Duncan could speak to the circumstances that led law enforcement to Vasquez–Algarin's residence.

Deputy Marshal Duncan testified that he had an arrest warrant for Edguardo Rivera and was given “reliable” information from a detective from the Harrisburg Bureau of Police and informants that Rivera lived at the North 13th Street address. App. 25, 26. During cross-examination, when defense counsel pressed Deputy Marshal Duncan to elaborate on “the exact factors” that led him to believe that Rivera lived at the address, Deputy Marshal Duncan reiterated that he had relied on “[i]nformation being provided to me by another law enforcement officer, information that we had from informants on the street that that address was being used by Mr. Rivera.” App. 36. When counsel asked if, prior to going to the residence, Deputy Marshal Duncan had checked records for the resident of the apartment, he confirmed that he had but was unable to recall whether he had identified the renter of the apartment.

The District Court denied Vasquez–Algarin's motion to suppress, concluding from Deputy Marshal Duncan and Detective Morris's testimony that the officers had a “reasonable belief” and “probable cause to believe” that the fugitive, Rivera, resided at the apartment and was present at the time of the officers' entry and that their entry was therefore constitutional.³ United States v. Vasquez–Algarin, No. 1:11–CR–0200–01, 2014 WL 1672008, at *1–2 (M.D.Pa. Apr. 28, 2014)

. At trial the next month, Deputy Marshal Duncan provided substantially the same information about what had led him to the North 13th Street address to apprehend Rivera.⁴ However, he offered a different answer to a question he also had been asked at the suppression hearing about why he spent significant time knocking and yelling at the door. At the suppression hearing, Deputy Marshal Duncan had testified that often residents will not come to the door for law enforcement but “if we stay there for a while, and you continue to knock and continue to not leave, typically you'll gain some response from somebody inside.” App. 29. In his trial testimony, however, he identified a second reason he knocked for so long at the door in this case: “The address was not the address of record for Mr. Rivera, so we wanted to knock and attempt to gain contact with somebody inside and gain their consent to search the address.” App. 138.

After a two-day trial, a jury convicted Vasquez–Algarin on both drug counts. He now appeals the District Court's denial of his suppression motion.⁵ We review the District Court's legal conclusions de novo and the underlying factual findings for clear error. United States v. Torres, 534 F.3d 207, 209 (3d Cir.2008)

. In the present context, where we are reviewing the denial of a motion to suppress to determine whether police officers had probable cause to believe the subject of their arrest warrant lived in the apartment they entered, we may look to the entire record and are “not restricted to the evidence presented at the suppression hearing where the motion was denied.” United States v. Silveus, 542 F.3d 993, 1001 (3d Cir.2008) (quoting Gov't of the V.I. v. Williams, 739 F.2d 936, 939 (3d Cir.1984) ).

II. Discussion

Vasquez–Algarin argues that law enforcement officers needed a search warrant to enter the North 13th Street apartment because the subject of their arrest warrant (the “arrestee”⁶ ) did not in fact reside there. As we will explain below, however, their entry was constitutional if they had sufficient information to support a reasonable belief that the arrestee resided at and was present within the targeted home. To determine what reasonable belief requires, we will look to the principles set forth in the Supreme Court's key precedents, the views expressed by our sister Circuits and, most importantly, the fundamental tenets of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence governing the home. We conclude that to satisfy the reasonable belief standard law enforcement required, but lacked, probable cause. The officers' entry was therefore unconstitutional and, because the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule is inapplicable here, the evidence seized from Vasquez–Algarin's apartment should have been suppressed.

A. Payton and Steagald

The Supreme Court has issued two major decisions regarding the constitutionality of in-home arrests. Because here law enforcement officers believed, albeit mistakenly, that the home they were entering was the residence of the subject of their arrest warrant, the controlling authority is the first of these decisions, Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980)

. There, the Supreme Court considered two consolidated cases in which police officers entered private residences without any kind of warrant to make routine felony arrests and held that the state statutes that had authorized these warrantless entries were unconstitutional; the officers were required to have an arrest warrant to arrest a suspect in his home. Id. at 602–03, 100 S.Ct. 1371. In a dictum that has since evolved into a tenet of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, the Court also observed that a search warrant would not be required in that circumstance because “an arrest warrant founded on probable cause implicitly carries with it the limited authority to enter a dwelling in which the suspect lives when there is reason to believe the suspect is within. ” Id. at 603, 100 S.Ct. 1371 (emphasis added).

In the wake of Payton, to assess the constitutionality of an officer's entry into a home to execute an arrest warrant, the Courts of Appeals have drawn upon the Supreme Court's language to develop a two-prong test that extends to residency: the officer must have a “reasonable belief”⁷ that (1) the arrestee resides at the dwelling, and (2) the arrestee is present...