United States v. Wood

• Citation: 16 F.4th 529
• Decision Date: 21 October 2021
• Docket Number: No. 20-2974,20-2974
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Henry E. WOOD, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (7th Circuit)

16 F.4th 529

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.Henry E. WOOD, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 20-2974

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued September 14, 2021

Decided October 21, 2021

Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc Denied December 17, 2021

David E. Hollar, Attorney, Office of the United States Attorney, Hammond, IN, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Daniel J. Hillis, Attorney, Office of the Federal Public Defender, Springfield, IL, Thomas W. Patton, Attorney, Office of the Federal Public Defender, Peoria, IL, for Defendant-Appellant.

Before Sykes, Chief Judge, and Easterbrook and Brennan, Circuit Judges.

Brennan, Circuit Judge.

Henry Wood was arrested for violating his parole. Midway through the arrest, parole agents found methamphetamine hidden underneath the back cover of his cellphone. An investigator later extracted the data from his cellphone, revealing child pornography. Wood moved to suppress the data, arguing the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant before such a search. We disagree and affirm the district court's denial of Wood's motion to suppress.

I

Henry Wood served time in Indiana state prison for methamphetamine-related offenses. In 2018, he was released on parole under enumerated conditions. Any violation subjected him to "being taken into immediate custody."

Wood's parole release agreement required him to "report to [his] assigned supervising officer" as instructed. Wood also affirmed the following:

I understand that I am legally in the custody of the Department of Correction and that my person and residence or property under my control may be subject to reasonable search by my supervising officer or authorized official of the Department of Correction if the officer or official has reasonable cause to believe that the parolee is violating or is in imminent danger of violating a condition to remaining on parole.

About three months after being released, Wood violated his parole by failing to report to his supervising officer. The Indiana Parole Board issued an arrest warrant, and parole agents arrested Wood at his home in North Judson. One of the agents, Agent Gentry, secured Wood with wrist restraints and conducted a frisk search. During the frisk, Gentry noticed Wood repeatedly turning toward his cellphone, which was lying on a "junk pile." Gentry picked up the cellphone and handed it to Agent Rains. This upset Wood. He demanded that his cellphone be turned off and he began to physically resist Gentry. With the help of another agent, Gentry restrained Wood against a nearby wall, and Wood "calmed down immediately."

Meanwhile, Rains felt something "lumpy" on the back of Wood's cellphone, so he removed the back cover and found a packet of a substance which Rains believed to be methamphetamine. Wood eventually admitted the substance was, in fact, methamphetamine. A later search of the home revealed syringes and other drug paraphernalia. Based on these findings, Wood was arrested for possession of methamphetamine and parole agents seized his cellphone as evidence.

Seven days after Wood's arrest, an investigator for the Indiana Department of Correction performed a warrantless search of Wood's cellphone by extracting its stored data. This search revealed child pornography. The investigator forwarded this information to a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who obtained a search-and-seizure warrant for Wood's cellphone and its contents.

A federal grand jury indicted Wood for both receiving and possessing child pornography, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252(a)(2), (a)(4)(B). Before the district court, Wood moved to suppress the data extracted from his cellphone. He argued principally that the state investigator's warrantless search of his cellphone violated Riley v. California , 573 U.S. 373, 134 S.Ct. 2473, 189 L.Ed.2d 430 (2014). The district court disagreed, holding that the search of Wood's cellphone complied with the Fourth Amendment. United States v. Wood , 426 F. Supp. 3d 560, 575 (N.D. Ind. 2019).

Following the denial of his motion to suppress, Wood entered a conditional guilty plea. See FED. R. CRIM. P. 11(a)(2). He pleaded guilty to the receiving charge in Count 1 of the indictment—Count 2 was dismissed—and he reserved the right to appeal the district court's denial of his motion to suppress. This appeal followed.

II

"When reviewing a district court's decision denying a motion to suppress evidence, we review the court's legal conclusions de novo and its factual findings for clear error." United States v. McGill , 8 F.4th 617, 621 (7th Cir. 2021).

The district court rejected Wood's argument that Riley v. California required law enforcement to obtain a search warrant before searching his cellphone. Instead, the court used the totality of the circumstances approach articulated in United States v. Knights , 534 U.S. 112, 122 S.Ct. 587, 151 L.Ed.2d 497 (2001), and Samson v. California , 547 U.S. 843, 126 S.Ct. 2193, 165 L.Ed.2d 250 (2006), to conclude that the search of Wood's cellphone was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. We affirm in both respects.

A

Wood asks us to apply Riley v. California to parolees. The primary problem with this request is that Riley dealt with searches incident to a lawful arrest. The Supreme Court carefully tailored its analysis to that context and expressly recognized that "other case-specific exceptions may still justify a warrantless search of a particular phone." Riley , 573 U.S. at 401–02, 134 S.Ct. 2473. Under the Fourth Amendment, "what is reasonable depends on the context within which a search takes place." New Jersey v. T.L.O. , 469 U.S. 325, 337, 105 S.Ct. 733, 83 L.Ed.2d 720 (1985).

Given the context-specific nature of the Fourth Amendment, Riley is not readily transferable to scenarios other than the one it addressed. Indeed, we have declined to apply Riley in two other contexts: consent searches and border searches. See United States v. Wanjiku , 919 F.3d 472, 483–85 (7th Cir. 2019) (border search); United States v. Thurman , 889 F.3d 356, 366 n.9 (7th Cir. 2018) (consent search).

To be sure, "the Supreme Court has recently granted heightened protection to cell phone data." See Wanjiku , 919 F. 3d at 484. But neither our research nor the parties’ briefs reveal any circuit court decision extending a Riley -like rule to parolees—quite the opposite. See United States v. Pacheco , 884 F.3d 1031, 1043–44 & n.10 (10th Cir. 2018) (discussing Riley ’s inapplicability in the parole context); United States v. Johnson , 875 F.3d 1265, 1273–76 (9th Cir. 2017) (holding that Riley did not require parole agents to obtain a warrant before searching a parolee's cellphone); United States v. Jackson , 866 F.3d 982, 985–86 (8th Cir. 2017) (same). Nevertheless, we take a fresh look.

The Supreme Court's "general Fourth Amendment approach" is to "examine the totality of the circumstances to determine whether a search is reasonable within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment." Samson , 547 U.S. at 848, 126 S.Ct. 2193 (cleaned up). Whether a search is reasonable is determined "by assessing, on the one hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individual's privacy and, on the other, the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests." Wyoming v. Houghton , 526 U.S. 295, 300, 119 S.Ct. 1297, 143 L.Ed.2d 408 (1999).

This balancing of interests sometimes generates categorical rules, like the search-incident-to-arrest exception addressed in Riley . Under that doctrine, law enforcement generally may conduct a warrantless search of an arrestee's person without "additional justification." Riley , 573 U.S. at 384, 134 S.Ct. 2473 (quoting United States v. Robinson , 414 U.S. 218, 235, 94 S.Ct. 467, 38 L.Ed.2d 427 (1973) ). Two governmental interests support this rule: officer safety and evidence preservation. Id. On balance, these interests outweigh an arrestee's diminished expectation of privacy, justifying an exception to the rule that "reasonableness generally requires the obtaining of a judicial warrant." See id. at 382–84, 134 S.Ct. 2473 (quoting Vernonia School Dist. 47J v. Acton , 515 U.S. 646, 653, 115 S.Ct. 2386, 132 L.Ed.2d 564 (1995) ).

But the "ultimate touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is ‘reasonableness,’ " Riley , 573 U.S. at 381, 134 S.Ct. 2473 (internal quotation marks omitted), so technological advancements may alter the contours of Fourth Amendment doctrine. See, e.g. , Kyllo v. United States , 533 U.S. 27, 35–36, 121 S.Ct. 2038, 150 L.Ed.2d 94 (2001). Riley is illustrative. There, the Supreme Court held that cellphones fall outside the search-incident-to-arrest exception because the government's interests in officer safety and evidence preservation did not outweigh an arrestee's particular privacy interest in his cellphone. Both sides of the balancing test were affected by a cellphone's ability to store "vast quantities of personal information." Riley , 573 U.S. at 386, 134 S.Ct. 2473.

Riley first noted that the expectation of privacy, though lowered by custodial arrest, was not eliminated. Id. at 392, 134 S.Ct. 2473. Cellphones differed greatly, the Court observed, from physical items, like a "cigarette pack, a wallet, or a purse" because of their "immense storage capacity" which may contain "a revealing montage of the user's life." Id. at 393, 396, 134 S.Ct. 2473. Therefore, an arrestee's privacy interest in his cellphone garnered more protection than, say, the cigarette pack found on the arrestee in United States v. Robinson . 414 U.S. at 236, 94 S.Ct. 467.

Regarding the government's twin interests of officer safety and evidence preservation, the Court noted that "[d]igital data stored on a cell phone cannot itself be used as a weapon to harm an arresting officer or to effectuate the arrestee's escape." Riley , 573 U.S. at 387, 134 S.Ct. 2473. Officers retained the ability to "examine the physical aspects of a phone to ensure that it will not be used as a weapon." Id. And though potential destruction of...