US v. Debruhl, No. 09-CO-1208.

• Decision Date: 22 April 2010
• Docket Number: No. 09-CO-1208.
• Citation: 993 A.2d 571
• Parties: UNITED STATES, Appellant, v. Lorenzo Ali DEBRUHL, Appellee.
• Court: D.C. Court of Appeals

993 A.2d 571

UNITED STATES, Appellant, v. Lorenzo Ali DEBRUHL, Appellee.

No. 09-CO-1208.

District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Argued February 4, 2010.

Decided April 22, 2010.

Roy W. McLeese III, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Channing D. Phillips, Acting United States Attorney, and Lara Worm, and Ann K.H. Simon, Assistant United States Attorneys, were on the brief, for appellant.

Thomas W. Farquhar for appellee.

Chris Kemmitt, Public Defender Service, with whom James Klein, Samia Fam, and Corinne Beckwith, Public Defender Service, were on the brief for amicus curiae Public Defender Service.

Before REID and KRAMER, Associate Judges, and FERREN, Senior Judge.

FERREN, Senior Judge:

This case presents the question whether the federal "exclusionary rule" should be applied retroactively to a pending case after the Supreme Court has issued a decision expanding Fourth Amendment protection that would benefit the defendant if the rule applies.

At the time of appellee Debruhl's arrest for a traffic violation, New York v. Belton,¹ as commonly interpreted, allowed the police to search the passenger compartment of an automobile without a warrant, and virtually without restriction, when incident to a lawful arrest. Before Debruhl's trial, however, in Arizona v. Gant,² the Supreme Court narrowed Belton by precluding warrantless searches of an automobile after the occupants had been removed and secured with handcuffs, and thus no longer remained a threat to police safety or to preservation of evidence. The parties agree that Gant's revised interpretation of the Fourth Amendment applies retroactively to all cases "not yet final."³ Therefore, because Debruhl, like Gant, had been removed from his car and handcuffed before the arresting officers conducted their search, it is undisputed that the search of Debruhl's car was unconstitutional. As a consequence, argues Debruhl, the evidence seized from his car—cocaine and related drug paraphernalia—must be suppressed under the traditional exclusionary rule.

To the contrary, says the government, the evidence is admissible under the "good-faith" exception to the exclusionary rule because of the officers' reasonable, objective reliance on "settled law"—on the Belton line of cases—while conducting their search before Gant was decided. We cannot agree. As interpreted in this jurisdiction and in several federal circuits, Belton did not reflect "settled law" on which police officers could reasonably rely in conducting the warrantless search on the facts of this case. We therefore agree with the trial court's decision to reject the good-faith exception and suppress the evidence seized from Debruhl's car. Accordingly, we affirm.

I. FACTS AND PROCEEDINGS

On January 11, 2009, Metropolitan Police Department officers observed appellee Lorenzo Ali Debruhl driving an Oldsmobile with its lights off between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. in the 900 block of Hamilton Street, N.E. Officers Cepeda and Eglund decided to conduct a traffic stop of the car and ran a check of its license plate. While the officers were asking for Debruhl's driver's license and registration, their inquiry on the license plate came back showing no record or listing for the tags. Upon checking the registration provided by Debruhl, the officers found that it matched the license plate but not the car. A subsequent check of the vehicle identification number revealed that the car was unregistered. Officer Eglund asked Debruhl to step out of the car, placed him under arrest, then handcuffed him. Debruhl was escorted by Officer Cepeda to a spot behind the car while Officer Eglund searched the passenger compartment. During the search, the officer recovered a brown paper bag from under the driver's seat. Inside the bag were a pair of gloves, a digital scale, razor blades, an unspecified amount of currency, and "a clear plastic bag containing a white rock substance" that field-tested positive for cocaine.

A grand jury indicted Debruhl on one count of possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute,⁴ and one count of possession of drug paraphernalia.⁵ Before trial, Debruhl filed a motion to suppress the drugs and drug paraphernalia, and the motion was heard on September 11, 2009. Although the trial court credited the testimony of Officer Cepeda that the search had been made incident to Debruhl's arrest, the court inquired of counsel whether the Supreme Court's recent Gant decision required it to suppress the evidence as the product of a search that violated the Fourth Amendment.

The Gant case grew out of the search of a car incident to an arrest for a traffic offense on August 25, 1999.⁶ The suspect, Gant, had been handcuffed and secured in a squad car while the police searched his car and located a bag of cocaine in the pocket of a jacket on the back seat.⁷ Gant filed a motion to suppress the evidence, arguing that the search was unauthorized under the Fourth Amendment because, being handcuffed and stowed in the squad car, he had not posed a threat to the officers and, further, because his stop for a traffic offense did not authorize a search for evidence.⁸ The trial court rejected these arguments, but the Arizona Court of Appeals reversed, suppressing the evidence. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed the suppression order in an opinion issued on July 25, 2007, stressing that once the scene had been secured, New York v. Belton did not justify a search of the car incident to an arrest to protect officer safety or preserve destructible evidence.⁹

Arizona sought review in the United States Supreme Court, which granted certiorari on February 25, 2008. Oral arguments were held on October 7, 2008, and the decision came down on April 21, 2009, little more than three months after Debruhl's arrest and search. In Gant, the Supreme Court affirmed the Arizona Supreme Court ruling: with Gant handcuffed and held in the squad car, there had been no risk to police officer safety nor any need to search the car for evidence related to his arrest for a traffic offense. This decision appeared to be at odds with the traditional understanding of the Court's bright-line rule in Belton, permitting indiscriminate search of a vehicle's passenger compartment incident to a lawful arrest.

During discussion of Debruhl's suppression motion, the government conceded that Gant applied retroactively;¹⁰ Debruhl's Fourth Amendment rights had been violated. The government added, however, that despite the unlawful search, the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule should apply because the officers had done nothing wrong.¹¹ They had reasonably relied on Belton's bright-line rule (as interpreted by this court) in conducting the search, and thus suppression of the evidence would not serve the principal purpose of the rule: to deter police misconduct.¹²

After discussion of Gant and relevant case law, the trial court ruled that the good-faith exception did not apply, and that the exclusionary rule accordingly survived the government's challenge. The court granted the defense motion and suppressed the evidence of drugs and drug paraphernalia on September 24, 2009. The government then filed this pretrial appeal.¹³

II. EXCLUSIONARY RULE NOT TIED TO RETROACTIVITY OF FOURTH AMENDMENT RULING

Before addressing the government's argument based on the good-faith exception, we deal briefly with Debruhl's argument— adopted by the trial court—that under Supreme Court authority retroactive application of a Fourth Amendment ruling includes application of the exclusionary rule.

Because no one disputes that Gant's Fourth Amendment ruling applies retroactively to Debruhl—that is, no one questions that the search of Debruhl's car and seizure of evidence from it were unconstitutional —the exclusionary rule, says Debruhl, is inherent in the Fourth Amendment and flows retroactively as well. To the contrary, replies the government, the exclusionary rule no longer is considered an "essential part"¹⁴ of the Fourth Amendment "right to privacy,"¹⁵ and thus retroactive applicability of the Fourth Amendment does not necessarily imply retroactive application of the exclusionary rule, without exception; these issues are separate.¹⁶

Debruhl relies primarily on United States v. Johnson¹⁷ where the Court applied, retroactively, to a case on direct appeal, the Fourth Amendment rule announced earlier in Payton v. New York,¹⁸ and affirmed the reversal of Johnson's conviction and suppression of evidence unlawfully seized from him. The government had offered an "objective" good-faith exception to retroactive application of Payton, formulated in a way that the Court characterized as "an absurdity."¹⁹ The government, however, was contending against retroactive application of the Fourth Amendment decision itself, not merely against retroactive application of the exclusionary rule; the government made no effort to separate the exclusion remedy from the Fourth Amendment right.²⁰ As a result, the defendant received the benefit of the rule without a contest over it, and thus Debruhl cannot claim that Johnson necessarily precludes the government from presenting a "good-faith exception" argument for admission of the evidence seized from his car.

Gant presents a closer question, as language from both the Court's opinion and the principal dissent suggest that both sides assumed suppression would follow from retroactive application of the Court's decision.²¹ That said, none of the opinions in Gant expressly acknowledged, let alone addressed, that assumption. We are therefore left to deal with the issue anew in connection with the good-faith exception.

In doing so, it is important to keep in mind that we are considering an "exception." The government does not dispute that, if the good-faith exception is not satisfied, the exclusionary rule will apply to a defendant whose Fourth Amendment rights have been violated, and all unlawfully seized evidence will be suppressed. In short,...