CA10: No REP in motel room used for FBI sting on cop

Defendant was a Tulsa police officer caught in an FBI sting suspecting him and others of stealing from drug dealers. The FBI rented a motel room and wired it for video and sound, and the FBI agent in the room as known as “Joker.” Defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the conversations in the room that would make a Title III warrant necessary. United States v. Wells, 739 F.3d 511 (10th Cir. 2014):

Wells’s voluminous assertions on appeal can be boiled down to the following narrow proposition: the district court erred in its analysis when it focused on the location where Wells’s speech took place, rather than on Wells’s personal privacy expectations in the content of his conversations. It is certainly true that “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.” Katz, 389 U.S. at 351. “But the extent to which the Fourth Amendment protects people may depend upon where those people are.” Carter, 525 U.S. at 88. The Supreme Court has specifically held that “capacity to claim the protection of the Fourth Amendment depends upon whether the person who claims the protection of the Amendment has a legitimate expectation of privacy in the invaded place.” Id. (quotation and alteration omitted). Thus, the district court was quite correct to consider Wells’s connection or, more appropriately, lack of connection, to Joker’s motel room in evaluating Wells’s suppression motion.

Like the district court, we conclude Wells’s complete lack of socially meaningful connection to Joker’s motel room renders objectively unreasonable any expectation of privacy he had in his communications and actions in that room. …