CA7: WI law of hotel ejectments reasonably relied on by officers to conduct hotel room search after arrest

Defendant was arrested as a parole absconder also known to be a forger and identity thief, and there was a printer in the backseat of his car. He was in a hotel room in Wisconsin, not registered in his name. Under the Wisconsin law of ejectment of hotel tenants, the hotelier was free to get them out after the arrest, and the police could be used to gather their stuff. In addition, the government’s use of an administrative IRS summons didn’t circumvent any constitutional rights. Defendant was known to be an identity thief, and this was reasonable at the time. United States v. Procknow, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 6942 (7th Cir. April 27, 2015):

Thus, Procknow’s and Van Krevelen’s justifiable ejection (or at least the officers’ reasonable belief on this point) extinguished any legitimate expectation of privacy Procknow may have had in room 315, and authority (or apparent authority) to consent to entry into room 315 thereby reverted to the hotel. See Molsbarger, 551 F.3d at 811; Finsel, 326 F.3d at 907; Rambo, 789 F.2d at 1295-96; Akin, 562 F.2d at 464. The district court found that, after the ejection, hotel management asked the EPD officers to enter room 315 for the purpose of clearing the room of the dog and any other unregistered occupants. This finding—while not necessary to our holding since Procknow’s expectation of privacy had vanished—was not clearly erroneous. We conclude that the district court did not err in denying Procknow’s motion to suppress the evidence obtained from the hotel room.

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Even if we were to insist upon a showing of probable cause in this situation, the government has shown that, prior to the issuance of the administrative summonses or the grand jury subpoenas, the authorities had adequate probable cause to believe Procknow was involved in stolen-identity refund theft. The authorities had a wealth of information on this score obtained (legally, as we have just held) from the search of Procknow’s hotel room, as well as the April 2011 suspicious-activity report by Procknow’s bank of five deposits into Procknow’s account of tax refunds in three different names. We cannot say that the use of the withdrawn administrative summonses circumvented any probable cause requirement or otherwise violated Procknow’s constitutional rights. Accordingly, even if the IRS issued the summonses in contravention of § 7602, suppression of the evidence derived from the grand jury subpoenas would not be the appropriate remedy. See Caceres, 440 U.S. at 754-55 (“In view of our conclusion that none of respondent’s constitutional rights has been violated here, either by the actual recording or by the [IRS’s] violation of its own regulations, our precedents enforcing the exclusionary rule to deter constitutional violations provide no support for the rule’s application in this case.”).

The government argued a lack of a reasonable expectation by a parole absconder, but the court felt it didn’t have to go there there.