CA10: Defendant granted a general consent to search his vehicle, and that included closed containers; even prying broken seams of an ice chest

Defendant granted a general consent to search his vehicle, and that included closed containers. Here, there were two ice chests. The hinges and seams looked tampered with and they contained fish (often to mask drug odor). One officer used an upholstery tool to separate the already broken seam and saw foam that wasn’t part of the manufacturing. Under that he finally saw a black bundle which had drugs. The consent was valid as to prying open the ice chests. United States v. Mendoza, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 5597 (10th Cir. March 25, 2016):

Defendant contends that even if his consent was valid, the search of the first ice chest exceeded the scope of that consent. “The standard for measuring the scope of a suspect’s consent under the Fourth Amendment is that of ‘objective’ reasonableness—what would the typical reasonable person have understood by the exchange between the officer and the suspect?” Jimeno, 500 U.S. at 251. The consenting party “may of course delimit as he chooses the scope of the search to which he consents.” Id. at 252. Absent an explicit limitation, however, “a general consent to search [a car] includes closed containers within the vehicle, and this court has specifically ruled that a failure to object to the continuation of a search indicates that the search was conducted within the scope of the consent given.” United States v. Santurio, 29 F.3d 550, 553 (10th Cir. 1994) (citation omitted). Still, “before an officer may actually destroy or render completely useless a container which would otherwise be within the scope of a permissive search, the officer must obtain explicit authorization, or have some other, lawful, basis upon which to proceed.” United States v. Osage, 235 F.3d 518, 522 (10th Cir. 2000).

Defendant’s consent was to a general search without limitations. His consent therefore extended to closed containers in his vehicle. But he contends that both prying open the lining of the ice chest and dumping the seafood on the road damaged his property beyond any reasonable construction of his consent. We disagree.

Trooper Koch’s further separation of the already separated inner and outer lining of the ice chest did not permanently damage it. The linings had been partially separated before the search by the tampering required for the drugs to be placed between the linings. …