CA8: Motel security’s determination to eject “trespassers” denied them any REP in room

A guy named Inmon rented a motel room for one night for one person and then left. Motel security noticed three people separately go to the room carrying bags. The police were called, and Inmon was arrested for no DL when he showed back up at the motel. Motel security then told the police the rest were trespassers and evict them. Nobody would answer the door, so motel security said to break in. Three people were inside with drugs. As trespassers, they had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the room. United States v. Bohmont, 2011 U.S. App. LEXIS 6287 (8th Cir. March 25, 2011) (unpublished):

We address Inmon’s and Bohmont’s Fourth Amendment challenges separately, as each can rely only on his own expectation of privacy. Inmon rented the room that the officers searched, giving him a reasonable expectation of privacy in the room. See Conner, 127 F.3d at 666. However, once he was arrested and the officers told the hotel security guard they were taking Inmon to jail, the security guard asked the officers to remove all other guests from Inmon’s room, as he considered them to be trespassers with no legitimate basis for being in the room. The officers took Inmon to the room with them when they went to evict the other occupants at Mr. Bastean’s request, and Inmon was present when the officers knocked on the door and told the occupants they had to leave because they were trespassing. Even though Mr. Bastean did not explicitly tell Inmon that he had been evicted from the hotel, we believe these facts are sufficient to establish that Inmon had in fact been evicted. Missouri law allows a hotel to eject a person if the hotel operator “reasonably believes that the individual is using the premises for an unlawful purpose.” Mo. Rev. Stat. § 315.075(3). Mr. Bastean called the police because of concerns that the room was being used to traffic drugs. The officers’ discovery of drug paraphernalia on Inmon’s person was sufficient to justify Mr. Bastean’s concern that there were illegal drugs in the room and allow him to eject Inmon when the officers arrested him and told Mr. Bastean they were taking Inmon to jail. Under our precedent, once an individual is lawfully ejected from a hotel, the rental period terminates and “control over the hotel room revert[s] to the management.” United States v. Rambo, 789 F.2d 1289, 1295-96 (8th Cir. 1986) (holding that a hotel occupant who was asked to leave by police officers acting on behalf of hotel management who complained of defendant’s disorderly behavior was justifiably ejected under state law and no longer had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the hotel room); see also Young v. Harrison, 284 F.3d 863, 869 (8th Cir. 2002) (holding that defendant “was justifiably evicted from the hotel because his friends created a disturbance” despite absence of any state statute addressing evictions from a hotel, such that “the control over the hotel room reverted to the management and [the defendant] ‘[could] not assert an expectation of being free from police intrusion upon his solitude and privacy in a place from which he has been justifiably expelled’” (quoting Rambo, 789 F.2d at 1296)). Thus, at the time the officers forcibly entered the hotel room at Mr. Bastean’s request, Inmon had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the hotel room, and the subsequent search of the room did not violate his Fourth Amendment rights.

Bohmont’s expectation of privacy in Inmon’s hotel room is even more attenuated. Bohmont did not rent the room, and the district court determined that he was not Inmon’s overnight guest but rather was nothing “more than [a] ‘mere visitor[] in the room.’” (R&R at 14.) …