CA6: Mixed motive for administrative search doesn’t make it unreasonable

Following other circuits, just because an administrative search has a mixed motive that the plaintiff tow company owner may have stolen property did not make the administrative search invalid. Rodriguez v. City of Cleveland, 439 Fed. Appx. 433 (6th Cir. 2011):

The individual defendants’ pre-search suspicion that Rodriguez possessed a stolen dump truck did not render their warrantless administrative search of M & M invalid. This conclusion finds support in United States v. Villamonte-Marquez, 462 U.S. 579, 103 S. Ct. 2573, 77 L. Ed. 2d 22 (1983), where the Supreme Court concluded that customs officers had not offended the Fourth Amendment when, pursuant to a federal statute, those officers boarded a sailboat in a shipping channel and asked to see the sailboat’s documentation. Id. at 580-83, 592-93. …

In cases more factually analogous to this one, other federal circuits have concluded that an officer’s suspicion as to the presence of a stolen vehicle did not render unconstitutional the initiation of a warrantless administrative inspection of an automotive repair- or salvage-related business. For example, in Bruce v. Beary, 498 F.3d 1232 (11th Cir. 2007), an Auto Theft Unit officer had received a complaint from an individual who had allegedly purchased a vehicle with a suspicious VIN from a particular auto body repair shop and salvage yard. Id. at 1235-36. After receiving this complaint, the officer and his supervisor set out to search the repair shop/salvage yard pursuant to a Florida statute that “permits a warrantless physical inspection of” such businesses “during normal business hours ‘for the purpose of locating stolen vehicles.’” Id. at 1236 (quoting Fla. Stat. § 812.055). In a subsequent civil rights action, the owner of the repair shop/salvage yard asserted that, “from the inception, the search of the [business] was not a routine administrative inspection, but rather an ordinary criminal raid, undertaken with suspicion of a particular crime and implemented to discover and seize evidence of that crime.” Id. at 1240. Although the Eleventh Circuit recognized “that the administrative search exception [should] not be allowed to swallow whole the Fourth Amendment,” id. at 1241, that court concluded that the inception of the warrantless administrative inspection at issue nonetheless passed constitutional muster, id. at 1242. Noting that “[t]he Supreme Court has made quite clear that an administrative search is not rendered invalid because it is accompanied by some suspicion of wrongdoing,” the Eleventh Circuit determined that the complaint the officers had received did not generate the probable cause necessary to support an application for a search warrant. Id. Lacking “direct criminal suspicion of wrongdoing,” the officers had “validly invoked their statutory authority to” search the repair shop/salvage yard. Id.