The government failed to prove a standardized inventory procedure in the local police department. And, the inventory appeared to be an investigative search, not a legitimate inventory, so it is suppressed. United States v. Dennis, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 99472 (M.D. Ga. June 14, 2018):
It cannot be left wholly to a law enforcement’s discretion in determining whether to open a closed container during an inventory search. Wells, 495 U.S. at 4. Although, again, a police officer is allowed some discretion, including “sufficient latitude to determine whether a particular container should or should not be opened in light of the nature of the search and characteristics of the container itself,” the Government must produce evidence of a standardized policy or routine that guided the officer’s decision. Id. And the burden is on the Government to provide evidence of that policy so that the Court can determine if the search was conducted in accordance with that policy or whether, if the officer exercised discretion to deviate from that policy, any deviation from the policy was reasonable under the facts and circumstances. See Wells, 495 U.S. at 4-5 (ruling that, absent an inventory policy, the search at issue “was not sufficiently regulated to satisfy the Fourth Amendment and that [evidence found therefrom] was properly suppressed”).
Thus, whether the Government has proven that the unidentified officer properly opened the cigarette box depends on whether he acted according to standardized criteria or established routine or, if he used his discretion to veer from that policy, whether it was reasonable to do so. See United States Khoury, 901 F.2d 948, 958 (11th Cir. 1990) (ruling it was error to deny a motion to suppress evidence from an inventory search where the Government provided no evidence “that the inventory search followed a standardized procedure pursuant to regulatory strictures” despite the investigating officer’s assertion that “the search was performed as a matter of course when a vehicle was impounded and the investigating officer was not at liberty to decline to inventory the contents”) ruling modified on other grounds by United States v. Khoury, 910 F.2d 713 (11th Cir. 1990).
Here, there is no evidence of the inventory policy other than Prosser’s very general description, and, in any event, there is no evidence the unidentified officer knew what that policy was. In short, the Court simply has no evidence that would allow it to conclude that when the unidentified officer “further investigat[ed]” the crumpled cigarette box he was acting within the scope of or was guided by the Georgia State Patrol’s standard procedures. On the contrary, the scant available evidence of the standard procedures suggests that the officer’s “further investigation” went beyond simply listing items for safekeeping. In fact, the evidence suggests that Prosser found the crushed cigarette box to be of no particular significance in his inventory of the vehicle and that is the reason he simply placed it on the console. The further investigation by the unidentified officer was just that—a further investigation beyond the scope of an inventory search, as described by Prosser, that led to the discovery of the drugs. Perhaps there was a legitimate reason for the unidentified officer to open up a crumpled cigarette box when Prosser had not, but there is no evidence of what that reason may be.
The Government has not met its burden. Accordingly, the evidence seized from Dennis’s vehicle during the January 20, 2016 inventory of that vehicle must be suppressed.
by John Wesley Hall
Criminal Defense Lawyer and
Search and seizure law consultant
Little Rock, Arkansas
Contact: forhall @ aol.com / The Book www.johnwesleyhall.com
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced."
—Williams
v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold,
J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws,
or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp
v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that
bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the
police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater
than it is today."
— Terry
v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their
property."
—Entick
v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have
frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And
so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his
case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth
Amendment."
—United
States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated
here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth."
—Chapman
v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the
bottom of a turntable."
—Arizona
v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly
exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth
Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in
an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."
—Katz
v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to
protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born
to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men
of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
—United
States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted
intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by
government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose
it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.”
—United
States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want /
But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need."
—Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
"In Germany, they first came for the communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for
the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came
for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration
camp]
“You know, most men would get discouraged by
now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!”
---Pepé Le Pew
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers,
is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which
reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that
those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being
judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting
out crime."
—Johnson
v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)