In United States v. Lyle, 15-058-cr (April 1, 2019) (Raggi, Chin, Lohier), the Second Circuit, following a remand from the United States Supreme Court, once again held that the search of a rental car that James Lyle was driving (1) without a valid driver’s license, (2) without the permission of the rental car company, but (3) with the permission of the authorized driver, was lawful. We covered the panel’s original opinion in United States v. Lyle, 856 F.3d 191 (2d Cir. 2017) in a June 1, 2017 post. That post lays out the rather interesting facts and procedural history of this methamphetamine distribution and conspiracy case, and discusses each of the issues originally raised on appeal by Lyles and his co-defendant, Michael Van Praagh, including the panel’s original treatment of the rental car search issue. Subsequent to that blog post, the United States Supreme Court granted Lyle’s petition for a writ of certiorari challenging the search of the rental car and remanded to the Second Circuit for further consideration in light of its unanimous decision in Byrd v. United States, 584 U.S. ---, 138 S. Ct. 1518 (2018). Byrd included grand rhetoric about the Fourth Amendment, with Justice Kennedy writing that “[f]ew protections are as essential to individual liberty as the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.” 138 S. Ct. at 1526. On remand, however, the Circuit once again upheld the search of the rental car.
On December 13, 2013, New York Police Department (NYPD) officers observed Lyle park and exit a car in midtown Manhattan. Officers noticed what appeared to be an illegal gravity knife clipped to his pants, and inquired about the knife.[1] Lyle told police that he was permitted to carry it for work purposes. He also initially denied that he had been driving the vehicle, but admitted that he had been when police told him that they had seen him driving it. When asked for identification, Lyle provided officers with an expired license; they soon learned that his driving privileges were suspended. Officers also determined that the vehicle Lyle was driving was a rental car, and that Lyle was not an authorized user under the rental agreement. Lyle told police that his girlfriend had rented the car and given him permission to drive it. He was arrested for driving with a suspended license and possession of an illegal knife. Prior to leaving the scene, Lyle asked police to allow him to contact his girlfriend so that she could pick up the rental car. They denied the request, and instead towed and impounded the vehicle. An inventory search of the vehicle at the police station led to the discovery of over a pound of methamphetamine and approximately $39,000 in cash in the trunk of the car.
The district court denied Lyle’s motion to suppress, ruling that Lyle had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the rental car because he was not an authorized driver under the rental agreement, and that in the alternative, the inventory search of the vehicle was lawful. On appeal, the Circuit was faced with a circuit split on the reasonable privacy expectations of an unauthorized rental car driver. The panel declined to address head-on whether an unauthorized rental car driver ever has a...
