People v. Rodriguez

NOT TO BE PUBLISHED

APPEAL from an order of the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, No. C1641175 Eric S. Geffon, Judge. Affirmed. Request for judicial notice denied.

Seth Flagsberg, under appointment by the Court of Appeal, for Defendant and Appellant.

Matthew Rodriquez, Acting Attorney General, Lance E. Winters, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Jeffrey M. Laurence, Assistant Attorney General, Eric D. Share and Katie L. Stowe, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.

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DATO, J.

Defendant Jaime Phillip Rodriguez was apprehended in a residential neighborhood after parking his car. A search of his vehicle following his arrest yielded drug contraband. Rodriguez moved to suppress the evidence, arguing that Officer Eric Bachman of the San Jose Police Department lacked reasonable suspicion to detain him and claiming Bachman's discovery of an outstanding arrest warrant during the detention did not sufficiently attenuate the taint of the initial illegal detention. The trial court accepted Rodriguez's first argument but rejected his second, and he now appeals. For reasons we recently explained in People v. Kasrawi (2021) 65 Cal.App.5th 751 review granted, S270040 (Kasrawi), ^[1] federal and state Supreme Court authorities compel our conclusion that even if the initial detention was unlawful, the evidence need not be suppressed. As the trial court found, Officer Bachman's discovery of the arrest warrant during the allegedly unlawful detention attenuated any taint that would otherwise attach to his subsequent search of Rodriguez's vehicle. Accordingly, we affirm the trial court's order denying Rodriguez's motion to suppress.

FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

Around 3:40 a.m. on April 14, 2016, Bachman was patrolling a residential area in San Jose in his marked police vehicle. The headlights on Bachman's vehicle illuminated the area in front of him. He observed a car proceeding normally on Pedro Street near the Northrup Street intersection; the car pulled over to the right and parked legally alongside the curb. The

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intersection of Pedro and Northrup is not busy; both are two-lane roads with one lane going in each direction of travel. Bachman continued on Pedro Street. When he approached the parked vehicle, he noticed its sole occupant, Rodriguez, sitting in the driver's seat. Bachman turned on his spotlight to illuminate the vehicles parked on the south side of Pedro Street and parked in the middle of the street near Rodriguez's vehicle. There appeared to be no other people around.

Dressed in his uniform, Bachman exited his patrol vehicle and walked toward Rodriguez's car. As he approached, Rodriguez stepped out. Standing five to seven feet from him, Bachman struck up a conversation." 'Hey, what's up?'" he asked. Rodriguez replied," 'I just got off of work.'" Bachman asked Rodriguez if he lived nearby; Rodriguez responded that he lived around the corner on Northrup. Bachman asked whether Rodriguez had parked there because there was no parking on Northrup; Rodriguez answered," 'Yeah.' "

As they spoke, Bachman observed that Rodriguez was sweating, fidgeting, moving around, and speaking rapidly. He believed Rodriguez to be under the influence of a controlled substance. At that point, Bachman asked Rodriguez for identification. Rodriguez told him he did not have any on him but verbally provided his name and date of birth. Bachman dialed into the San Jose Police Department's communications unit, which ran a records check. The query revealed that Rodriguez had a suspended license and was subject to an outstanding arrest warrant. The dispatcher did not provide the docket number for the warrant, but Bachman obtained it later as he wrote up his report.

Having learned about the warrant and suspended license, Bachman attempted to handcuff Rodriguez. Rodriguez became a bit argumentative,

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and another officer arrived to help place him into handcuffs. At the time of arrest, Bachman observed that Rodriguez had fluttering eyelids, dilated pupils that were nonreactive to light, and an elevated pulse.

Soon after arresting Rodriguez, Bachman searched his person and his vehicle. The vehicle search yielded two baggies in the driver's side area containing a white, powdery residue and additional baggies in the seat pocket behind the front passenger seat containing a white, powdery substance. Another baggie containing a white, powdery substance was found in Rodriguez's sock.

Rodriguez was charged in Santa Clara County with two felonies- possession for sale of a controlled substance (Health & Saf. Code, § 11351, count 1) and transportation, sale, or distribution of a controlled substance (id., § 11352, subd. (a), count 2)-as well as two misdemeanors-using or being under the influence of a controlled substance (id., § 11550, subd. (a), count 3) and driving on a suspended license (Veh. Code, § 14601.1, subd. (a), count 4). In connection with count 4, the People alleged that Rodriguez was previously convicted in March 2011 for driving on a suspended license.

Rodriguez moved to suppress evidence from the vehicle search and Bachman's physical observations as fruits of an unlawful detention. Claiming Bachman detained Rodriguez and lobbed questions about where he lived on seeing nothing more than a man legally park his car, Rodriguez argued that the subsequent search and discovery of a substance that looked like cocaine were subject to the exclusionary rule. In addition, Rodriguez invoked the Harvey-Renters-Madden rule, requiring the prosecution to establish the source or reliability of arrest warrant information that Bachman claimed to have received. (See People v. Harvey (1958) 156 Cal.App.2d 516, 523-524;

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Renters v. Superior Court (1970) 2 Cal.3d 659, 666-667; People v. Madden (1970) 2 Cal.3d 1017, 1021.)^[2]

The People opposed the motion, arguing the initial encounter was consensual and not a detention. It was only when Bachman asked Rodriguez for identification that the People believed a detention occurred, and this was supported by reasonable suspicion that Rodriguez was under the influence of a controlled substance. Once Rodriguez was detained, the People claimed Bachman was entitled to ascertain his identity, arrest him on an outstanding warrant, and search his vehicle and person incident to arrest. Alternatively, the People argued that even if Bachman's initial encounter with Rodriguez was unlawful, the exclusionary rule did not apply because discovery of the arrest warrant attenuated any taint under Utah v. Strieff (2016) 136 S.Ct. 2056 (Strieff).^[3]

At an August 2017 evidentiary hearing, the parties examined Bachman as the sole witness. The prosecution introduced into evidence a certified copy of the DMV printout, to show that Rodriguez's license was suspended at the time of the stop (Exhibit 1), and a copy of Rodriguez's criminal record, which

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included a "CLETS printout"^[4] indicating an outstanding arrest warrant matching the docket number in Bachman's report (Exhibit 2). The court continued the hearing to permit Rodriguez to submit a supplemental brief. Arguing in his brief that Strieff was distinguishable because Bachman lacked any foundational basis to detain him, Rodriguez claimed Bachman's behavior was flagrant and weighed against attenuation.

The parties appeared before Judge Geffon for continued argument in September 2017. First, the court considered whether Bachman's initial encounter was a detention. On this, it deemed the record "clear that the officer's conduct crossed the line of a consensual encounter and became a detention." "The spotlight, in addition to the comments and the actions of the officer," the court believed, "made it so that a reasonable person would not have felt free to leave or break off that encounter." By the officer's own admission, the court found there was no reasonable suspicion to justify that detention.

Because it found the detention unlawful, it turned to whether the exclusionary rule applied, or whether discovery of the warrant was an intervening event that attenuated the taint under Strieff, supra, 136 S.Ct. 2056. Of the three attenuation factors in Strieff, the court focused mainly on the third factor-whether Bachman's conduct was purposeful or flagrant. ^[5]

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Judge Geffon began this inquiry by noting that Strieff faulted the officer for not simply asking what was happening in the suspected drug house, citing Florida v. Bostick (1991) 501 U.S. 429 for the proposition that a seizure does not occur simply because an officer approaches and asks an individual a few questions. (See Strieff, supra, 136 S.Ct. at p. 2063.) But the officer's failure to inquire was deemed to be a "good-faith mistake[ ]" reflecting "at most" negligence. (Ibid.) Drawing a parallel to this case, Judge Geffon could not say that Bachman was purposeful or flagrant in detaining Rodriguez without reasonable suspicion. Rather, in the judge's view, Bachman "clearly" intended to engage in a consensual encounter but went too far in his attempt. As a result, this was a mere act of negligence and not the type of purposeful or flagrant misconduct the exclusionary rule served to deter.

Rodriguez filed a motion for reconsideration. In his supporting memorandum, Rodriguez claimed that Bachman detained him "solely on a hunch, without any articulable basis for suspecting illegality," rendering the official misconduct "critically different" than that considered in Strieff. As he does on appeal, Rodriguez relied on People v. Bates (2013) 222 Cal.App.4th 60 (Bates), an attenuation case involving the intervening discovery of a probation search condition, to argue that suppression was required to deter officers from engaging in such suspicionless...