United States v. Castro

881 F.3d 961

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff–Appellant,

v.Chaka CASTRO and Juan Olaya, Defendants–Appellees.

No. 17-1590

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

Argued: February 1, 2018

Decided and Filed: February 7, 2018

ARGUED: Andrew Goetz, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY'S OFFICE, Detroit, Michigan, for Appellant. James C. Thomas, JAMES C. THOMAS, P.C., Sterling Heights, Michigan, for Appellee Castro. Kenneth R. Sasse, Lake Orion, Michigan, for Appellee Olaya. ON BRIEF: Andrew Goetz, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY'S OFFICE, Detroit, Michigan, for Appellant. James C. Thomas, JAMES C. THOMAS, P.C., Sterling Heights, Michigan, for Appellee Castro. Kenneth R. Sasse, Lake Orion, Michigan, for Appellee Olaya.

Before: SUTTON, KETHLEDGE, and LARSEN, Circuit Judges.

SUTTON, Circuit Judge.

In December 2014, a string of home invasions struck Dallas, Texas. Law enforcement focused their investigation on Chaka Castro and Juan Fernando Olaya. Texas courts issued warrants to search their phones. Consistent with the warrants, state officers conducted detailed searches of Castro's phones and a cursory search of Olaya's phone, and the FBI conducted a full search of Olaya's phone. Each search turned up potentially incriminating evidence that the individuals had violated federal racketeering laws. The district court granted each defendant's motion to suppress. Because each search complied with the Fourth Amendment, we reverse.

I.

Over a three-day period in December 2014, a spate of robberies occurred in and around Dallas. The crimes fit a pattern. The robbers broke into the home, rounded up the occupants at gunpoint, and bound them with duct tape. Then they searched the home for valuables and took what they found.

On December 7, police interrupted a robbery attempt that fit this pattern. The robbers fled on foot. Later that day, police arrested Juan Fernando Olaya after finding him in a stolen vehicle with a suspected accomplice. The police inventoried the vehicle's contents and took custody of a Samsung Galaxy cell phone. Suspecting that Olaya was one of the robbers involved in the crime spree, the police obtained a warrant to search the phone from a state magistrate judge. The warrant incorporated a police affidavit, which explained why the cell phone probably contained evidence about the robberies.

An officer reviewed the contents of the phone by hand. He found potentially incriminating evidence and took screen shots of it, after which he stored the seized phone at an evidence storage facility.

In January 2015, Texas officials merged their investigation with a federal investigation based in the Eastern District of Michigan focused on a multistate criminal enterprise. Later that year, Texas officers transferred the Samsung Galaxy to the FBI for a more detailed analysis. The Bureau searched the phone based on the state court warrant.

Meanwhile, Texas officers came to suspect that Chaka Castro had organized the robberies. They followed a signal coming from a stolen cell phone to a house where Castro lived. Officers watched the home, searched it twice, and conducted a brief search of Castro's cell phones after obtaining her consent. Based on this evidence, a different Texas judge issued search warrants for Castro's two phones. Both warrants used the same language, save for the description of the phone. In relevant part, each said:

Proof having been made before me under oath by [the investigating officer] that there is probable cause to believe that evidence of violations of Texas Penal Code 29.03 (Aggravated Robbery), exists on named phone device ..., you are hereby COMMANDED to execute a search for but not limited to the following pieces of evidence:

Subscriber information, cell phone location data, business records, photographs, images, depictions[,] correspondence, notes, paper, ledgers, personal telephone and address books, voice messages, text messages, memoranda, telexes, facsimiles, or other documents (in any form printed or digital) which reflect the receipt, purchase, transmission, and/or communication of a crime or any other electronic, magnetic, optical, electrochemical, or high-speed data processing device performing logical arithmetic, or storage functions; hard disk, drum, CD ROM or scanner; communication facilities directly relating to or operating in conjunction with such device, or any other files, deleted or not involved in this or any other unlawful activities.

R. 169–1 at 7; R. 169–2 at 7.

Officers searched each phone and found incriminating evidence about the robberies.

The federal government charged Castro and Olaya with violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The defendants moved to suppress the cell-phone evidence on the ground that the searches violated the Fourth Amendment. The district court granted the motions, and the federal government appealed.

II.

Castro. The Fourth Amendment demands that a search warrant "particularly describ[e]" the places law enforcement may search and the things they may seize. U.S. Const. amend. IV. Warrants empower and constrain. Riley v. California , ––– U.S. ––––, 134 S.Ct. 2473, 2485, 189 L.Ed.2d 430 (2014).

In attacking the (two nearly identically worded) warrants, Castro claims that they flubbed the particularity requirement because they permitted searches for evidence of "a crime," seemingly allowing the police to look at her phone in search of evidence of any crime rather than evidence of the robberies. A catch-all phrase at the end of the warrants made things worse, she adds, as it permitted officers to look for "any other files, deleted or not involved in this or any other unlawful activities." Neither concern requires suppression.

Start with "a crime." Castro claims that the officers should have used "the" rather than "a," which would have cured the warrants' overbreadth. But that wording would have created problems of its own, as more than one armed robbery prompted the warrants. The affidavit lays out evidence of probable cause that Castro participated in several armed robberies. That is why the warrants mention "violations of Texas Penal Code 29.03 (Aggravated Robbery)." The officer wanted the search to cover all of the robberies listed in the affidavit. A general article ("a") rather than a specific one ("the") served that end.

The rest of the language in the warrants reinforces this interpretation. A warrant that empowers police to search for something satisfies the particularity requirement if its text constrains the search to evidence of a specific crime. See Andresen v. Maryland , 427 U.S. 463, 480–81, 96 S.Ct. 2737, 49 L.Ed.2d 627 (1976) ; United States v. Raglin , 663 Fed.Appx. 409, 413 (6th Cir. 2016) ; United States v. Christie , 717 F.3d 1156, 1165–66 (10th Cir. 2013). Castro's warrants did just that. The first two lines of each warrant noted that they were based on "probable cause to believe that evidence of violations of Texas Penal Code 29.03 (Aggravated Burglary)" would be found on the phones. That language served as a "global modifier" that limited the scope of the warrant to evidence of aggravated burglary. United States v. Willoughby , 742 F.3d 229, 233 (6th Cir. 2014) ; see Andresen , 427 U.S. at 480–81, 96 S.Ct. 2737. Read as a whole, the warrants told officers they could search only for evidence related to aggravated burglary.

Andresen v. Maryland considered a warrant that permitted the seizure of "fruits, instrumentalities and evidence of crime at this (time) unknown." 427 U.S. at 479, 96 S.Ct. 2737. The word "crime," the Court held, should not be read in isolation to encompass all crimes but to refer only to the crime of false pretenses mentioned earlier in the warrant. Id. at 480–81, 96 S.Ct. 2737. A similar conclusion fits this case. See United States v. Johnson , 690 F.2d 60, 64–65 (3d Cir. 1982) (upholding a warrant for "a crime" and "a criminal offense").

This interpretation also respects another imperative in reading warrants: They need not meet the rigors of Roget, Merriam, Webster, Strunk, and White. A commonsense contextual reading usually suffices, and usually gets the point the magistrate and officer sought to express. See Illinois v. Gates , 462 U.S. 213, 235–36, 103 S.Ct. 2317, 76 L.Ed.2d 527 (1983).

Consider an analogy. Suppose a mother gave her teenager a grocery list that said: "I checked the pantry and we are out of Cheerios. Please go to the market and buy a box of cereal." The mother would be irritated if the teenager came home with a box of barley. Sure, barley is a cereal—of sorts—and, sure, it comes in a box, but the full statement and the context in which it was made would inform a reasonable person that the mother meant a box of breakfast cereal. So also today: Context shows that "a crime" refers only to the list of crimes already mentioned.

The catch-all phrase tacked onto the operative sentence in each warrant—"any other files, deleted or not involved in this or any other unlawful activities"—does not alter this conclusion. The government (to its credit) concedes that this phrase sweeps too broadly. But an "infirmity due to overbreadth does not doom the entire warrant." United States v. Greene , 250 F.3d 471, 477 (6th Cir. 2001). The remedy is to sever the offending phrase from the warrant, suppress any evidence collected under it, and admit the evidence collected under the valid portions that remain. Id. ; see also 2 Wayne R. LaFave et al., Search and Seizure § 4.6(f) (5th ed. 2017); cf. Cassady v. Goering , 567 F.3d 628, 649 (10th Cir. 2009) (McConnell, J., dissenting) (recognizing that "every federal court to consider the issue has adopted the doctrine of severance"). Both warrants are good candidates for this remedy. In each warrant, the invalid section appears at the end of the operative sentence and can be severed without changing the meaning of the valid sections of the warrant. The remaining valid sections are "sufficiently particularized, distinguishable from the invalid portions, and make up the...