United States v. Cruz-Romero

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

v.ALEJANDRO CRUZ-ROMERO

CRIMINAL ACTION NO. 1:13cr28-MHT (WO)

DISTRICT COURT OF THE UNITED STATES FOR THE MIDDLE DISTRICT OF ALABAMA, SOUTHERN DIVISION

DONE: August 5, 2013

OPINION AND ORDER

Defendants Alejandro Cruz-Romero and Blake Ronnie Enfinger are criminally charged with trafficking methamphetamine in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2 (aiding and abetting) and 21 U.S.C. §§ 841(a)(1) (drug trafficking) and 846 (conspiracy). This case is currently before the court on Cruz-Romero's motion to suppress. Cruz-Romero asks the court to suppress evidence uncovered in his trailer in what he contends was an illegal warrantless search under the Fourth Amendment. An evidentiary hearing was held on the motion on July 18, 2013.¹ For the reasons that follow, the motion will be denied.

I. BACKGROUND

In early 2013, officers from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and the Alabama Beverage Control Board set out to arrest two suspected drug traffickers on whom they had been gathering intelligence for some time, Enfinger and the person supplying his methamphetamine, who they believed was named "Alex" and was of Hispanic heritage. An undercover officer and a confidential informant drove to a Daleville, Alabama Waffle House parking lot where they had previously arranged to meet Enfinger to buy two ounces of methamphetamine. When Enfinger met the two there, he did not yet have the promised drugs, so he set out in his pickup truck to go get it. As he did, undercover officers trailed him. The officers followed Enfinger as he drove around the area and made several stops at gas stations and other locations. Although the officers lost sight of him on several occasions, including one time when he entered a Walmart, they generally succeeded intracking his movements over the course of the next few hours.

The officers eventually followed Enfinger to the Oak Terrace Trailer Park. The trailer park had two entrances off a state highway and consisted of about a dozen trailers in a loop, surrounded by woods on most sides. Because the park had such tight quarters, the officers decided not to follow Enfinger inside, but instead to drive around the outside and post themselves at places on the perimeter and try to watch his movements.

While Enfinger was in the park, one officer driving nearby saw a female walking on the side of the road. She appeared to the officer to be holding a cell phone. As he drove past her, she watched him and periodically looked down to what the officer thought was her phone. Based on her movements, she appeared to be sending a text message. The officer's vehicle was not marked as belonging to law enforcement, but he was wearing a ballistic vest bearing the word "POLICE," which hethought she may have seen. His "gut feeling," from past experience with how drug dealers work, was that she was a paid "lookout" (somebody who watches for law enforcement during criminal activity) for "Alex," Enfinger's methamphetamine supplier, who was most likely in that trailer park, and she was using her phone to alert "Alex" to the officer's presence. The officer reasoned that, the woman appeared to be Hispanic and, according to his intelligence, "Alex" was also Hispanic, and that, he thought, supported his suspicion that they were involved in a criminal conspiracy together. He also found it suspicious how she watched him while using her phone, and that she was standing on that particular road, which was in a generally rural area.

The officer radioed a request for others to go check her out. He also turned around to check her out himself. When the officers approached her, it was clear that a language barrier precluded meaningful communication. She no longer seemed to have her phone, or whatever it wasthat the officer thought was a phone, and she could not explain why that was in a language the officers understood. They suspected that she had thrown the phone into a deep ravine beside the road, but none of them made any attempt to enter the ravine to search for it. Instead, the officers gave up on her in short order and returned to pursuing Enfinger.

Around this same time, an officer watched Enfinger park his truck in the trailer park, get out, walk towards a trailer, and turn around its corner, apparently walking towards the trailer's entrance. Although the line of sight between the officer and Enfinger was lost when Enfinger turned the trailer's corner, it seemed apparent to the officer which trailer's entrance he was proceeding towards. The officer informed the others of this over the radio. Some time later, Enfinger exited the trailer, got back into his truck, and drove out of the park, onto the state highway. Some officers continued to trail him while others stayed behind.

Minutes later, Enfinger was back at the Waffle House parking lot where the undercover officer and the confidential informant were waiting for him, and he delivered them the promised methamphetamine. He then left the parking lot and drove onto the highway. After about two miles, two marked sheriff's department cars turned on their blue lights. Instead of stopping immediately, Enfinger made a very brief attempted escape, steering abruptly off the roadway and accelerating across the median. He stopped almost immediately, however, before running his car into a steep drainage ditch. He then gave up the attempted flight and succumbed to arrest. Asked where he had gotten the methamphetamine, he answered, "Alejandro," who, he said, was back at the trailer park.

The arresting officers called their cohorts back at the park to inform them of Enfinger's arrest and statements. Having learned that Enfinger had implicated "Alejandro," the officers immediately approached thetrailer they believed Enfinger had entered, knocked several times, and, there being no answer, took the door by force.² About a dozen officers stormed inside and found Cruz-Romero as he was either in or getting out of the shower. They allowed him to put on a pair of pants, but, before they did, they searched the pockets. There, they found several thousand dollars, which they believed was the money Enfinger used to buy the methamphetamine. The cash was seized and Cruz-Romero was arrested.

The officers did not have a warrant for the search.

II. DISCUSSION

Cruz-Romero asks this court to suppress at trial the cash and any other evidence that was found during the warrantless search of his trailer, which he contends was an illegal search under the Fourth Amendment.³

A.

The Fourth Amendment protects "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." U.S. Const. amend IV. "It is a basic principle of Fourth Amendment law that searches and seizures inside a home without a warrant are presumptively unreasonable. A warrantless search is allowed, however, where both probable cause and exigent circumstances exist." UnitedStates v. Rush, 248 F. Supp. 2d 1121, 1123 (M.D. Ala. 2003) (Thompson, J.) (punctuation and citations omitted).

"Probable cause," the first requirement for a warrantless search, "exists where the facts lead a reasonably cautious person to believe that the search will uncover evidence of a crime." United States v. Burgos, 720 F.2d 1520, 1525 (11th Cir. 1983) (quotation marks and citation omitted). Here, the circumstances leading up to the entry into the trailer, including, most importantly, the arrest of Enfinger and his implicating Cruz-Romero (that is, "Alejandro"), were sufficient for reasonable law-enforcement officers to believe that evidence of drug trafficking could be found in the trailer. Cruz-Romero challenges this conclusion because, given that the officers lost sight of Enfinger on several occasions, they did not, in fact, actually know for sure whether Enfinger had purchased the drugs inside the trailer rather than, perhaps, another trailer, or somewhere else around town where Enfinger had stopped.But that argument is without merit: Probable cause requires only a probability, not a certainty, e.g., Dahl v. Holley, 312 F.3d 1228, 1234 (11th Cir. 2002) ("Nor does probable cause require certainty on the part of the police. Sufficient probability, not certainty, is the touchstone of reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment.") (punctuation and citation omitted), and there was certainly a high probability that Enfinger purchased the drugs in the trailer, like he said he did, rather than, say, at the Walmart.

As for "exigent circumstances," the second requirement for a warrantless search, that term "refers to a situation where the inevitable delay incident to obtaining a warrant must give way to an urgent need for immediate action." Burgos, 720 F.2d at 1526. For example, exigent circumstances are often found where delay could reasonably result in the endangerment of the public or law-enforcement officers or the destruction of evidence of crime. See id. at 1525-26. "The need toinvoke the exigent circumstances exception to the warrant requirement is particularly compelling in narcotics cases because narcotics can be so easily and quickly destroyed." Rush, 248 F. Supp. 2d at 1123 (punctuation and citation omitted). The legal test for exigent circumstances is "whether the facts would lead a reasonable, experienced agent to believe that [an exigency was present].... Thus, the court is not looking at whether the officers possibly could have secured a warrant before they entered [the] property, but whether it was reasonable for the officers to believe that [the warrantless entry was necessary]." Id. at 1123-24 (citations omitted; emphasis in original).

Here, the evidence is sufficient to support that reasonable officers could have believed that warrantless entry was necessary. For one, there were several opportunities for Cruz-Romero to have discovered that the officers were outside his trailer: although the officers did not know for sure that the woman they encountered wasan actual lookout for Cruz-Romero,...