United States v. Reed

1

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff - Appellee, v. VONNELL ALANDO REED, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 22-1573

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit

January 22, 2024

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION

ON APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN

Before: GIBBONS, WHITE, and THAPAR, Circuit Judges.

OPINION

GIBBONS, CIRCUIT JUDGE.

Vonnell Reed challenges his conviction for possessing a firearm while a convicted felon in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). Reed claims that the district court erred in denying his motion to suppress and that he was deprived of his statutory and constitutional rights to a speedy trial. Finding no basis to disturb the district court's judgment, we affirm.

I.

A.

In the late evening hours of April 4, 2019, Detroit Police Department Sergeant Harold Lewis and Officers Michael Reyes and Gibron Lockhart were together on patrol in Detroit's northwestern corner near Seven Mile Road. Approaching a stoplight, they observed a black SUV lacking a visible license plate. The officers agreed to initiate a traffic stop, and Lewis, who was driving, followed the SUV, activating the cruiser's lights. The SUV pulled over, and Lewis, Reyes and Lockhart exited the cruiser, approaching the SUV on foot.

The officers flanked the vehicle, with Lewis approaching from the driver's side, Reyes approaching from the passenger side, and Lockhart approaching from the rear. As they advanced, Reyes and Lockhart directed their flashlights through the SUV's tinted windows, and both officers observed the driver - whom they would later identify as defendant Vonnell Reed - turn towards the center console and toss an object into the SUV's backseat. Reyes then "heard a thump on the back right side door," DE 68, Suppression Hr'g Tr. Vol. II, Page ID 324, and Lockhart similarly heard "a clunk sound . . . like a metal object hitting the floorboard," id. at 307. Both officers suspected a firearm, and Reyes leaned towards Lockhart to "let him know that [he] had seen a pistol and . . . needed [Lockhart] to unlock the doors." Id. at 328.

Lockhart then veered left and joined Sergeant Lewis at the front driver's side door. After unlocking the SUV's doors to allow Reyes access to the backseat, Lockhart assisted Lewis in removing Reed from the vehicle. Upon speaking with Reed, Lewis and Lockhart learned that Reed possessed neither a valid driver's license nor a Michigan concealed pistol license. The pair handcuffed Reed and walked him back to the cruiser.

Meanwhile, Reyes opened the rear passenger door and searched the SUV's floorboard. There, he recovered a 9mm Hi-Point pistol with seven live rounds loaded in the magazine. The officers then placed Reed under arrest for carrying a concealed weapon in a motor vehicle, in violation of Mich. Comp. L. § 750.227(2).

B.

Subsequent investigation revealed Reed's four prior felony convictions, and on April 23, 2019, a federal grand jury returned a one-count indictment charging Reed with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). Reed pled not guilty, and he remained in federal custody pending trial.

The district court set a trial date of June 17, 2019, but Reed's trial did not take place for another three years. Between April 2019 and March 2020, a series of agreed continuances, in part owing to back-to-back substitutions of Reed's court-appointed counsel, repeatedly delayed Reed's trial date. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic and the district court's related precautions, together with Reed's pretrial motions and subsequent attempts to replace his attorney yet again, delayed Reed's trial until March 2022.

During this three-year interval, Reed litigated two issues relevant to his current appeal. First, Reed moved to suppress the firearm that Reyes recovered from the backseat of his SUV, arguing that the search violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The district court denied the motion, concluding that Lockhart's and Reyes's visual and auditory observations - to which they credibly testified at the suppression hearing - provided them with reasonable suspicion to conduct a protective search of Reed's vehicle.

Second, Reed urged denial of the government's October 2021 motion to adjourn trial, as further delay would violate his constitutional and statutory rights to a speedy trial. The district court disagreed and granted the government's motion. Because the bulk of the delay up to that point owed to Reed's motions, pandemic-related precautions, or a confluence of the two, the court concluded that further continuance would not violate Reed's Sixth Amendment or Speedy Trial Act rights.

Representing himself, Reed ultimately went to trial in March 2022. The jury found Reed guilty, and the district court sentenced him to seventy-one months' imprisonment. Reed now appeals his conviction, arguing that the district court erred in denying his motion to suppress and that the delays violated his speedy trial rights under the Sixth Amendment and Speedy Trial Act.

II.

A. We begin with Reed's motion to suppress. Reed contends that the district court should have excluded the 9mm Hi-Point pistol and its accompanying ammunition from the evidence at trial because Reyes discovered the pistol during an unconstitutional search of Reed's vehicle. To that end, Reed makes a predominantly factual argument, claiming that the district court erred in deeming Lockhart and Reyes credible and thus erred in accepting their version of events. Without the officers' testimony, Reed surmises, the district court lacked a basis to conclude that Reyes's search of Reed's vehicle was constitutionally sound. And without a constitutional justification for the search, Reed concludes, the firearm that Reyes recovered should have been suppressed.^[1]

We review the district court's factual findings, including its credibility determinations, for clear error. United States v. Waide, 60 F.4th 327, 335 (6th Cir. 2023). District courts are typically "in the best position to judge credibility," United States v. Bradshaw, 102 F.3d 204, 210 (6th Cir. 1996), and we therefore lend their credibility findings "great deference," United States v. Navarro-Camacho, 186 F.3d 701, 705 (6th Cir. 1999). We yield to the district court in this context unless our review of "the entire evidence" leaves us "with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed." United States v. Sanford, 476 F.3d 391, 394 (6th Cir. 2007) (quoting Navarro-Camacho, 186 F.3d at 705). And because the district court denied Reed's motion to suppress, we view the evidence in the light most favorable to the government. United States v. Hurst, 228 F.3d 751, 757 (6th Cir. 2000). If the district court chose between "two permissible views of the evidence," we will not find clear error. United States v. Campbell, 486 F.3d 949, 953 (6th Cir. 2007).

After hearing testimony from Lockhart and Reyes and viewing the dashboard and body-worn camera footage, the district court deemed the officers credible and accepted their version of events, finding that the officers (1) stopped Reed for driving without a license plate, (2) observed Reed toss a firearm-shaped object towards the backseat, (3) heard the suspected firearm land with a loud noise, and then, upon opening the rear passenger door, (4) found Reed's loaded pistol lying on the vehicle's floorboard. Although Reed testified to a different version of events, the district court found his testimony unpersuasive, stating that it "added nothing to support the invalidity of the stop and search." DE 57, Op. &Order Denying Mot. to Suppress, Page ID 182. Reed now challenges the district court's credibility finding based on four supposed weaknesses in the officers' story.

To begin, Reed argues that the officers were predisposed to detect evidence of a weapon because Lockhart was, at the time of the stop, participating in a special operations unit tasked with "get[ting] guns off the street." DE 67, Suppression Hr'g Tr. Vol. I, Page ID 271. Reed claims the officers searched his vehicle based on this predisposition rather than their observations. But this contention cuts both ways, because if the officers indeed "anticipat[ed]" finding weapons, CA6 R. 39, Appellant Br., at 26, then they likely approached Reed's vehicle with heightened awareness and focus, which would bolster, rather than undercut, the reliability of their observations. See United States v. McCallister, 39 F.4th 368, 373 (6th Cir. 2022) (noting that an argument that presents the court with "two permissible views of the evidence" is an "insufficient basis upon which to reverse a district court's factual finding"). Even if Lockhart's participation in the special operations unit primed the officers to see a weapon (a wholly unsupported proposition), that fact would not meaningfully undermine the officers' credibility as to their reasons for the search.

Reed next argues that the officers could not have seen into his vehicle as they described because Reyes, upon cross-examination, could not identify his flashlight's beam among the multiple light sources that dashcam footage captured shining on Reed's SUV. But this argument is minimally probative as to the officers' credibility, for two reasons. First, Reyes's difficulty parsing the various sources of light shown in the dashcam footage tells us nothing about what activity within Reed's vehicle the dashcam footage does or does not depict. To put it another way, the line of cross-examination on which Reed relies is simply beside the point. Second, even if the dashcam footage failed to corroborate the officers' recollection of Reed's movements (a proposition that Reyes's cross-examination did not establish), that fact would still not...