United States v. Rucker

540 F.Supp.3d 798

UNITED STATES of America

v.Anthony RUCKER

Case No. 19-cr-636

United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, Eastern Division.

Signed May 18, 2021

AUSA, Assistant US Attorney, Aaron Richard Bond, Assistant US Attorney, United States Attorney's Office, Chicago, IL, Pretrial Services, for United States of America.

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

Robert M. Dow, Jr., United States District Judge

For the reasons stated below, Defendant's motion to suppress [25] is denied.

I. Background

Defendant Anthony Rucker filed a motion to suppress evidence from what he contends was an unlawful search of a residence at 937 North Harding in Chicago on May 21, 2019. The Court has taken extensive briefing [29, 42, 45, 48, 57, 58], heard oral argument [49], and convened an evidentiary hearing [55]. Three of the four Chicago police officers who encountered Rucker on that day testified at the hearing. In addition, the parties submitted video evidence from the body-worn cameras of three officers, as well as a video taken at a later time to show the layout of the residence.

The testimony establishes that the four Chicago police officers set up surveillance near the 900 block of North Harding Avenue, in Chicago, between Iowa Street to the south and Augusta Boulevard to the north. Two officers, Goss and Dohnal, were on foot, while two others, Sweezer and Zeman, remained in an unmarked car. Officers Goss and Dohnal observed Rucker engage in what they believed to be hand-to-hand narcotics transactions in front of the residence located at 937 North Harding and relayed their observations to Officers Zeman and Sweezer over the radio.

After the second suspect narcotic transaction, Officers Zeman and Sweezer drove toward Rucker's location. As they approached, they observed Rucker engage in another transaction with the driver of an orange Dodge Charger that was stopped in the middle of the street. As Zeman and Sweezer closed-in on the location of the transaction, they observed a heavy weighted object in Rucker's front right hoodie or jacket pocket. Based on their training and experience, the officers suspected that object to be a gun. The officers were familiar with Rucker and knew that he was a convicted felon and thus not legally permitted to possess a firearm. As the officers approached to within 15 feet of Rucker, he began to walk away toward the residence at 937 North Harding, which the officers knew to be Rucker's mother's residence. Officers Zeman parked the vehicle and the two officers followed Rucker toward the residence, with Officer Sweezer in the lead.

Officer Sweezer observed Rucker holding his right hand to his right side, where Officers Sweezer and Zeman had seen the heavy object. Rucker continued through the front exterior fence, up the front porch stairs, and into the residence. Sweezer was about five feet behind Rucker as he entered the residence. The door that Rucker entered when he went into the residence was a screen/spring door with a glass window that Officer Sweezer was able to see through, giving him a partial view into the living room. There also was a second main door to the residence that Rucker left open. After Rucker entered the residence, he locked the screen/spring door by turning the knob on the door, and then took one to two steps into the residence. Officer Sweezer testified that he was able to see into the residence through a glass window and saw Rucker remove a gun from his right hooded sweatshirt pocket and toss it into the right side of the living room. From his position at the door, Officer Sweezer was unable to see where the gun landed. Sweezer also claimed to have observed three young children inside the living room––one on the couch, one towards the front of the living room, and a third who came into the living room from an adjacent hallway––each of whom were within a couple feet of the location where Sweezer believed the firearm had been tossed. Sweezer observed no other adults in the house at the time besides Rucker.

Officer Sweezer then had a brief conversation with Rucker, telling Rucker to open the door. Rucker complied and shortly thereafter Sweezer asked Officer Zeman to handcuff Rucker. Sweezer then advised Zeman that Rucker had thrown a firearm onto the floor of the residence and asked Zeman to retrieve it. After handcuffing Rucker and leaving him to be escorted out of the residence by Sweezer, Zeman recovered a firearm from on top of a pile of clothes on a small couch/armchair located within the living room, approximately five to six feet from the front door. When he entered the residence to recover the firearm, Officer Zeman also observed two children. Officer Zeman did not observe any other adults besides Rucker until after the gun was recovered, at which time Rucker's mother appeared from what looked to be a back room of the residence. While he was in the house, Officer Zeman did not go into or search any location other than the area of the living room where the firearm was located and recovered and promptly exited after picking up the firearm.

II. Discussion

The legal issues implicated by this motion focus on multiple aspects of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. First, did the officers have reasonable suspicion to conduct an investigatory stop of Rucker? Second, did exigent circumstances justify Officer Zeman's warrantless entry into and limited search of the residence to recover the weapon? Third, if exigent circumstances did not exist, should the motion to suppress nonetheless be denied under the inevitable discovery doctrine? As explained below, the Court concludes that the first two questions can be answered in the affirmative; thus, it need not address the third one.

A. Reasonable Suspicion to Conduct a Terry Stop

In Terry v. Ohio , 392 U.S. 1, 21-22, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968), the Supreme Court defined an "investigative stop" as "a brief detention, which gives officers a chance to verify (or dispel) well-founded suspicions that a person has been, is, or is about to be engaged in criminal activity." United States v. Bullock , 632 F.3d 1004, 1014-15 (7th Cir. 2011). "An investigatory stop complies with the Fourth Amendment if the brief detention is based on reasonable suspicion that the detained individual has committed or is about to commit a crime." United States v. Ruiz , 785 F.3d 1134, 1141 (7th Cir. 2015). In assessing the propriety of an investigatory stop, courts look to "(1) whether the police were aware of specific and articulable facts giving rise to reasonable suspicion; and (2) whether the degree of intrusion was reasonably related to the known facts." Bullock , 632 F.3d at 1012. "Reasonable suspicion is a lower threshold than probable cause and does not deal with hard certainties, but with probabilities. It requires more than a hunch but less than probable cause and considerably less than preponderance of the evidence." Id.

Here, the credible testimony of the officers establishes multiple reasons for "reasonable suspicion" that Rucker had committed a crime during the officers’ surveillance. All four officers testified that they had observed Rucker engage in what they reasonably believed were hand-to-hand narcotics transactions in the street. Officers Sweezer and Zeman also testified that they observed a heavy weighted object in Rucker's right sweatshirt pocket, which they believed to be a firearm based on their training and experience. Finally, Sweezer testified that as Rucker entered the residence and locked the screen/spring door, he removed a gun from his sweatshirt pocket and tossed the gun into the right side of the living room. To add more context to these observations, the officers further testified that, based on previous interactions, they knew that Rucker was a convicted felon. These facts taken as a whole provided ample reason to suspect that Rucker had been involved in narcotics sales and illegally possessed a firearm and thus justified the initial investigatory stop.

B. Exigent Circumstances to Recover the Firearm.

Although warrantless searches of areas entitled to Fourth Amendment protection are presumptively unreasonable, law enforcement officers may overcome this presumption by demonstrating that "exigent...